Third-gender pronouns and binary-identified individuals

[feuervogel]

I read a blog post yesterday, an intro post from a guest blogger at feministe who usually writes over at Questioning Transphobia.

Queen Emily writes Don’t use third gender pronouns (eg “ze” and “hir”) on a binary identified person because it ungenders them. (Third-gender pronouns are also known as gender-neutral pronouns.) Then down in comments, she says, When someone uses “ze” to refer to me when I have explicitly referred to myself as a trans woman, it’s ungendering and cissexist to boot.

When I read this post by sohotrightnow, Queen Emily's post was the first thing I thought of, even though the writer of the problematic story (which I agree is problematic, and that is not the topic of this post; I'm not even involved in bandom) identifies as female.

The section that made me click the link to the writer's profile:

When I engaged promisethstars in discussion and tried to explain why this was bothering me, zie raised the point that the story is an AU, and argued that from zir perspective, there was no difference between making Gabe Saporta a Catholic priest for zir AU and making Patrick Stump a prostitute for another AU.

(You can see the wtfery evidenced by promisethstars in this quote, but that's not what I'm looking at.) I clicked the profile tag, and saw that Megan will occasionally "fangirl out." To me, that reads as "I identify as a girl."

Ungendering is a tactic used against trans-spectrum individuals by the media, academics, and radical feminists. I obviously do NOT believe that using "zie" to refer to a binary-identified cis-individual has anywhere near the emotional impact it does on a binary-identified trans-individual. But it isn't appropriate, either.

Or am I talking out of my ass here?

Comments

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Either way, the grist of fail was impressive. Curse my linkaholism - your links here cost me most of yesterday morning and got me all worked up. ;)

[feuervogel]

I know that feeling, mate. I've lost entire *weeks* to following discussions of people being stupid on the internet.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I tend to just lose a day at a time. By the end I'm so worn out and worked up that I just start killing tabs and convincing myself to go to sleep already. I just lack the energy to maintain the levels of outrage this sort of nonsense tends to engender. ;)

[feuervogel]

My problem is that every day there are new links of wtf on my reading pages, and I can't stop myself from clicking on them.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

And this is why I largely avoid drama-prone communities (in either the more normal or the LJ sense). There are also any number of days where I go "I simply lack the outrage reservoir to read this post, because I know I won't stop till I've read all the links and then it will be Thursday. Ignore!" If I do it long enough, I might not even come back to plumb the depths.