#I am genuinely just considering sucking it up and adding a gender categorization rider to the effect of “assigned trans by social circle”

[grison-in-space]

and it really ignores the way it makes a spectacle if there are only a handful of trans people in the room, or even worse, only one

god yes this. I'm visibly gnc enough that it gets everyone all het up to look at me, and I have in fact started going professionally by she/they exclusively because people stop being weird at me about it then. Pronouns aren't the biggest thing I want acknowledged about my gender, not by a long shot, but like... I am too busy trying to either tune out my own discomfort or obsessively parse the threat level of the people talking to me to comprehend anything interesting, okay?

I am so tired of people being excited to meet me and listen to me talk about a very specific experience of gender that I do not have! That is not the fault of people who do have gender experiences and interpretations of those experiences that aren't identical to my own, but boy fucking howdy I see these stupid fucking pronoun circles transmitting the idea that we are all in some kind of perfect consensus about gender as a major perpetuating factor driving that intensely awkward experience. I have been complaining about that experience for over a decade. I would like to stop doing that.

pronoun circles also erase foundational concepts from queer manners like "you do not ever, ever out another person" by eliding the concept of "contextual pronouns" or pronoun code-switching, in which one set of pronouns might be preferred in one venue but another might be preferred in a second context or around specific people. the thing is, these things are important. For all the straights and more insulated queers like to say how much better things are now (and they are!) they're still plenty rough for many of us--and, you know, what doesn't kill you can leave fucking scars. You don't get to judge how much scar tissue and unwillingness to talk about themselves without being able to control the safety of the space anyone has, and you don't get to arbitrate what spaces feel safe to other people. Consider that your space might feel unsafe no matter what you do and allow room for people to move away to inform their own comfort levels. Your audience might include people who have no idea about anything going on under the surface with the topic, but it also might include veteran activists and burnouts, so you will want to think about how you might respond to that if someone like that shows up and politely asks you to not smack them in the nose.

Please. It's so awkward to have that conversation.

I have also had someone cheerfully announce shit like "anything as long as it's not he, she or they!" because "gender is hard for me so I want it to be hard for everyone!" verbatim. *deep inhale of frustrated breath* when I am full on socializing and therefore masking I have limited cognitive capacity to retain specific contextual social roles, because I am doing everything consciously or semiconsciously and that shit is tiring. you have just announced that you are wasting my very limited cognitive capacity not because it fulfills a need that helps you feel alive but because it makes you feel wise and lofty, like you are engaging in performance art or "making people think." look. I don't need help thinking. I have three miniature essays on the nature of gender and sex rotating in my head at any given time. stopping me from thinking is the usual problem.

also the thing is I am not paying to attend your damn art, and I am not here to contemplate your deep thoughts on gender. I am out here fucking trying to figure out what cultural-category-shorthand I can politely shove you into so I can dedicate that piece of social processing to something else, like figuring out whether someone is secretly peeved about me or fighting off another intrusive anxiety attack. I like people who try to make interactions with themselves accessible to fucked-up autistic chronic maskers like me more than people who think making me do extra cognitive work to interact with them is a fun game. so sue me. you don't ever know how big or small someone else's overall energy reserve is. all you know is how much you value what you ask for.

the bitch of it is that I appreciate a good gender performance, in the sense of an art piece. that is, after all, what gender is: it's a social category we construct ourselves in order to advertise who we are to an unpredictable and public audience. and I love talking about gender, because gender is always endlessly interesting, and I have three different essays in the back of my head I should really figure out how to write up and submit. I love talking about gender because social signals are, in their own way, art! art is worth appreciating! but not when I am trying to play a role in my own right to make sure everyone is at ease, and not when I am trying to accomplish other things by communicating with you.

Besides, I love my friends very much but not all of my friends share my particular idiosyncratic taste in art, so it is easier to be able to dissociate these things with one another if we don't happen to overlap. performance art, like any art or form of play, should be opt in. if there is a thing you do not care about for itself, consider how hard you want to ask people to work to respect it. that's all I'm saying. as someone who has adjusted my pronouns to add singular they in order to accommodate people who are trying to figure out how to navigate a newer social rule to them as politely as possible.

and I hope the concept of the pronoun circle goes to die in hell, ideally before I have to launch myself bodily at people who are otherwise my allies and supporters in both queering sex differences research and also politics while shrieking at the top of my lungs about access conflicts, because the thing is I will do it. I am devoid of dignity. we all know I can and I will.

so. there's that perspective.

i think one of the most frustrating things about the “share pronouns in a circle” phenomenon, as someone who teaches, is it has been so entrenched in the “canon” of the “progressive toolkit” that when you reject it for very good reasons, you recieve pushback for not giving space for pronoun sharing, so you just end up doing it anyways. and it really ignores the way it makes a spectacle if there are only a handful of trans people in the room, or even worse, only one