
This article was featured in One Great Story, New Yorkās reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
If you met me, youād probably ask what pronouns I use. Youād ask me because my gender identity is not that clear ā to you, at least. I wear light makeup and paint my nails and, depending on the occasion, might be in a slip dress with a kitten heel. And yet, if you heard me speak, youād probably assume (correctly) that I was assigned male at birth (AMAB, in the current jargon; I was also, of course, assigned the name Brock). You might assume, based in part on my voice and disposition, that I date and sleep with men, like a gay man (also correct). And so youād ask what pronouns I use because itās considered the polite thing to do now ā an accepted part of our perilous new social-justice social contract ā and you donāt want to offend me with your ignorance and you do want to flatter yourself with your deft ally-ness, all the while probably thinking, especially if youāre over 30, Oh goodness, the world is so different now.
And Iād politely respond, āThey/them is fine,ā with a smile. Maybe a somewhat forced smile, because Iāve come to dread this whole interaction. If Iām feeling game, I might even ask for your pronouns, though chances are, unless perhaps youāre my age or younger ā Iām 24 ā they will be exactly what Iād expect. By the end of the ten-word exchange, Iād be a little exhausted and youād be a little on edge. And if I had to guess, youād still probably fuck up my pronouns the next time you use them. You almost certainly would when Iām not standing right in front of you.
I have been using they/them pronouns for about four years now, since I started identifying as nonbinary (enby, to use the jargon) as an undergraduate, and am a little proud to say that my generation was the one that forced ā finally ā the entire world, or at least the good-intentioned, progressive part of it that I am fortunate enough to reside in, to acknowledge something many queer people (and feminists and restless square pegs of many varieties) have long sought: freedom from the bright-line tyranny of gender and its accompanying expectations. In this case, starting with some of the most basic elements of the English language: the pronouns he and she. Thereās power in sloughing off both of them, and some fun, especially when I see how befuddled the whole thing can make people. There is a certain satisfaction in making this confusion you seem to be having ā What box to put Brock in? ā your problem, not mine. Iāve thought enough about it.
This all seemed very exciting in the Trump-tainted years, during which I was a gender-studies major in college, determined, as one is at that age, to find themself and stick it to the toxic Man. Just a few years later, they/themness is everywhere. The āpronoun go-roundā is the new icebreaker in schools and at the office. Your resistance-leaning co-workers feature their pronouns in their Slack bios and email signatures and Zoom panels. Joe Biden (āhe/himā) and Kamala Harris (āshe/herā) have billboarded theirs in television interviews. And capitalism and the culture industry have been happy to co-opt it. Itās on the reboot of Sex and the City, Star Trek: Discovery, Greyās Anatomy, and the animated cartoons Steven Universe and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Peacock announces a new horror flick called They/Them starring a bunch of he/hims and she/hers and describes the movie as a āqueer empowerment story.ā
You certainly canāt avoid it during this yearās Pride Month. Thereās a Manhattan Mini Storage billboard that reads MAN-HATTAN, SHE-HATTAN, THEY-HATTAN, WE-HATTAN. Itās on $15 T-shirts for Targetās 2022 Pride collection that read SHE HER THEY THEM HE HIM US. There are THEY/THEM face masks available on Etsy. Even Walmart.com peddles pronoun kitsch. Earlier this year, the Museum of Sex sent a promotional email with the subject line āValentineās Day Gift Ideas for 2022 ā LOVE LOCK DOWN for Womxn, Men, He, She, Him, Her, They, Them, Xe, Xyr, Yyrself and Xirself.ā Another promotional email subject line: āMenās & Non-Binary Engagement & Wedding Bands.ā (You know what doesnāt sound at all romantic? A nonbinary engagement ring.) A publicist sent me ā addressing me on the mailing label as BROCK COLYAR, THEY/THEM ā a free sample of what are supposed to be nonbinary razors. (āAfter all, hair is hair,ā says the letter; I beg to disagree.)
It has gotten so ubiquitous that itās pissing off the crypto bros: In early June, Jesse Powell, chief executive of Kraken, one of the worldās largest cryptocurrency exchanges, told his staff they had best conform to whatever pronouns they were assigned at birth, whining, āItās just not practical to allow 3,000 people to customize their pronouns.ā He also suggested that people who donāt conform to his various conventions should just quit. Pronouns have become a talking point in right-wing media, from The Wall Street Journal (āThis ostensibly benign practice helps to normalize a regressive ideology that is inflicting enormous harm on societyā) to the podcast Red Scare, where one of the hosts, Anna Khachiyan, considers it a symptom of the ādecline of western civilization.ā Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has also in the past couple of years gone on the record getting worked up about the First Amendment implications of regulations designed to prevent language discrimination.
The Powells and the Alitos think they are losing something ā some settled sense of the world, presumably with (to use the jargon) cisgendered men like them ruling wisely over us all. It clearly makes them crazy that seemingly everybodyās teenager (and even my cousinās dog, according to my cousin, anyway) uses they/them pronouns now. The UCLA Law think tank the Williams Institute reports that 1.2 million adults in the U.S. identify as nonbinary. As for young people, a 2020 survey by the Trevor Project concluded that about one in four queer youth use pronouns that arenāt exclusively she/her or he/him; in addition to they/them, there are those who use she/they and he/they or dozens upon dozens of āneo-pronounsā like ze/zir and fae/faer. (If youāre dizzy because you keep thinking, But itās just not grammatically correct!, please know that English speakers have been using they as a singular pronoun on the written record since probably the ninth or tenth century. If you found someoneās phone at a bar, Iām sure you would have no problem saying, āSomeone lost their phone!ā)
All of which should be good, right? And yet Iāve begun to wonder what exactly I was trying to accomplish when I started using they/them pronouns and insisting you do, too. In cities and states where itās not so easy to talk about your pronouns all the time, Republican politicians are passing legislation targeting trans youth and their parents, censoring classroom discussion (a.k.a. āDonāt say gay!ā), and even trying to ban minors from attending drag shows. Could all of the energy put into enforcing pronoun culture among people already generally sympathetic have been better spent elsewhere?
I also wonder whether todayās clunky pronoun etiquette has played a role in stunting my self-understanding as well as my self-confidence. I worry that in the end, they/them is just another dead end that mostly serves to annoy some people and make others feel better about themselves. Is something that has become enormously widespread actually a failed queer experiment, less a civil-rights triumph than a trend that blew up too quickly and makes us all feel persnickety? If this is a step toward some other utopic, gender-blurred society, when did it start to alienate me?
I donāt remember the first time I met an enby or someone who used alternative pronouns, or even the first time I felt it resonated with how I understood myself. My first coming out, after all, felt like a much bigger to-do. I grew up in Middle of Nowhere, Tennessee, and even though everyone there suspected I was gay ā I built most of my personality around a love for Stevie Nicks and had watched gay porn since I was 12 ā for whatever reason I didnāt think I was. Instead, I maintained crushes on my best girlfriends and eventually dated one. (She would go on to date a girl instead, who transitioned to a man, and then after they broke up, she started dating cis men.)
Then I went off to college, where, unlike back home, there were lots of openly queer people who quickly identified me as one of their own. I didnāt hesitate to kiss the first boy who ever danced with me. (It turns out he was āstraight,ā and years later weād sleep together, immediately after which heād start posting photos of himself in dresses on Instagram; what Iām trying to tell you through these seemingly unrelated escapades is that nothing about any of this is simple or easy to understand, even for those involved.)
But youāve heard this story before ā about the small-town boy who downloads Grindr and finds the people he wants to fuck, many of whom want to fuck him, too. With that confidence, I started to learn what I wanted for myself. Although being āmasculineā ā or presenting that way online ā is a popular sexual marketing tool among the gays, it was never going to be for me. I started wearing makeup and more jewelry and perusing the womenās section of thrift stores. But what I learned as I tinkered with my personal presentation is that the āmasc4mascā gays didnāt always want to hook up with someone who didnāt conform to their version of homomasculinity, with its cropped tees and jockstraps. (Honestly, I just found it all a bit tacky.)
Perhaps subconsciously looking for answers to why I didnāt feel at home among many of those who shared my supposed sexuality, I began pursuing a major in gender and sexuality studies, taking classes on feminist and queer theory and reading all the things they have you read at a fancy liberal-arts school with classes like āFeminism in Trumplandiaā and āQueer Modernisms,ā such as this from Judith Butlerās Gender Trouble: āThere is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very āexpressionsā that are said to be its results.ā In other words, gender is a construct, yadda yadda yadda, and gender is a performance.
This classroom knowledge ā plus the privilege of being a twinky white kid living on a college campus in the moneyed northern suburbs of Chicago ā felt like it gave me freedom to play. I didnāt feel like a man, or a gay man, especially of the varietal I found around me. But I didnāt feel like a woman, either. What I wanted was to be free of anything that would label me distinctly male or distinctly female. I wanted my gender to be nothing, null, nada. After all, that Butler quote begins, āThere is no gender identity.ā Therefore, couldnāt I just forgo one?
There was also the fact that midway through my first semester at college in 2016, instead of getting the first woman president we all assumed we were going to get, we got ā well, you know who we got. During that initial year in office, Trumpās administration rolled back LGBTQ+ rights, in part through erasure. For example: removing any mentions of queer people from government websites, revoking protections for trans students guaranteed by Title IX, and announcing that trans people would no longer be allowed to serve in the military. The leftās response was to insist on queer visibility. Out of power politically, they could at least control some things. Like ⦠pronouns.
At Northwestern, a task force was formed to discuss and research the experience of āgender-queer, non-binary, and trans (GQNBT)ā students, faculty, and staff, and when its final report was released the following year, 2019, ārespecting and affirming names and identityā was at the very top of its list of recommendations, above creating gender-inclusive restrooms or addressing health-care needs of the gender nonconforming. Admittedly, some of the impetus behind ārespecting and affirming names and identityā involved encouraging the school to honor trans studentsā chosen names, but there were also several pronoun-specific directives, like āEnsure that pronouns appear in course rosters.ā Learning pronoun preferences suddenly became just as important as learning first names ā a nightmare, one could imagine, for a professor with a room of 100 moody first-year students. One caveat from the report: āBe prepared to respond to shifting best practices and adjust as social and cultural standards shift.ā
It wasnāt just on campuses, of course, though the momentum certainly started there. Shit was changing real fast all over. By 2019, Merriam-Webster named they its Word of the Year (āLookups for they increased by 313 percent over the previous year. This curiosity is remarkable for a venerable old pronoun,ā the dictionary noted), and the American Psychological Association officially endorsed its use (in an example, the APA spelled it out as simply as possible: āKai is a nonbinary person. They attend university in their home state of Vermont and are majoring in chemistryā). Jessica Bennett, later to be named āgender editorā at the New York Times, wrote a piece headlined āShe? Ze? They? Whatās in a Gender Pronoun?ā and then declared a ānew gender revolution.ā After all, only a few years before, in 2015, even The New Yorkerās Ariel Levy was side-eyeing the practice, writing in a profile of Transparent creator Joey Soloway, āIt would sound crazy, for instance, to describe Soloway by saying, āThey are my favorite director.āāā In the same article, the poet Eileen Myles, who has since adopted they/them pronouns, was quoted tripping over someone elseās, acknowledging and excusing it away with, āItās not intuitive at all.ā
By 2018, I was eager to join in on the hype and decided to start identifying as nonbinary. At that moment, it felt sexy and radical, like Iād discovered a shiny new paper clip in the lip. I also smoked cigarettes, painted my nails black, and listened to a lot of Bowie (āRebel Rebelāā). This too was kind of a punk provocation.
Plus, in that era of Trump and Me Too, I had just been sexually assaulted for the first time, and what worse to be in 2018 than a man? Donāt get me wrong: I didnāt feel like one, but at the same time I didnāt really want to be one, either. It was a political declaration. Identifying as nonbinary was my way of saying to everyone else, āIām not playing your game.ā As the activist and artist Kate Bornstein said to me recently, āThe sneaky magical thing about that word, nonbinary, is that it doesnāt say what you are. It only says what youāre not.ā And as a friend told me not long ago about their decision to identify publicly as nonbinary, āIām not asking you to consider my gender as much as I am asking you to spend a little time considering yours.ā
But the pronouns, for me, were always beside the point. I never led with them; it felt like announcing a new haircut that nobody had yet noticed. The way Iād gotten a grasp on my weird, sticky feelings about my body was by experimenting with my presentation and the kinds of people I pursued romantically, not telling other people how to refer to me when I wasnāt around. (Another perplexing thing about the pronoun tedium: How often do you have to use somebodyās pronouns in front of them?) This felt like a personal discovery, and my unwillingness to wear my pronouns on my sleeve (literally, like on a name tag at some campus meet and greet) clearly bothered people. At the time, I was particularly close with one of my professors, whom other professors were constantly approaching nervously to ask how they should refer to me. She would tell them, āIām not sure. What do you want me to do? Ask Brock about their sex life, too?ā I treasured that response, not only for its refusal to abide by the norm but also because, subtly, it did just that (ātheir sex lifeā).
When the pronoun go-round became the norm in the classroom, I began sharing only my name ā āHi! My name is Brockā ā but more often than not, a do-good cis person would remind me to please share my pronouns. It felt like an unnecessary spotlight on my difference, which was already visible to anyone who looked at me at the time (it takes practice to figure out eyeliner).
Then, on the first day of an internship at Ms. magazine, I gave it a try. When it was my turn in the go-round, I said, āHi! Iām Brock, and I use they/them pronouns.ā The next day, my editor told me my job for the summer would be writing about āmale feminism.ā I learned that new pronouns wouldnāt do much to change the way I was perceived by others.
When I graduated from school and began my first job out of college, at this magazine, āWhat are your pronouns?ā became the first thing many of my new co-workers asked me ā proudly, hip as they were to this representative of the incoming generation. I would usually say, āThey/them, but Iām really not that precious about it,ā because I didnāt want them to think I was some kind of Gen-Z Gender Police here to sow discord in their workplace. Plus I learned that people liked me more if I didnāt make a big fuss about it, and I secretly enjoyed watching people bumble over their words in front of me, which felt like sweet payback for the same people constantly telling me about all their trans friends and family members. That was part of the fun. I was, I thought, forcing them to think.
Privately, Iāve often also told myself it was my privileged duty ā as someone, for whatever reason, not terribly easily triggered ā to be other peopleās workshop. I was, effectively, a safe space for them. And maybe they would do better the next time they met a nonbinary or trans person. I justified my flippancy with a 2019 opinion piece by the Black feminist Loretta Ross in the New York Times arguing against callout culture. In it, Ross tells a story about accidentally misgendering a student during a college lecture. Unfazed, the student responds, āThatās all right; I misgender myself sometimes.ā Ross, in response, writes, āWe need more of this kind of grace.ā
By then, the pronoun thing quickly became oppressive. (Admittedly, my presentation also became more refined: better shoes, better hair, better eyeliner technique.) At work, people began asking me about them even more often, sometimes on a weekly basis. There was a sign placed outside the menās room and the womenās room at the office that said RESTROOMS ARE BINARY. PEOPLE ARE NOT. (Do you know whatās not binary? Single-stall restrooms.) Every barista, every first date, every stranger at a party, every best friend of ten years, and (in a sign this had truly gone mainstream) my mother inquired about my pronouns. Do you know what ruins sex? Asking for pronouns directly before, during, or after getting naked; Iāve experienced all three. All of my friendsā moms ask them about my pronouns and then my friends recount the conversations to me ⦠again and again and again. Now that I have my byline in this magazine, I have become Googleable. Type my name in the search bar and āBrock Colyar pronounsā is one of the autofills. Iāve watched people I donāt know discuss my pronouns on Reddit threads and in TikTok comment sections. (Does my algorithm know my pronouns?) I go to a party where I overhear a close friend accidentally use he/him to refer to me. I then hear another person, someone Iām not that close to, lay into the first person. Iām not sure whom I should be more offended by, but everybody is embarrassed. Iāve been consumed by pronouns.
Many of the nonbinary people Iāve spoken with recently feel similarly underwater. For some, thereās a sense that constantly asking about pronouns is a way for straight people to virtue-signal their wokeness. Ben, who previously worked for a company where putting pronouns in email signatures was the status quo, told me that when they switched jobs to a less self-consciously progressive organization, their co-workers quit getting them wrong. The unwoke, without all that lefty pressure, were simply less worked up about it. Another person phrased their experience this way: āItās constantly straight people freezing up and stressing out. Like, How do I be an ally?ā There is nothing enjoyable, in other words, about being a small-talk roadblock. āI canāt relax because you canāt relax. It makes it not fun for me,ā said Beau, talking about their experience with pronoun culture at work. Sam, another nonbinary person present for the conversation, told me they donāt always insist upon their pronouns in the office for exactly these reasons: āAlthough the people I work with are very nice, theyāre also 45-year-old women who are gonna fuck up and make it super-awkward when they fuck up. āOh my God. I didnāt mean that.ā āOh my God. Iām so sorry.ā āOh my God. Are you offended?ā I donāt want to deal with that.ā
However, advertising their pronouns was helpful when Sam explained their gender to friends and family: āI present pretty femme. When people meet me, theyāre going to think Iām a woman, but thatās simply not the case. How do I let somebody into that experience without being disgustingly vulnerable?ā The solution: they/them pronouns. The problem: The pronouns then become a hang-up for titillated and nervous cis people. They ask for your pronouns, usually not once but a number of times. Still, āIf you know my pronouns,ā Sam continued, āyou know very little about me. It was never about the pronoun. Weāre doing it for other people. In an ideal universe, I donāt need to have a pronoun.ā Another nonbinary friend, Nic, added, āWhat I prioritize more is how people relate to me. Do you see me as me and not this thing, this word?ā Which reminded me of those first days at work, when my new co-workers would ask for my pronouns before they asked where I was from, what school I went to, where I was living in New York, or what my ambitions were as a journalist.
Christopher, who presents as femme and used to work in a job where they had to deal with the public all day long, told me the bombardment of pronoun questions sometimes made them feel even more uncomfortable than a misgendering. āI go to work. Iām wearing a miniskirt. Everyone asks me for my pronouns. To me, what that means is āI see that youāre a man. And I see that youāre dressed in a womanās costume. And I would like to know whether or not you want me to participate in the fantasy youāre having,āāā they said. āI donāt think my answer should fundamentally change anything about how weāre interacting right now. And the fact that youāre so desperate to know is weird.ā
Of course, on the other side of this hang-up are all of the well intentioned trying desperately not to fuck up. āI think a lot of the conversation has been around āWhat do I do if I get it wrong?ā I think people are afraid of making mistakes,ā says Alfredo Del Cid, the head of learning and development at Collective, a California-based consulting firm for issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (Collective is a vendor for Vox Media, which owns New York).
Which brings me back to Loretta Rossās grace. Part of the reason this is a lightning rod for the left and the right is this specter of the angry queer, ready to yell at you for getting their pronouns wrong. Which is understandable ā it takes a long time to figure some of these things out, and screw everyone who can disregard all of that work with a quick he or she ā and at the same time is partially grounded in truth (though society is always ready to frame its outsiders as wet blankets, as the scholar Sara Ahmed has written about extensively, thereās a reason my Twitter handle is @UnhappyFem). But for me personally, it has always been perplexing why our gender has become so predicated on the experience of injury. What exactly is empowering about going through life with a reservoir of internal anger, ready to explode on anyone who doesnāt understand our admittedly complicated relationships to our genders? The gender theorist Jack Halberstam, who admits to also being āloosey-goosey about pronouns,ā told me about a recent experience of being misgendered at a doctorās office. Rather than getting upset, he chose instead to think about the receptionist who had done the misgendering. āI canāt say to that woman in the office, āHow dare you?ā This is her job. I need to be generous about what sheās doing all day as well, not demanding on every level that I am comfortable.ā
Meanwhile, maybe in an attempt to inject some humor back into the conversation, all of this has become a meme on the queer internet. I scroll through Twitter: āIām the first non-binary person to have a little tummy ache,ā āHe/him sun, she/her moon, he/they rising,ā āWorking in a tea shop is the most non binary job,ā āOrville concert was a transformative experience ⦠bunch of Bushwick they/thems screeching āYass vibrato!!āāā Trident gum, the brand, tweets out, āhe/they of the day: spearmint Trident gum.ā
Quietly, my friends and I deploy our own they/them jokes. Most have to do with stereotypes and sex. At drinks with a nonbinary former hookup, they define the stereotype: āPeople who survive on their parentsā money, putting on a shit ton of crazy makeup, floating around Bushwick, being hyper politically correct.ā They continue, āThereās so much of my personal life thatās embedded in word politics,ā meaning they canāt figure out what their boyfriend should call them (definitely not āpartnerā at this age). Another friend, who was recently told they were a hookupās first āpenis personā ā which is only slightly better than something I read about in a confessional on Instagram, āgood theyā ā and I begin using the word joyfriend as a joke, but then it starts to catch on.
It doesnāt help my headache that many representations of nonbinary people in the media are social-justice-warrior characters like Che Diaz, the āqueer, nonbinary, Mexican Irish divaā on And Just Like That ⦠Avie Acosta, a genderqueer former model, told me, āPeople donāt want to sit with ambiguity and mystery. Thereās no poetry to Che Diaz.ā Thereās also a meme of one person responding to another person correcting their misgendering of the actor Ezra Miller: āRight, thanks! They keep assaulting people, women mostly.ā These are the cringe struggles of representation. And whatās there to say about Jonathan Van Ness?
These days, it feels as if an identity that, not long ago, felt unique to me in most rooms I entered has gone mass. Yes, part of what Iām personally upset about is the fact that this thing I loved isnāt so alt anymore. But more than that, it feels as if pronoun culture has contributed to nonbinary becoming just the third gender after male and female, more static and concrete than its original fluid intentions. The same nonbinary person who complained about nonbinary stereotypes lamented to me, āI donāt want to be a homogeneous normcore mashing of the two genders.ā Ben hoped, āIf man or woman can mean so many things, then so can nonbinary.ā We all became nonbinary to escape gendered expectations, and now weāre stuck again. I canāt help but think that the walking-on-eggshells battle for pronouns is turning my gender into a human-resources-approved corporate product, more neutered than neutral, and, maybe above all else, profoundly unromantic. Next time, just call me by my name.