Opinion
My pronouns in last week's column offended people. One person tweeted, "it's another they/them. What they say doesn't matter because they are suffering from a mental illness." I guess it's a win that the Twitter user used my correct pronouns despite thinking I am mentally ill for using them. It is pervasive for people to ridicule or deny my pronouns.
The argument goes something like sex is a binary of male and female and gender reflects that binary in the form of man and woman, respectively. They believe that pronouns are biological, so a male can only use he/him pronouns and a female can only use she/her pronouns and they/them pronouns do not exist.
The science is clear – sex is a spectrum. There are male, female, and intersex people. If people believe that gender strictly reflects sex, then gender itself cannot be binary. The truth is that gender is not biological or related to sex. Sex is concerned with people's physiological attributes like their chromosomes, hormones, genes, sex organs, and secondary sex characteristics. Gender refers to socially constructed norms, roles, and behaviours. Gender identity is a person's understanding of their role and interaction in society.
Babies are born into a world where if they are born with a penis, they are assigned the sex male, the gender man, and the pronouns he/him, and if they are born with a vagina, they are assigned the sex female, the gender woman, and the pronouns she/her. Babies born with a combination of secondary sex characteristics are often operated on and forced to fit either male or female secondary sex characteristics and are then assigned either man or woman.
Adults who keep the gender assigned to them by others at birth are cisgender. A lot of people are assigned the wrong gender by others at birth. Those people often change their gender and pronouns to their true gender and pronouns and are known as transgender.
Despite the simplicity that people can use any pronouns irrespective of their sex, people continue to refuse to use trans people's correct pronouns. If the science isn't convincing that pronouns are not biological, speak to a wealthy man with a boat. If pronouns are biological, how did dead ships become she/her? Refusing to respect trans women's pronouns while referring to inanimate objects like boats as she exposes New Zealanders' transphobic underbelly.
I am non-binary and use they/them pronouns. People argue that they/them pronouns aren't biologically or grammatically correct. Imagine Josiah is at the gym, and he finds an iPhone lying around. Thinking someone's lost it, Josiah takes the phone to the person at the counter and says, I think someone has forgotten their phone. Could you please give it to them when they come looking for it? Josiah knows the phone's owner is an individual, but because he doesn't know who that person is, he uses gender-neutral pronouns to refer to them. We use they/them pronouns to refer to people we do not know all the time, so why won't we use if for the people we know?
Pronouns are neither biological nor grammatically incorrect. Remember that grammar is to language what maps are to the Earth. If a river changes course, the map is wrong, not the river. Language can, will and must continue to evolve. I am not going to spend my life being at war with my gender because some people choose to fixate on superfluous grammatical talking points and inaccurate science to deny the existence and validity of trans people.
