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Why I Use Two Sets of Pronouns
Or How I Learned to Love Duality and Contradiction
As an initial caveat, I want to mention that this is my personal experience with gender and is by no means meant to encompass everyone’s experience, especially those who do not identify with exclusively one pronoun set. My pronouns are they/them and she/her. I am fundamentally against absolutism and never felt like identity is an endpoint or that we should be trying to find our “true selves” but that we have to learn to love all iterations of our lives and learn from the part we did not love. This way of thinking has certainly informed how I think about gender — not as an end point, but as a perpetual state of being and undoing and being again. That being said, always respect people’s preferred pronouns and for some identity IS an endpoint, and that is okay. It should be a given, but I wanted to make it clear from the outset.
Further, I think it is essential to mention that I have a supportive family and ones that never enforced gender upon me which I want to recognize is an immense privilege. Not only did they name me a gender-neutral name, they let me figure it out as a kid what felt comfortable and were generally adaptable to any and all changes. This has afforded me a lot more freedom to explore and shift, and I want to recognize that as far as the folks I have interacted with…
