Fundamentally, a move toward gender-neutral pronouns ignores the important work that gendered pronouns perform in everyday life. However, we strongly disagree with their proposal. This unique position with regards to the structures of gender is precisely why scholars of gender have been studying and examining trans/GNC lives for decades. Transgender and gender-nonconforming (abbreviated below as trans/GNC) people, particularly transfeminine people of color, are disproportionately and in some ways uniquely victimized by the rigid and specific ways that Western society views, constructs and penalizes nonheteronormative and noncisnormative gender performances and identities. We firmly understand that the impacts of gender are felt unequally, in light of both our lived experience and our research in sociology, gender, technology, and linguistics. We are writing here as as a mix of queer, nonwhite, non-American, bicultural, trans people, and we share Saguy and Williams’ political bent. As a parallel, Saguay and Williams offer the quick adoption of “Ms.” as a model for moving rapidly past restrictive gender norms, and advocate for a similar adoption of “they/them” pronouns. They argue that using the gender-neutral third-person pronoun “they” could reduce discrimination and bias in social situations, and even reduce the cognitive load on the person being gendered. They draw on psychological work which suggests that even the act of drawing attention to one’s own gender can lead to poorer performance on cognitive tests.Īs a corrective, they suggest something of a “universal design” approach. They assert the act of gendering highlights gender when it is not relevant in social interaction.įor instance, they draw on data from audit studies showing that when a job candidate is identified as a woman, this identification puts the candidate at a stark disadvantage. Abigail Saguy and Julie Williams recently published an op-ed on the Scientific American website advocating that we begin addressing everyone with gender-neutral pronouns (“they,” “them”) rather than binary-gendered pronouns (“he,” “him” or “she,” “her”).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |