Encourage open dialogue, which means being open about your own shortcomings or fears, when relevant. What to embraceĮmbrace doing your own research on pronouns, without expecting non-binary people to educate you.
#Tim and moby they them pronouns free
Feel free to put your own pronouns in your email signature, or to introduce people using your pronouns (this can take the focus off non-binary people having to do all the work). Feel free to ask people when you meet them what pronouns they use. What to avoidĪvoid assuming every person’s gender. This also takes the onus off your non-binary friend for having to explain it themselves later. If you still feel that is confusing, you can be explicit (“I asked Poppy – who uses they/them pronouns – they might come”). If you are using it in an instance where it might be misconstrued as plural, you can change the first part of the sentence to make it clear (“I may bring a friend, their name is Poppy”). Try this: if you are using the pronoun in a scenario where there is no confusion over singular versus plural, just go ahead and use it (“You are going to meet my friend Poppy today, I hope you like them”). A friend’s parent recently responded to their pronouns, saying: “But if I tell Shelly you’re coming round for dinner, she’ll think you’re bringing extra people!” While it is no longer grammatically incorrect to use they/them as singular anymore, people still get confused about it. Both Jane Austen and Geoffrey Chaucer – who died in 1400 - used pronouns that way. This isn’t new – the saying “Everybody loves their own mother” has been used since around late 1300. It is normal in the English language to use they/them pronouns when we don’t know the gender of the person to which we’re referring, or if we want our sentence to be applicable to all genders. So please, if you learn someone uses they/them pronouns, don’t respond: “We get it OK – she’s gay!” – as my friend’s parents recently did. Being gender non-conforming, right down to their pronouns, is how they choose to identify. For others, it’s a form of protest: they contest rigid gender expectations and would rather live without them. Some people do it because they don’t feel they fit into a gender. Reasons for choosing gender neutral pronouns are complex and personal. Last year, Merriam-Webster made the singular gender-neutral use of “they” its word of the year, based on the fact that it had seen a 313% increase in searches for its definition that year. In 2015, of 4,000 students at Harvard who had submitted preferred pronouns, around 1% chose pronouns other than “he” or “she”. More and more people are using gender-neutral pronouns.
It really isn’t that hard, however, to get it right.
But I admit to having made mistakes – even avoiding using pronouns in the past, for fear of getting it wrong.
#Tim and moby they them pronouns how to
Putting someone’s dignity before my shyness about how to use a pronoun is, of course, the bare minimum. As someone who is new to using them (a number of my friends have recently started to identify as non-binary), I confess it can be intimidating when you want to respect someone’s wishes without making any blunders. If gender neutral pronouns intimidate you, you’re not the only one. Non-binary people tend to prefer using they/them pronouns (although not exclusively – some use she and he interchangeably).
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