The Problem of Pronouns

This morning, I read an article in The Guardian about gender fluidity, and I find myself struggling again with available pronouns.

As a child, I felt definitively that I was a boy. I eschewed female identity when and how I could, given limited options and the persistence of parents. To my parents’ credit, they gave toddler-me dolls and a workbench, and primary-school-me sewing lessons and mechanical training, so I flew under the radar for a time as a mere tomboy. My mother did worry out loud that my insistence into puberty upon boy roles in plays and at Halloween meant I was going to be a lesbian. She didn't know the half of it.

I mourned and burned with shame when hormones inevitably (at that time) forced me into the world of perceived women. The horror came in no small part because of the confining gender roles attributed to my biology and the sudden changes in what I was and was not allowed to do and who my friends could be. But social roles weren’t the only reason for the internal turmoil. Instead of being thrilled with the transforming body as many of my peers were, I hated me every step of the way. I wished for androgyny, for the shift to be limited, and was sorely disappointed. The relationship of my gender identity and my physicality is, even now, now one of détente. Mirrors and photos continue to startle me.

Having done my best to adapt, I came to think of myself in college social psychology as a female with a strong animus in the Jungian sense, and that largely settled my angst. Some days, I feel more male with a strong anima, and some days, I feel balanced. This is extremely difficult to explain to others who don’t share my difference.

I became a feminist in high school. I embraced the social justice movement to end the subjugation of the female. That will always be important to me. In the struggle, details matter, pronouns matter. Later, in editing legal documents, I doggedly searched and replaced the ubiquitous he and the less regular he or she with s/he. I knew that the stickler higher-ups would insist that I change the words back (the men-partners marked up text and handed the changes back to the women-subordinates to word process), but that they would be forced subconsciously to acknowledge their act of denial and oppression.

Biology continued to haunt me. I very much wanted to be a parent, and in my mind, the role was always mother--perhaps because I had no other framework to think of it. My partner and I planned for gender-neutral children’s names, toys, and rearing; our children would not be forced to be either a princess or a warrior. To my deep frustration, my female biology didn’t cooperate with that plan, and I was left to think, “All that damn bleeding for nothing.” Feminists say that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels, I’ve sometimes jokingly added, “and in a white satin gown with a raging period.” Conducting intense professional activities while Armageddon takes place in one’s underclothing is a high-wire act. I’m not the only biological woman to hate the confines of the female body at times. I have also come to respect the different lenses the cycle brings to my perception.

Attraction to people across gender boundaries, which began early and has persisted through my life, did not help with my sense of not belonging to “either or.” I have had to learn to accept my bisexuality as well as my gender struggle, understanding them to be different issues in active conversation with one another. Sexuality helped me to better accept the form that nature assigned me, and also caused me to find it limiting.

The love of my life, while not markedly dimorphic, is an unequivocal he. He has embraced my differences even when I am at a loss to accept or express them. Even with an amazing partner, I do not often speak out loud about what others fail to perceive about me. I am embedded in an extended family as a wife with a traditional woman’s roles, in part because I have not insisted otherwise. As a result, some people who think they are close to me don’t really know me.

As the trans movement has become more known, I have found myself identifying with trans children on the cusp of adolescence and the horror they express at impending puberty, being forced where they do not belong. I wonder what I would have wanted to do had there been options. I don’t find myself now thinking I want to be reassigned, perhaps, because I know I don’t fit firmly in either gender. Choosing a gender now would be as great an act of self-aggression as puberty was a violation of my person.

I learned in The Guardian article that many gender-fluid persons use the pronoun we and us for individual self-reference and prefer they and them when others speak of them individually. They perhaps follow in the footsteps of some of the First Peoples of North America, understanding the existence of a third gender comprised of two-spirits or two-souls, in the probably-inadequate English translation. The Navajo had words for at least five genders. I advocate for people being called what they want to be called—names, categories, identities, and I will follow what a person wants in this regard as well. Yet, I find myself reflecting on the inadequacy of English, and I want something more apt for myself.

I am not multiple personalities. I am the same person whether expressing through one gender or another, at one age or another. My personality probability cloud may appear to others to shift depending upon whether my anima or animus or a balanced combination is in the lead, but I’m me. Women are socialized to use collective pronouns, to be inclusive and unselfish; I had to retrain myself not to shy from the I and me, and thus I am unwilling now to surrender those individual pronouns to explain further who I am in a more inclusive way. In English, the first-person is blissfully free of gender boxes. The third-person term is binary gendered and so we need a new, third way. Using the plural seems to reinforce the idea of an internal schism or variety that still falls short of explaining the richness of the whole person. My search for le mot juste continues.