What's in a Pronoun; March 28 2022

I’ve made a formal shift – blog posts are going to regularly happen on Mondays. I’m doing it. I’m committing to a schedule again. My roommates and I have put together a cleaning schedule, a meal plan… We’re acing this whole Adulting thing, truly.

I’m also bringing back something I did in the very beginning of starting this blog; a one-paragraph-at-a-time, totally unplanned story! I did a Twitter poll, and y’all chose:

A fantasy story,

Starring a protagonist with they/them pronouns,

And with tropes surrounding amnesia, sudden superpowers, and soulmates!

… It’s going to be hard not to write a Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild fanfiction, I’m not gonna lie.

But speaking of pronouns, my kid has been alternating between she/her and he/him pronouns. (For purposes of this blog post, I’m going to use she/her to refer to my kid for now!) She’s only three, and this has caused some confusion among the cisgender members of her family.

‘Isn’t she too young to make that decision?’

And you might be thinking that too! Especially if you’re cis, or have always felt you identified one particular way. I wanted to explain my thoughts surrounding this.

At three years old, my kid’s only just beginning to understand the differences between genders. It’s bound to be more complex for her, because she’s always understood that I, her father, am a man. But the other men in her life don’t have bodies that look like mine, and she understands that they’re also men. She’s got the grasp of it better than your average right-winger: genitals, bodies, they don’t define a person.

So when she came to me and spontaneously went, “I feel more like a boy,” I immediately asked what pronouns she wanted to use. She’s exploring! Not only that, she’s in the phase of her life where she’s going to emulate the people she loves. My roommate is genderfluid, and I’m a transmasculine person, so naturally she wants to be like us. She’s trying on pronouns to see if they fit, the way you’d put on a sweater you like the look of but don’t know if it’s as soft as it looks.

The next day, she wanted to use she/her pronouns in the morning, and he/him in the afternoon and evening. Today, she’s back to she/her. We’re thinking of getting colour-coded bracelets to indicate which pronouns she wants at any given time. Blue and pink are traditional, naturally, but I’m thinking of using her favourite colours instead, so she doesn’t wind up favouring one bracelet just because she likes the colour better. Three year olds will do that.

And now, our story begins!

Water exploded from their lungs, expelled with body-wracking coughs as they clambered from the cold rapids onto the grassy bank. The ankle-length shift clung to their body like a squeezing serpent. Every muscle ached, their vision still swimming as they threw themselves onto their back and stared up at sparkling twilight.