Pronoun Studies FAQs: do you use pronouns in front of people?
This is, interestingly, kind of a frequently asked question from “both sides” of the “pronoun issue” [1]:
‘Since only third person pronouns are gendered in English anyways, what’s the big deal about…
- …being asked to use a trans person’s pronouns?
- …just using the pronouns I feel like using, regardless of what a person has asked me to do?
…since I would never use a third person pronoun to a person’s face
Well, there are two issues with this, but first I want to acknowledge that it is very interesting to me as a linguist that (1) and (2) are both arguments I’ve seen. On the side of (1), I think the argument goes: “if you find it difficult or uncomfortable to use a trans person’s pronouns, well, you won’t have to do it in front of them much, so you can probably get away with avoiding pronouns or practicing more.” On the side of (2), I believe the argument goes something like “since I am never using third person pronouns in front of the person I’m referring to, they should have no say in how I refer to them, because that’s between me and my interlocutor.”
Both of these arguments are premised on the idea that it basically never happens that people use third person pronouns in front of the person they’re referring to. (2) is interesting in that it also goes so far as to say that the only people with any stakes in the content of the conversation are its participants, which I think is a separate issue.
But like, here’s the thing: obviously this happens all the time.
This is not a tangent, I swear: my friend and colleague Montreal Benesch has been tasked, or possibly has tasked faerself, with making cool stickers for the lab fae works in, the Trans Research In Linguistics Lab, or TRILL. The lab is run by Lal Zimman, also my friend and colleague; in 2019 Lal said at a conference, “Trans people are natural linguists,” which he explained was due to our heightened awareness of subtle linguistic cues as to how the people around us are interpreting our gender.
It’s not just pronouns — lots of other little linguistic markers can clue us in to whether we’ve been ‘clocked’ or how a person has decided to categorize us. What this means is that trans English speakers are, on average, way better at noticing pronouns than cis English speakers.
As I’ve talked about a lot on this blog, pronouns are a special kind of grammatical category in English that the brain tends to unconsciously skip over — function words. Unless something really surprising happens, many English speakers simply do not notice what pronoun was used in any given sentence. One of my ‘villain origin stories’ that I talk about a lot is that when I was in grad school, a professor in my department habitually misgendered me. This was someone who really genuinely understood the concept of nonbinary gender, and who swore up and down that they really did see me as nonbinary, and who also swore up and down that they were trying to practice my pronouns so as to stop messing up. They didn’t want to be misgendering me, I really do believe that. But one time, I remember I was standing next to them at the snacks-and-chatting time after a colloquium, and they were talking to someone else in the circle about my staff role at the time. They misgendered me; I waited until they finished their sentence, then asked, “Hey, [_], what pronoun did you just use in that sentence?”
They thought about it for a second. “I really hope it was the right one, but I am genuinely not sure,” they told me.
It was, of course, not the right one. They really didn’t notice. They have a PhD and have been a professor of linguistics for years. They are very linguistically aware! But they did not notice.
But obviously I noticed.
When Lal Zimman says trans people are natural linguists, what I think he is getting at is that trans people are linguistically hypervigilant. Being misgendered is informative: it tells us how the people around us think of us. (Of course, it also hurts: it sucks to find out that the people around us think of us really differently than we think of ourselves.) Do I think it is good that trans people are natural linguists due to, essentially, a constant state of fear? No. But I’m very glad to be a linguist for other reasons, and I really like all the trans people who made the jump to being linguists on purpose, so that’s some consolation. (And vice versa. Of course.)
If you are going to generalize and say people never use third person pronouns in front of the referent —you are making an empirical claim. It is an easily disproven empirical claim, disproven easily by simple observation.
As an exercise in increasing your linguistic awareness, I once again invite you to try and actually keep track for some extended period of time. If you are already a linguist, then it’s (free real estate meme voice) free data. If you’re not already a linguist, then this will be a useful mental exercise. It will be difficult, either way. You may have to carry around a little notebook and look eccentric to bystanders by taking it out and making tally marks randomly throughout the day. But you will absolutely observe that English speakers very much do use third person pronouns in front of the person they’re referring to, and you might or might not interpret it as ‘rude’ or ‘odd’ when you do notice that.
And finally, circling back to this idea that I have seen from transphobes, who argue in (2) that the (third person) pronouns used about a referent are only the business of the speaker and interlocutor, and that if the referent isn’t around to hear it, they’re not allowed to complain or make their preferences and requests known: this argument is so disingenuous that I struggle to formulate even a tepid counter-argument in good faith. If someone referred to you as “that bitch” to all your coworkers in your absence, you would obviously have grounds to object to this behavior. If someone prodigiously and intentionally referred to you by a mangled mispronunciation of your name whenever you weren’t around, you would be right to find this outrageous and unsociable. If I decided that every time I referred to you out of earshot, I said “Deborah… who BY THE WAY HAS HAD A UTERINE ABLATION,” you would correctly point out that it is both cruel and stupid to be attaching private information about your body to every fucking utterance. That’s what you’re doing, you fake fucking feminists. I denounce you and spit on your names and your intellectual output and I go out of my way not to assign your papers in my classes.
[1] On the matter of these scare quotes. Yesterday I went intentionally searching for transphobic comments about pronouns, because I’m deep in a writing project about the matter. It was actually quite hard to find such comments until I added the word “mumsnet” to my search. The transphobic side is a tiny, vocal, vitriolic minority who are so unpleasant to be around that they mostly live under a dumpster like a special kind of cockroach, hyper-evolved and specialized. They cannot thrive in daylight because they are so antisocial. Many such cases! This feels important to note because I’m trying to combat my own doomerism, and so perhaps you, dear trans reader who has turbo-depression, also appreciate knowing this. They are rare and mostly friendless.
This was a little zestier than I usually get on my public blog, but what can I say, I’m a little stressed out! Thanks for reading! If you want something that’s a bit friendlier, may I recommend some of my previous posts about the linguistics of pronouns. If anyone particularly needs me to write a friendlier translation of this post so they can share it with their mom or whoever, drop me a “skeet” on bluesky or email me or whatever. You can find me, I believe in you!
