There is a meme, in various versions, going around saying in a nutshell, “I never had any kind of problem with ‘you people’ until you got up in my face.”
“You people” Meaning anybody not cis, het, white, fundamentalist Christian, etc.
I remember reading a quote somewhere, it was really good and I will post it here if I can find it.
The gist was, if you were always accustomed to being the dominant mainstream, then any appearance of something/someone outside the dominant mainstream is going to seem to be threatening your existence.
Any amount of progress feels like a threat.
This is something best dealt with as emotional processing, not as trying to influence public policy to go backward.
Diversity is a prime organizing principle in nature. And, when we troubleshoot the failures of human systems, monoculture a.k.a. lack of diversity is a very common culprit in all sorts of problems.
On this note, recently on NextDoor someone posted one of those “humorous” dog-whistle posts mocking the idea of asking what someone’s pronouns are. The post ended up getting reported & removed, and quite rightly so.
But someone on the thread asked a legitimate question, which I didn’t know how to answer. And that is, how do you explain this to kids?
I didn’t have a good answer, so I did some searching and found a good answer for them. And for anyone else who wonders how to explain pronouns to kids. Come to think of it, this works for adults too!
(Scary Mommy on how to answer the question, is that a boy or a girl? https://www.scarymommy.com/how-to-answer-question-is-that-boy-or-girl )
Accompanying the text is a little cartoon. Showing little colored geometric shape creatures that are supposed to be a child and two adults. The child (small circle) is asking, “Is that a boy or a girl?”
Answers:
• I don’t know. Does it matter?
• We don’t need to know someone’s gender pronouns until they tell us.
• We can’t tell by the way someone looks and that’s okay.
• Until they tell us otherwise, we can use “they” to talk about them.
The approach shown in this picture works for adults too! Simple and to the point. I am memorizing it and using it from now on!
PS. At first it was a revelation to me that I don’t necessarily have the right to know someone’s gender just because I’m curious. I believe that this wrongheaded notion on my part arose from one of the 15 pillars of supremacy culture, known as “the right to comfort.” As in, I have the right to be soothed and not feel uncertainty or whatever kind of feeling it would bring up in me to not know someone’s gender, be able to classify them in some tidy box etc. I didn’t even realize I still had some of this programming lingering within me. What a relief to drop that!
(Credit: @teachingoutsidethebinary ; and @growingwithmxt )