So like I said I have a wife I had to tell her how I was feeling. I couldn’t just bottle it up and continue feeling strange. So I did. She could feel something was wrong, which she always seems to do. She asked me, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Well I don’t feel comfortable introducing myself with she/her/her’s pronouns. I wanna say. Hi. My name is Meredith, please call me Meredith. But that doesn’t sound right.” Could I do that? Could I use my name as a pronoun? Did other people do that? These were all the questions that ran through my mind as I told Jennifer (my wife) what I wanted to say. I also wondered if there were other pronouns that I could use. I knew that people used they/them/theirs or used pronouns interchangeably, but those did not feel right either.
She later asked me if I felt like a boy. I replied, “No, I really don’t feel like a boy or a girl. I feel like ME.” I didn’t wanna be confined to the binary standards. I wanted to be me, just a person, a sibling, a child, a partner or spouse, a sibling in-law. But, how could I be all these things and make people understand? Also, how could I ask people that have been calling me those things all my life to change? I really didn’t know and didn’t have the answers. However, I knew I would find them when Jennifer said, “I love you no matter what.”
Staying tuned!!
This weeks blog actually talks about my discovery of all those pronouns and how I played with them. So stay tune.
As we saw in last Wednesday's presentation, there have been multiple systems devised of gender neutral pronouns (like zi zim zir) for the English language. Since there has not been one agreed upon version to focus attention on, they simply have not caught on for wide usage. Such a limited language we have! Did you ever try out any of these? Just wondering what your own experience was like.
I did explore gender neutral pronouns like sibling, spouse, and child. They actually make me feel better. More complete as a person. To this day my wife still calls me wife. That really doesn’t bother me. I truly take that as a term of endearment from her. However, when others use that term it bothers me. I really have trouble when people out in public say, “have a good day ladies”. I hope one day people will get to saying, “have a good day“ or ”have a good day y’all“. I have been still trying to figure out a gender neutral word for
aunt. I will take suggestion if anyone has one.
Hey Mer, did you explore gender neutral pronouns? What was that like?