Last week, I made my Daily Beacon columnist debut, and it was absolutely terrible.
Not because I wrote some of the worst puns in the history of humankind. Not because Tennesseeans aren’t familiar enough with our state senators to get the joke about the “large, semiaquatic rodent.” Not even because some of my best punch lines mysteriously went missing in the editing process. My first week as a columnist was awful because I hurt people. And not just any people, but the very people I intended to lift up with my writing — members of the LGBTQ+ community most affected by the controversy over gender-neutral pronouns.
For those of you who missed it, my column last week was a satire, in which I flipped the script by misgendering certain cisgender UT administrators and politicians. My aim was to call out the ridiculous double standard that exists when it comes to gender pronouns. If you call a trans or non-binary person by the wrong pronoun, they should just “get over it” or “quit being so sensitive.” If you call Chancellor Cheek a “she,” you’ve committed a mortal sin. It’s silly, it’s stupid and it’s something we should talk about. But just how we should talk about it is another matter.
As some trans and gender nonconforming individuals pointed out to me in response to my column, misgendering people is not a joke or something to be taken lightly. Gender pronouns are inextricably tied to a person’s identity and thus to social status and privilege, and so using an incorrect pronoun strips a person of their ability to define themselves within social space. Trans advocate and actress Laverne Cox in her address to UT students last spring said, “Misgendering someone is an act of violence.” So although I think my column was useful to cisgender readers who had never imagined their own identities as subject to the gender pronoun conversation, I was wrong in applying an oppressive linguistic tactic to those who can never truly feel the weight of its oppression.
As I was trying to figure out the best way to apologize for and make sense of the harm I did with my column, I came across a Facebook post from DARKMATTER’s Alok Vaid-Menon, a self-identified trans/national queer activist. Vaid-Menon wrote, “We (gender nonconforming people) have to continually make our stories and experiences referential — defining our narratives always in relation to the concepts people are more likely to understand and agree on like ‘woman’ or ‘trans’ or ‘minority.’ So that every time I speak I am already mourning the things that I could not say. So that every time I am asked to ‘identify,’ I am already compromising.”
These words spoke to me because I realized that our language is set up so that we must make unfamiliar concepts palatable to the dominant audience to gain any semblance of respect. To talk about gender-neutral pronouns in a way that hit home for cisgender people, I had to put it in terms of male and female. I had to say, “hey, see what happens when I mess with your gender norms? It hurts, doesn’t it?” But as Vaid-Menon put it, “They tell us that our narratives have to be digestible, but I wonder what parts of us are left after we have been consumed?”
Although I deeply and sincerely apologize for the hurt I caused with my satire, I do not regret writing it. The criticism I received was criticism I needed to hear, and these conversations — about language, power and allyship — are ones we need to be having. But maybe cisgender people, maybe white people, maybe heterosexual people don’t really get it. Maybe we’re too obsessed with fitting people into a box, with chalking it up to black and white, to “he” and “she.” Maybe when it comes to identity politics of any sort, we all need to step back and realize it’s not that simple.
As Alok Vaid-Menon put it in their plea to the cisgender world, “Grant us our complicatedness.” And complicated we all are, indeed.
Summer Awad is a senior in College Scholars. She can be reached at[email protected].
