I would wager that I have had more discussions about the use of pronouns in the English language in the past year than most people have in their lives (outside English teachers, of course).
Most of the conversations are either with my sibling, or about my sibling, as they are trying to find the pronoun that is most comfortable for them.
The thing that is most interesting to me is the timeliness of other conversations I’m seeing on the web about pronouns, and rather than jumping into my personal opinions or experiences at this point, I would like to take the opportunity to point to some of these other articles and resources, and just remind my readers in general that there are people for whom the binary options of “he” and “she” pronouns are not the right fit. The best thing we can do is to respect them.
- How Using “They” as a Singular Pronoun Can Change the World – Article on Feministing.com Feb 3, 2015
Pronoun Do’s and Dont’s – Handy comic on Robot Hugs.com Sept. 9, 2014- Did you know the Swedish language has added a gender-neutral personal pronoun to their language?
- Pronoun Dressing Room – a place for you to try on pronouns using text from different works of fiction
- Pronoun Master list – on Ask A Non-Binary site – a list of all the pronoun options “of which we are aware”
- Finally, and most importantly to me, my sibling addresses being genderqueer frequently in their blog.
