Kirby Conrod – Medium

3 days ago

pronouns aren’t gender; please get better at looking at birds

Pronouns aren’t gender. If you’ve been around the pronoun conversations for a bit, you’ve likely seen this line, but I find it’s either intuitive to you (like lightbulb-moment “oh, that explains a lot”) or you’re stuck on like, “….sure, but what does that mean?” I will run you through a…

Pronouns

6 min read

Apr 18

you (yes you!!) should change your ID to X gender

Hey cis people! You should change your gender marker to X on your legal ID documents. Uhh why do you say that, Kirby? Well, the current thing that scares a lot of trans and non-binary people off of getting our ID genders changed to X is that, as it stands…

LGBTQ

6 min read

you (yes you!!) should change your ID to X gender

Mar 26

intermediate pronoun studies: themselves and themself

Q: Should I say ‘themself’ or ‘themselves’ with singular they? A: This is a question I have gotten a few times, and when I’ve answered it in live Q&A sessions, my answer has been that infuriating Linguistᵗᵐ Answer: I dunno, which one do you say? What feels more right? I…

Pronouns

7 min read

Dec 23, 2021

put a coin in the pronoun jar

I am listening back through the archives of the comedy podcast My Brother, My Brother, and Me. It’s a comforting and familiar media, and I like having background noise that feels sociable but undemanding when I’m hanging out at home. Yesterday in my backwards binge-listen I hit Episode 553: The…

Pronouns

5 min read

Sep 22, 2021

how to abolish deadlines

This is a post I have been meaning to write for ages, but I was finally spurred into action by this episode of Big Mood, Little Mood with host Daniel M. Lavery and guest Divya Victor. On the podcast, they give advice to an anonymous letter writer who, as a…

Pedagogy

9 min read

Sep 13, 2021

how to ask gender in a linguistics study

I get asked this a lot! This will be a short, informal version of work I’m in the process of writing up for formal publication in linguistics — it’s not yet peer reviewed, I’m not putting a ton of time into citations, and I’m not going to go deeply into…

Linguistics

10 min read

Jul 14, 2021

Guest Lecture in Pronouns: Vasundhara

Hello all! I had hoped to get this out in pride month, but it’s falling in wrath month instead; it’s fine, we’re still all totally in our feels this hot nonbinary summer, so we’re good! This is a guest post from Vasundhara Gautam, a computational linguist at Dialpad (moving to…

Pronouns

9 min read

Jul 7, 2021

so they forgot to tell you how to write a paper

For whatever reason, you may find yourself in a PhD program while somehow not actually knowing how to write a paper. It happens! You’re not a fraud (that I know of) and you’re not doomed to failure. Hopefully you’re reading this before you get to the big paper. If you’re…

Writing

18 min read

so they forgot to tell you how to write a paper

Jun 8, 2021

intermediate pronoun studies: how do I make people stop misgendering me?

After posting Pronouns 101 and Pronouns 102, I’ve been receiving more questions from readers! Thusfar, the questions I’ve had have been sort of aimed at how do I avoid misgendering people? Which is great, we love that! This is a question I get occasionally, though, and I’ve gotten it from…

Pronouns

14 min read

Jan 30, 2021

intermediate pronoun studies: multiple pronouns

After posting Pronouns 101 and Pronouns 102, I’ve started receiving some questions from readers! I will happily answer these anonymously — you can send your own questions to me via my twitter. This is my second reader question; the first one I answered in a previous post. From Gloria Mellesmoen…

Pronouns

16 min read