On sharing pronouns Brian D. Earp Yale University & University of Oxford This is the author’s copy of a forthcoming paper. It may be cited as follows: Earp, B. D. (2021). On sharing pronouns. The Philosopher, 109(1), 107-115. Available online early at https://www.academia.edu/44899030 Abstract In this essay I explore the emerging practice of “sharing one’s pronouns,” for example, in one’s email signature or professional website. I explain the reasoning behind this practice, and ask, in particular, whether it is all-thingsconsidered desirable that it should become a widespread social norm. I provide arguments in favour of, as well as against, this proposition. Along the way I touch on some ongoing debates within the philosophy of sex and gender. During this pandemic, I’ve been thinking about social norms and how they change. Take handshakes. People have been shaking hands with each other for a long time, as a kind of greeting. It started in pre-history, supposedly, as a way of showing you were unarmed. Now it’s an arbitrary gesture that’s associated with politeness. It’s ubiquitous. Most of us learn to do it at a very young age. And now it’s starting to look like a bad idea. As it turns out, shaking hands with someone is an especially effective way of transmitting germs, which has special salience at times like these. We probably should suspend the practice, at least for now. In fact, some go further and argue we should stop shaking hands altogether. They suggest we adopt a more sanitary greeting: a fist-bump, an elbow tap, a bow. 1 There are detractors: those who insist on pressing flesh even at the height of Covid-19. But most people can at least appreciate the logic of those who are in favour of changing the norm. In other cases, it may be perfectly clear to some people why a norm should be changed, but not so clear to others. Or people may agree that the status quo has certain problems, but disagree about how to make things better. This brings me to the subject of pronouns. How we use them, convey them, display them, talk about them, and even understand what they mean or refer to. Changes are afoot, but not everyone is on board. Some people are pretty clear, for example, that we should “share our pronouns” in various ways or at certain times: by adding them to our email signatures, putting them in our professional profiles or social media bios, or saying them out loud when we introduce ourselves: “Hi, my name is Riley, and my pronouns are she/her/hers.” Accordingly, it is now quite common, at least in certain circles, to see these kinds of pronoun practices. In other circles, the practices are less common. There are various potential reasons for this. Some people may be confused or out of the loop, unsure of what the fuss is about. Others know well what is going on, or think they do, and take it as an occasion for mockery: “My pronouns are Your Royal Highness,” I have seen or heard more than once. Still others may have a fairly good grip on the motives behind “sharing one’s pronouns,” and even feel sympathetic to the general cause, but be uncertain about whether this particular change in social norms is all-things-considered worth adopting. I count myself in this last group, for reasons that I hope will become clear. For those of you in the first group, however – the puzzled but curious – let me try to catch you up. I’ll start with the basics: What is a pronoun? *** A pronoun is, quite simply, a word that stands in for a noun or noun phrase. Suppose someone asks you about the Billie Holiday vinyl you have sitting on your coffee table. You could say: “It has one of my favourite songs on it,” using “it” to stand in for “the vinyl.” The pronoun here is “it.” But it’s the pronouns that stand in for people, not objects like records, that tend to be the most controversial. Pronouns like she, he, him, her, and they. 2 Some of this controversy is centuries old. A classic problem, at least in English, is what to do when referring to a generic, anonymous, or unfamiliar individual in the third person. To see this, just fill in the following blank: “Whenever our mystery guest arrives, please show _____ into the living room.” I assume most of you put “them” in the blank, and in my view, that’s a perfectly good answer. But an old-school, prescriptive grammarian might insist that “them” in this context is a mistake. After all, the “mystery guest” in our sentence is a single person, whereas “them” is a plural pronoun. The numbers don’t add up. When I was in school, we learned to use “him” in this sort of situation: a so-called masculine generic. This is the fault, historically, of primarily male linguists who decided that malecoded terms should be the default. Their arguments were often explicitly sexist. In keeping with this tradition, I was also taught to use such terms as “mankind” for humans in general, “mailman” for whoever brought the mail, “chairman” even for female committee heads, and so forth. I won’t rehearse all the arguments here for why such language is objectionably androcentric (for a short overview, you can see my 2012 paper, “The Extinction of Masculine Generics”). Suffice it to say this option will not do. Other options include saying “him or her” or “her or him,” although many people find these phrases to be inelegant. You could also, if you like, use a feminine generic to rebalance the scales of history a bit (the generic “she” is commonly used in academic philosophy and in some other humanities departments). But there is a deeper problem running underneath all this, which is: Why are English pronouns gendered in the first place? In many languages, pronouns do not distinguish genders. Instead, there is usually just one word—a kind of glorified version of “it”—that means something like “this person” when applied to humans. In other words, if you want to refer to someone indirectly without repeating their name, these languages don’t impel you to guess, or report on, whether that person is, say, a man or a woman. After all, that information might be completely irrelevant to whatever it is you are trying to convey. So it might seem strange, upon reflection, that really any language would force you to state, or reiterate, a person’s gender virtually every time you bring them into the conversation. But English does force you to do this, and it can make for some uncomfortable situations. *** 3 Consider the experience of my colleague Lori Watson, whose 2016 essay, “The Woman Question,” is a must-read for anyone interested in ongoing debates about sex and gender. In the essay, Lori states that she has female-typical sexual anatomy, was raised as a girl, and has always identified as a girl or woman. But she is nearly six feet tall, has broad shoulders, prefers to keep her hair short, and feels most comfortable in clothes that are stereotypically considered to be masculine in contemporary Western culture. So, she reports, in about 90% of her daily interactions with those who don’t know her, she is mistakenly assumed to be a man. “Living in the world as it is,” she writes, “I have to fight for my recognition as a woman on a daily basis.” Now, some of you might be thinking that Lori should throw on a dress, or grow her hair out, or put some lipstick on to avoid confusion. But there are at least two problems with this suggestion. One is that, in general, we shouldn’t compel people to play dress up in order to squeeze themselves into to some narrow vision of womanhood or manhood. And second, if you knew Lori, you would know that doing those things just isn’t her. The inauthenticity of it would be undeniable. Her remaining choices, then, are as follows: … to correct people when they call me “sir” or assume I am a man, or let it go, which often means functioning socially as a man. Let me paint a brief picture of what this looks like. Doing something as basic as going to the bathroom, anywhere that is public, is a nightmare. Few places have “unisex” bathrooms. So here are my choices: go into the women’s bathroom and face public shouting, alarm, ridicule, and confrontation. Or go into the men’s bathroom, look down at the floor, walk quickly into a stall, and hope nobody pays any attention to me but face the serious fear that they might. [Now] imagine standing over the coffin of your grandfather’s body, while the funeral director turns to your father and says, “This must be your son, I have heard so much about,” and all your father can say in response is a quiet, “no, this is my daughter.” Imagine going to the emergency room for what you believe to be an ovarian cyst, and the physicians and nurses are so baffled they ask you your name and repeatedly check your chart for your sex identification and then ask to see your driver’s license, something you’ve already given at check-in, to triple confirm, one presumes, that you aren’t delusional. I could go on. I have hundreds of such stories. All because your body is socially interpreted as masculine, yet you identify as a woman. 4 Lori does not consider herself transgender. But many people who are transgender, genderqueer, gender non-binary, or (otherwise) gender-unconventional, have strikingly similar stories. In one way or another, their sense of themselves as a man or a woman, or perhaps neither exclusively, or in some cases, their gendered appearance vis-à-vis their sexual anatomy (whether actual or assumed) does not align with prevailing social expectations. As a consequence, it can often be an ordeal simply to get through the day. And what’s more, or as a part of this, a meaningful aspect of their identity or self-conception (over which we’ll assume, for present purposes, each of us is ultimately our own authority) may be regularly misjudged by others. This misjudging can happen in all sorts of ways. But at least one way it can happen is to have someone call you a “he” when – to stick with Lori’s example – you identify as a “she.” And while this might not seem like a big deal to those whose embodied selves are socially “read” or interpreted in ways that are more congenial to their self-understanding, it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination or a particularly large dose of empathy to see how it could matter to someone who doesn’t have that luxury. Especially when, as is often the case, such misinterpretation happens repeatedly on top of many other slights (or more than slights, as the case may be). As Cassie Brighter, a trans woman, has shared about her own experience: Being misgendered means that how you saw yourself, just a woman casually discussing a TV show or a movie [for example], suddenly gets stripped away and replaced with “…but of course we know you’re really a man.” It’s nightmarish. It means that all of the other people who have been saying “she” might have been just “playing along,” nodding and smiling, mollifying the crazy person. The ONE person who misgenders you makes you question ALL of the times anyone has respected your true gender. With one monosyllabic word, they turn your life into a Black Mirror episode. I hope you can begin to see, then, why some people might try to make their lives a little bit easier in this one respect: that is, by explicitly “sharing their pronouns” (in some of the ways I mentioned before). In this way, those who interact with them won’t have to make a guess about what pronoun to use – often by relying on crude gender stereotypes – so there will be less of a chance of getting things wrong. *** 5 However, the story does not end there. As some of you will have noticed, the emerging practice of sharing one’s pronouns has been taken up by a wide range of people, including many who might be described as “cisgender” (that is, roughly, non-transgender) or whose gendered appearance rarely if ever causes them to be “misread” in anything like the ways described by Lori in her essay. Indeed, in some contexts, this “wider” practice is becoming institutionalized. For example, I know of several cases of an employee receiving a message from their workplace strongly encouraging, if perhaps not requiring, everyone to share their pronouns in more or less prescribed ways. In other cases, the pressure may be indirect. For example, someone may notice that many of their peers or colleagues have started sharing their pronouns – by listing them in their email signatures, perhaps, whether or not this is an official policy – and wonder whether they should do the same. For anyone in this position, let me again try to explain what is going on, by giving a little more context. I will start with what I take to be the perspective of those who favour these sorts of changes, and then I will turn to some potentially complicating factors that might make it harder for us, as a society, to be sure about the best way forward. Suppose that you are gender non-conforming in some way. Maybe you are in something like Lori’s position, or maybe you are transgender, and you are dealing with the following issue: people frequently use a pronoun for you that, at the very least, reminds you that you are in some way perceived as “different” from others, or that – perhaps more distressingly – really grates against your basic sense of yourself as a person. Given that, most likely, you are already dealing with a number of (other) burdens that typically go along with being perceived to violate traditional gender norms – burdens that may range from the relatively minor to the unbearably severe – it might be nice to have a show of solidarity. After all, if you are the only one, or one of a very small number of people, at your company, say, who has to keep choosing between clarifying your pronouns or flinching and suffering in silence, this can make a difficult situation that much harder. By contrast, if everyone at the company shares their pronouns, you won’t, at least in this one respect, have to feel quite so singled out. So here is an argument in favour of changing the norm (that is, in favour of “wider” adoption of pronoun-sharing among people as a general rule): 6 (1) People who are gender non-conforming typically have a hard enough time as it is. (2) If enough people share their pronouns as a regular matter of course, so that doing so becomes a new social norm, this will expectably make life easier for gender nonconforming people (among other benefits, they will be less likely to have pronouns applied to them that may painfully clash with their sense of self, and they won’t have to awkwardly stick their necks out in order to make this happen). (3) There is no real cost to explicitly sharing one’s pronouns, especially if one is in the “gender majority” (roughly, the group of people whose gender is rarely if ever socially misread). (4) If one can do something at essentially no cost to oneself, but which, in the aggregate, is likely to make things appreciably better for a group of people who are systematically and unfairly disadvantaged in society, one should do that thing (barring some kind of special excuse or justification). (5) So, one should share one’s pronouns. Moreover, one should encourage others to do so as well, so that the practice has wider uptake and becomes more robustly established as a new social norm. That seems like a pretty good argument, at least to me, and it might well carry the day. But it is also worth considering potential counterarguments, or at least complicating factors. After all, when the dignity or well-being of marginalized groups is at stake, we want to be sure that any social changes we pursue are really up to the task, while leading to as few negative sideeffects possible. In that spirit, then, let’s consider some possible drawbacks that might accompany, or follow from, the widespread adoption of a pronoun-sharing norm. These aren’t meant to be knock-down arguments, just countervailing considerations. We’ll have to decide together how this all shakes out. *** Consider the following case. Suppose again that you are gender atypical, but this time, in a particular way. For years, you have suspected that you are probably transgender, but you still have some lingering doubts. You grew up in a conservative community where ideas about gender are pretty restrictive, and where questioning those ideas is not generally tolerated, and 7 might in fact be dangerous. You do know that you feel uncomfortable with, or even alienated from, at least some of your sexually differentiated body parts or associated features, and as far as you can remember you have felt this way since you were little. Moreover, or perhaps alternatively, you find yourself drawn toward certain ways of dressing, behaving, relating, or simply being-in-the-world with others that are not conventionally seen as “appropriate” for someone with your sexual anatomy. Certainly not within your community. Alternatively, or perhaps moreover, you feel repulsed by many of the cultural scripts or norms that are conventionally seen as appropriate for someone with your sexual anatomy. In any case, something is not lining up for you, and you are unsatisfied with the status quo. At the same time, you may feel uncertain about who you really “are.” Perhaps you find the concept of a “gender identity” to be somewhat confusing. When people refer to this, you aren’t sure of what they mean. Do you even have a gender identity? How would you know? Part of your confusion stems from the fact that people seem to use the word “gender” nowadays to refer to a number of different things. Sometimes they seem to be talking about, basically, stereotypes of masculinity or femininity; at other times, they seem to be talking about the social role one occupies on the basis of one’s perceived reproductive features; and still other times, they seem to be talking about a kind of inner awareness one might have about the sex category – or perhaps the corresponding social role – one either does, or believes one should, fit into. Or maybe some combination of the above. So this is where you are in your process of identity formation. You strongly doubt that you would meet anybody’s criteria for being happily “cisgender” (notwithstanding that this is yet another term you are not entirely sure you understand). But all the same, it is far from obvious to you how best to coherently, much less accurately, “map” your embodied experiences, subjective feelings about yourself, desired ways of relating to others, and so on, onto the available conceptions of trans/gender/identity that are currently circulating in the wider culture. As a consequence of all this, you face certain puzzles or difficulties as you go about your daily life. For example, when you are asked to mark your gender on a form or survey, you genuinely don’t know what to put. If the question had been about the cluster of sex characteristics you were born with – unless you are intersex, perhaps – you might have been 8 able to put an “M” or an “F” without too much consternation. But since the form is asking about your gender, you find yourself thinking, “What is it, exactly, you are trying to find out about me? What specifically do you want to know?” (For an in-depth discussion of these questions and possible answers, see my recent essay in Think, “Debating Gender.”) Now, let’s imagine that the practice of pronoun-sharing has become a more dominant norm. As a result, most everyone has their pronouns in their email signature now, or on their website, or on social media. At the office, when people are introducing themselves to the new hire, everyone goes around and says, “Hi, my name is So-and-so, and my pronouns are [whatever].” Suppose you’ve only ever disclosed your complex, unorthodox feelings about gender to your therapist, say, or your closest friends. Moreover, so as not to tip off your conservative community back home while you try to sort out, or come to terms with, those vexed feelings, you’ve been more or less “passing” as a cisgender woman or man. Accordingly, you prefer not to highlight questions of gender identity in public settings to the best of your ability. As it happens, people tend to call you “she” or “he” in line with your cisgender-ish performance, and while this feels a little strange to you – they are, after all, essentially guessing whether you have a vulva or penis each time they refer to you; or perhaps they are guessing your gender identity? – you much prefer this relatively ambiguous situation to talking explicitly about pronouns, thereby raising the issue of your (self) concept of gender. Now it’s your turn to introduce yourself. What should you say? You could say something like, “I don’t want to talk about my pronouns in this public setting; I prefer to keep such matters private.” But that would probably raise some eyebrows, and interfere with your ability to “pass.” You could say, “I don’t really have a preference; refer to me however you like.” But that might amount to (or at least risk) the same thing. Alternatively, you could confidently state the pronoun that corresponds to the cisgender identity that most people presume you have. But that might feel like lying: it is one thing to let people make an assumption about you; another to tell them what to assume. Finally, you might feel that gender, on whatever conception, is simply not the sort of thing one should be drawing attention to, as the default, in various social contexts. *** 9 Here is an example. Suppose you are a woman, transgender or cisgender, who has been fighting for years to be taken seriously by your mostly male colleagues in a scientific field that is dominated by men. You are tired of being talked down to. You are tired of the subtle, and not-so-subtle, comments about what you happen to be wearing and how it does or doesn’t complement your figure. You simply want to be able to present your work, whether at a humble lunch talk or a major conference, as a scientist, and not “as a woman.” And now imagine that you are about to speak in front of your colleagues, and you feel compelled to introduce yourself, in keeping with the emerging social norm, as Dr. So-and-so, whose pronouns are… It may seem innocuous enough. But there are concerns here. One type of concern comes from the field of psychology, where a large volume of work suggests that women and racial minorities are often made anxious by even subtle reminders of their marginalized identities in certain high-stakes situations. For example, they may worry about seeming to confirm a negative performance-related stereotype about their group in situations where, ironically, this very worrying can undermine performance. So, if women in general start to feel pressure to share their pronouns in contexts where foregrounding their gender could be disadvantageous, personally or professionally, this might count against step (3) of the above argument (the idea that sharing pronouns has no real costs). Another concern goes like this. When we single out some aspect of our identity and give it pride of place next to our very name, we may implicitly convey that this is a central part of who we are, or how we want to be socially perceived. In other words, whether or not it’s our intention, we “frame” ourselves in terms of that identity-dimension, and people’s downstream impressions of us will be shaped accordingly. Of course, for some people, their gender is a central part of who they are, and they do want to be perceived through that lens in a social setting. Sharing their pronouns might be a helpful way of showing this. But the argument we are considering here is not whether any given individual should feel free to share their pronouns in whatever way they wish (I assume there is general agreement about that); rather, the question is whether it would be good to adopt a social norm whereby most people are expected to share their pronouns, for example at work or online. And that question raises a different set of issues. *** 10 One issue it raises is a deceptively simple question I have so far avoided asking directly. And that is: What exactly do pronouns refer to? As I noted earlier, the ones we are interested in refer to people, as opposed to objects for example, so let me be more specific. What about people do these pronouns “latch onto”? By virtue of what exactly does a “he” or “she” apply? This question is important because, if we want to decide whether people in general should share their pronouns in more or less public ways, we’ll need to have a better sense of what it is about themselves we may be expecting them to publicly disclose. Until recently, I imagine most people took pronouns to serve as an indicator of someone’s sex, where “he/him” pronouns referred to people who had (or were believed to have) maletypical sex characteristics, like a penis, and “she/her” pronouns referred to people who had (or were believed to have) female-typical sex characteristics, like a vulva or more prominent breasts. Now, I don’t suppose that people were actively thinking about each other’s genitals when they used these pronouns, but ultimately, I suggest, they were making an inference to that effect. And if that’s right, it might seem odd that we should ever have been comfortable communicating our assumptions about other people’s intimate anatomy by the very act of referring to them in everyday conversation. Now, however, pronouns seem, increasingly, to refer to something else. Increasingly, they seem to refer, not to a person’s real or perceived sex, but to something more like their gender identity. As I touched on above, this term doesn’t have a universally accepted definition. But it’s generally understood to be an aspect of a person, akin to a self-concept, which often draws on notions of masculinity or femininity and which may or may not correspond in any predictable way to their sex-typed characteristics. In some ways, this seems like an improvement over having people’s public pronouns tied to their so-called private parts. But there is also a sense in which people’s gender identity is, if anything, even more private than their apparent membership in one sex category or another: to get ahold of it, you have to enter a person’s mind. And this is where a tension starts to rise. Our minds, our thoughts, our self-conceptions, may be among our most intimate possessions. Accordingly, there are some things about our minds and ourselves which others do not have the right to know – unless we especially want to tell them. Indeed, as the example I gave earlier was meant to illustrate, for some people this may include their thoughts or feelings about their own gender, or perhaps about gender as a wider 11 concept. Maybe they feel it’s complicated. Maybe they don’t want to reduce it all down to a syllable. Maybe they are reluctant to engage in what Jen Manion calls the “performance of inclusion” or the “ritual” of pronoun-sharing (thereby distracting, in her view, from the substantive advancement of gender-minority rights). In short, if pronouns are supposed to index a person’s gender identity – which some people may not want to share, and which others do not have a right to know – it could be problematic to adopt a social norm according to which people are expected, in general, to share their pronouns. An analogy: presumably most people would not want to feel pressure to list their sexual orientation, say, in their email signatures, right there underneath their job title; or to state their race, religion, or political affiliation after their name during an introduction. (Come to think of it, under current conditions, “sharing one’s pronouns” may in fact amount to sharing one’s political affiliation—another potentially complicating factor.) But it may seem that there is an obvious objection here. Personal pronouns are, whether we like it or not, an extremely common feature of everyday language. They cannot just be done away with. And in English, at least, for better or worse, they encode gender and not, for instance, race. So, although we might object to an emerging social norm that seems to put pressure on us to list our race, religion, sexual orientation, and so on, in our email signatures, the cases are not analogous. The English language just doesn’t force us to make guesses about those other sorts of qualities of people, at least if we want to refer to them in the third person without repeatedly using their name. But it does force us to guess their sex or, increasingly, their gender identity, under those same conditions. So, it would be better if we all just told each other what pronouns we wanted others to use. *** Perhaps that is the right answer after all. But in closing, let us zoom out a bit to consider the bigger picture. Let us imagine, just for a moment, that English did encode something other than sex or gender identity in its third-person pronouns. What if, to stick with our example, it actually did encode a person’s race? This hypothetical situation is the subject of a brilliant essay by Douglas Hofstadter, first published in the 1980s: “A Person Paper on Purity in Language” (you can easily find it by searching online). Parodying a conservative newspaper columnist named William Safire, who 12 used to rail against objections to the widespread use of masculine generics on the ground that they were sexist, Hofstadter invites us into an alternate reality, a nearby language-world to the one we inhabit. “It’s high time,” Hofstadter writes, channelling Safire, that “someone blew the whistle on all the silly prattle about revamping our language to suit the purposes of certain political fanatics.” Consider the “absurd” proposal of a fictionalized anti-racist author, Abraham Moses: Moses’ shrill objection is to the age-old differentiation of whites from blacks by the thirdperson pronouns “whe” and “ble.” Ble promotes an absurd notion: that what we really need in English is a single pronoun covering both races. Numerous suggestions have been made, such as “pe,” “tey,” and others. These are all repugnant to the nature of the English language, as the average white in the street will testify, even if whe has no linguistic training whatsoever. Then there are advocates of usages such as “whe or ble,” “whis or bler,” and so forth. This makes for monstrosities such as the sentence “When the next President takes office, whe or ble will have to choose whis or bler cabinet with great care, for whe or ble would not want to offend any minorities.” [There are also] some yapping black libbers who advocate writing “bl/whe” everywhere, which, aside from looking terrible, has no reasonable pronunciation. Shall we say “blooey” all the time when we simply mean “whe”? … Another suggestion is that the plural pronoun “they” be used in place of the inclusive “whe.” This would turn the charming proverb “Whe who laughs last, laughs best” into the bizarre concoction “They who laughs last, laughs best.” As if anyone in whis right mind could have thought that the original proverb applied only to the white race! Alright, so you see the point. If our language did encode race in its pronouns, rather than sex or gender identity, it is not obvious that the best way to deal with the attendant genuine problems, including some people being regularly “misraced” (that is, mistakenly referred to as a member of a racial category they do not consider themselves a part of), would be to promote an analogous social norm to the one we have been considering. That is, it might not be preferable for people, as a rule, to start listing or stating their preferred racial pronouns in various professional (or other) contexts. Rather, it might be preferable to make a concerted effort, individually or as a society, to find an alternative to using racialized pronouns. *** 13 I don’t have any grand conclusion here. There are very real questions about what we should do about pronouns under ideal versus non-ideal conditions, or perhaps during current or future stages of language evolution, if we do try to make changes to English (see the essay “He/She/They/Ze” by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak for a helpful discussion of this). No matter what we do, there will likely be some trade-offs, and not everyone will be totally pleased. For example, some people, transgender or otherwise, who have a binary gender identity – that is, who proudly identify as either a man or woman – might really value having “he” or “she” available as a way of reinforcing their sense of self. My own working practice is to use “they” (happily, both race- and gender-neutral) when referring to anyone in the third person whose gender identity I am not absolutely sure of, while using “he” or “she” for those who I know have that preference. Or, when citing or quoting someone in an essay, I have started to simply repeat the person’s last name where necessary or applicable, rather than using any pronoun at all. It may not be a perfect solution, and sometimes I still slip up, but I think it’s a reasonable place to start. In the meantime, if I am right that pronouns now largely convey a person’s internal sense of themself as a gendered being, rather than, say, their sex, I ask that you not inquire about my pronouns. If you want to be privy to such personal information, you will have to get to know me. Acknowledgements Thank you to Peggy Cadet, Rachel Calcott, Clare Chambers, Robin Dembroff, Anne FaustoSterling, Elena Grewal, Rianna Hidalgo, Leah McCaskill, Moya Mapps, Anthony Morgan, Yuri Munir, Luke Roelofs, Paul Thompson, Marcus Tye, Lori Watson, Meryem Ezgi Yalcin, and Tan Zhi-Xuan for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this essay and/or in-depth discussion of these ideas. 14 Works mentioned or quoted Brighter, C. (2018). I wasn’t ‘annoyed’ at your misgendering me. Medium. https://byrslf.co/iwasnt-annoyed-at-your-misgendering-me-b13cd9480b2c Dembroff, R., & Wodak, D. (2018). He/she/they/ze. Ergo, 5(14), 371-406. Earp, B. D. (2021). Debating gender. Think, 20(57), 9-21. Earp, B. D. (2012). The extinction of masculine generics. Journal for Communication & Culture, 2(1), 4-19. Hofstadter, D. R. (1985). A person paper on purity in language. In: Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Basic Books, online version available at https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html Manion, J. (2018). The performance of transgender inclusion. Public Seminar, November 27. Available at https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-performance-of-transgender-inclusion/ Watson, L. (2016). The woman question. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(1-2), 246253. 15