A Quick and Easy Guide to They / Them Pronouns

 
A Quick and Easy Guide to They / Them Pronouns

by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson
Limerence Press

2018

 

 

Someone I know through work, who has a a nonbinary gender identity, mentioned to me that they had bought multiple copies of A Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns so they could hand one out to anyone they knew who was confused. So I thought I might also read the book for myself. It's a work of graphic nonfiction, primarily intended to educate a group we might call 'the straights' about nonbinary identity and gender-neutral pronouns. There's also a section speaking directly to nonbinary readers.
 

Bongiovanni is themself nonbinary, and Jimerson is a cisgender (that is, non-trans) man. In addition to speaking to multiple audiences in terms of targeting both readers who are nonbinary and might be having trouble getting others to respect their pronouns and readers who know someone nonbinary and might want to understand their pronouns better, the coauthors also speak to people with different levels of comfort and familiarity with gender diversity, including readers who might be presumed hostile. 

 
One consequence is that tonally the book is kind of all over the place, switching from explaining to requesting to demanding to attempted coercion (like 'do this or you'll get in trouble with your boss') with not a lot of separation. It's very short, only 60 small pages, so maybe there simply isn't room for some things. I did wish they'd say more about why people use they / they pronouns beyond 'it's none of your business!'

 
I suspect that the book is most useful for a nonbinary person thinking about how to talk about their pronouns to someone else. I don't know how successful just handing this book to someone and asking them to read it would really be, although the authors repeatedly suggest it.

 
One way I tend to think about these things is that there are probably tiers of allyship. Using someone's correct pronouns after they've told them to you seems like the most minimal level of acceptable behavior. Helping out one friend by correcting your other friends if they misgender them is harder, but still an important show of basic human respect. This is probably the difficult conversation that the book does the best job of modeling and preparing the reader for.

 
Doing things like always calling any unknown person 'they,' never calling people 'ma'am' or 'sir' or referring to them as 'that guy' or 'that lady,' or always including your own pronouns when introducing yourself to a new person - those feel like requests of a different order. They're part of an ongoing political and cultural movement. They're aimed at normalizing gender-neutral language and creating a social environment where a nonbinary person is less likely to be accidentally misgendered by a stranger. I support this. But participating in that project feels like a higher level of allyship, not something I think is necessarily wise to ask of everyone (because, priorities), and something where the people who are participating deserve to be told the reasoning behind the request. Let us not pretend that cooperation with activism is the same thing as simply having good manners.