I have this thing on my shoulder. It’s kind of like a chip, I guess. I like to think of it as an imp, a little demon, and I call it the Imp of the Perverse - that thing in your brain that tells you to jump off cliffs and touch hot stoves, say exactly the wrong thing, go along with a bad idea just to see how big the explosion’s gonna be. Mine used to be pretty nasty - it used to want me dead - but now it mostly demands that I never do anything the easy way if a ridiculously convoluted and laborious alternative is available. Nothing can be simple, nope, sorry. Everything does indeed have to be a whole fucking production. Including, it turns out, my choice of pronoun.

My transition has been lurching, haphazard, long stretches of increasingly pressurized discomfort punctuated by sudden, sweeping changes. People are often surprised at my decisions, because I tend to keep my own counsel about this kind of stuff - gender kind of stuff, I mean. I’ve come to understand that some of that is dysphoria, and some of it is environmental - I’ve always found my body hard to inhabit, and I’ve never found a lot of sympathetic ears about that, so I just kept it to myself. They didn’t have “nonbinary” in the 90s, it wasn’t out yet.

Also, this whole deal is my own, intensely private process, and it’s weird, and nobody else really needs to be involved. That’s something cis folks often don’t understand about transitioning: it’s not really about reorienting how you see me. It’s about reorienting how I see me, and ceasing to be defined by others’ gaze. It doesn’t especially matter if you understand it - you don’t have to. You just have to accept it and treat it with basic respect.

Sometimes even folks in the LGBTQ+ community seem to have trouble with that concept, though. I’ve gotten a lot of pushback around the pronoun I’ve chosen, “it,” specifically from other nonbinary and trans people. They too seem to be under the impression that another person’s pronoun in some way meaningfully affects them, that I am somehow hurting you by choosing to refer to myself in a way you would not choose to refer to yourself.

Just trying to live

I’ve absorbed a lot of words about this, but most of them have been Internet Discourse kind of words - long on insecurity and performative outrage, short on considered reasoning, humility, compassion, and curiosity. The only coherent, concrete beef with “it” as a pronoun appears to be its past use as a transphobic slur. Bigots like to refer to trans people as “it” in order to dehumanize them.

Now, I’ve never experienced this - I didn’t grow up around that kind of bigot; in Kansas and Arizona the bigots I met were mostly racists - and so I don’t have the negative associations other people have with the word, but that’s not to say those negative associations aren’t legitimate, and it’s not to say that discomfort is unreasonable. If I met a person in real life whom I was considering becoming friends with, and they told me they’d be uncomfortable calling me “it” because it feels rude and hurtful, I’d say, “Okay, I get it, ‘they/them’ is also fine if that works better for you.” I’m not out here trying to fuck up somebody’s day with my gender, all right? I’m just trying to live, like everyone else.

But there are reasons I use “it” as my pronoun, and the people who have a problem with it are rarely interested in them, which suggests to me that they’re more concerned with how they feel about my pronoun than with how I feel about it. That makes them look pretty entitled and self-involved to me, which in turn makes me pretty uninterested in their perspectives or their company.

The people who ask about my reasons are the people I like, people who often become my friends, and it’s for those people that I’m writing this. You’re probably here because you asked me why I use the pronoun “it,” and there’s a lot that goes into it, so… maybe this is a first draft of my FAQ.

As far as dehumanization goes…

A big problem trans people have right now, honestly, is just a dearth of terminology. We’re lacking in words of sufficient granularity and clarity to describe ourselves. It’s kind of a good problem to have, because it’s an opportunity, one that nonbinary folks in particular have enthusiastically seized, coming up with a mass of neopronouns so wild and diverse that even we definitely cannot keep up with all of them. As an amateur linguist with a loathing for prescriptivism, I adore this explosion of new words, and I welcome its inherent expansion of our concept of “personhood.”

‘Cause… that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? It’s about being a person. Not being a human, that’s something else, something very specific. A human has a set of biological characteristics, and is generally assigned societal roles based on those biological characteristics, because a human is an animal descended from a monkey, and less-evolved animals like humans often believe that the only meaningful difference between individuals is their coloring and genital configuration. But we’re coming up against the limitations of that kind of thinking. Even beyond the ongoing argument about which colors of human should count as human, there’s the impending argument about how much technological augmentation constitutes an inroad on one’s humanity, the transhumanist argument about AI, and the potential for wider, more deeply harmful arguments about alien species in the future. Humanity is trying to grow up and move out of its mama’s basement, before mama’s basement floods and collapses, and we’re discovering that our incredibly parochial view of universe as centered on us is… well, not very useful, and might offend the species at the grown-ups’ table.

So there are two ways to be dehumanized. There’s the way we’re currently doing it, attaching “your survival needs as a human” to “these criteria describing humans I approve of who are suspiciously similar to myself” - in essence, saying “I don’t think you should be considered a human, so I’m going to deny you resources in the hope that you will die and cease confusing me about why humans exist who don’t look like me.” Like “art,” the term “human” is often slapped on things less as a label, indicating the contents, but more as a status symbol, an indication that this is a being who deserves dominion over other beings and to carelessly consume the resources of this world due to some indefinable but definitely innate quality that is universal to all (white, cishet, able-bodied) humans.

But there’s another usage of the term that is value-neutral, that refers simply to removing human involvement or influence from something, setting a thing apart from humanity without making a value judgment on either humanity or the thing in question. I’m not arguing that we should reclaim dehumanization - in general, yes, people intend harm with those behaviors and they should be discouraged. I’m just saying that’s the sense in which I feel the word, and thus the pronoun “it,” usefully applies to me.

I still don’t wish to be included

I don’t perceive myself as some other kind of being, it’s not that. I’m not a mermaid or an alien or a vampire, despite my insistence on being forever overdressed. It’s just that my subjective experience, what it feels like to be me, appears to be manifestly different from what it feels like to be a human, in ways that materially alter my life and generally make it more difficult. I’ve never authentically expressed myself and been accepted by other humans, only one or the other at a time. My contact with humans repeatedly indicates to me that I’m not one, and humans I’ve known tell me the same: I am only intermittently successful at passing for one of you.

It seems, therefore, useful to indicate that to people at the outset - you might want a warning, before you meet me, that I probably won’t act like humans you’ve met. It might make you slightly less poorly disposed towards me, and it will certainly get us through this social interaction a whole lot quicker. In general, I don’t think that conforming better with current human expectations and mores will make me happier or more successful - I tried that for ten years; it didn’t work. It seems like what I need is to be allowed to be the weird little being that I am without some insecure human deciding that my existence is somehow a critique of his.

So yeah, dehumanize me, go nuts - I don’t consider being called “human” a mark of status, and I’m perfectly happy to be excluded. I’ve always related to George Carlin when he says:

I am a personal optimist, but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don’t confuse my point of view with cynicism - the real cynics are the one who tell you “everything’s gonna be all right.” And P.P.S.: By the way, if by some chance you folks DO manage to straighten things out and make everything better, I still don’t wish to be included.

On to the important stuff

That’s the background noise of this decision, as it were, the opinions of everyone who’s not me and my response to them. I don’t actually feel any of that is terribly important, though - it’s just something I have to dispose of first, before anyone will listen to the rest of what I have to say. The important opinions about my pronoun are, naturally, mine. I have to live with it. I have to explain it like this, every day for the rest of my life until our society gets its head round the apparently earthshattering idea of using a different made-up word sometimes, rather than those other words we also made up.

My associations with the word “it” used as a pronoun aren’t just non-negative - I was never exposed to its use as a slur, but also, one of my favorite books as a young person was Clive Barker’s Imajica. In this book, one of the main characters is a shapeshifter, a creature whose gender and appearance are mutable based on what others want to see, and so it has no fixed gender. This character is referred to as “it” throughout, but it’s the love interest of our protagonist (whose name I stole when I changed mine) so it’s treated with respect and tenderness, and the fact of its gender is never used to abuse it except by those framed as villains. This is the voice I hear in my head when I hear the word “it” applied to a person - the voice that said, “I’ll love you until the death of love.”

An ambulatory heap of rusted machinery

The most important thing, the thing that cis folks can’t really sympathize with because they’ve never been subjected to the feeling of their body being wrong, their name being wrong, their pronoun being wrong…is that “it” feels right to me. It does what a pronoun is supposed to do - it accurately pinpoints who’s being discussed among a field of others, and when I hear it, it resonates with me as referring to myself. Trust me, if you see me in a group of ten people, and somebody’s calling one of those people “it,” you’re gonna know who the fuck they’re talking about. I’m probably going to be the only “it” you know. With that in mind - y’know, with the actual purpose of pronouns in mind - couldn’t we argue that “he” and “she” are terrible, useless pronouns and should be scrapped? They’re so common that they do almost nothing to clarify who’s being mentioned in any group larger than two people. Clearly we enbies are just trying to help out the linguistically impoverished cishet world!

Any other pronoun rings wrong to a greater or lesser extent, fails to accurately represent my experience of myself. My subjective experience feels very much like a crew of drunken squirrels struggling to operate an ambulatory heap of rusted machinery. Mostly there’s a lot of activity and mess going on inside, and I don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on around me. As a result, when someone tries to get my attention, a tiny panic ensues inside: “Oh shit. They said ‘he’s over there’ and now someone’s coming toward me. But ‘he’ is only one part of me. Do they want to talk to a man? Should I act like a man? Is that relevant to this interaction? If I act like a man but don’t look enough like one, will it become a problem? Is arguing about it worth the trouble? Am I ever going to see this person again? What if they use that pronoun with someone who knows me by a different one?”

Usually by this time, the person who needed something from me has either bled out on the floor waiting for me to respond, or decided quite fairly that I’m brain-dead, and moved on to someone more fun. I recognize that to others, this may seem like a trivial issue, easily bypassed - who cares how much of this internal conflict others can see from outside, they’re just trying to get information from me, so why does it have to be this complicated - but, y’know, the Imp. It’s just not that simple. This kind of question cuts directly to the roots of my depersonalization and dissociation, which in the past made me suicidal. It’s the kind of question that my OCD likes to tie me up in, trapping me in my skull until I’m literally unable to speak or move for hours on end.

Don’t say “fuck” to grandma

These are my problems, my brainweasels, I recognize that. I know none of this can make much sense outside my own head. I can’t make you understand how devastating this confusion is to me… I just need you to believe that it is, and do me the favor of helping me skip it so we can interact. It’s just a little personal thing I need others’ forbearance to deal with, like the way your grandma prefers you don’t swear around her. It’s not that she thinks you’re a bad person, and it’s not that she doesn’t want you to come around, she just doesn’t like those words and when people use them, she has to deal with a lot of internal distress and bad associations. Therefore, the kindest thing to do is just… don’t say “fuck” to grandma. It’s that simple. It’s so simple I can do it too - I know that some people have bad associations with “it,” and I’m okay with “them” as an alternative, because it’s close enough that it does the job, gets me past the confusion. We’re all just trying to treat each other right, and someone telling you that you’re screwing up is investing in your relationship, trying to tell you how to treat them properly so you can both enjoy being together.

My main issue with “they” is that it’s insufficiently specific. A pronoun is intended to specify a given person, and “they” doesn’t effectively do that. I recognize that this sounds like basically the same objection as people who say “it’s a plural, you can’t use it that way,” but my problem isn’t grammatical, it’s experiential - “they” doesn’t ping to my ear as someone referring to any specific portion of me. It is general enough to encompass all of my perceived parts, and my flesh prison, the entirety of the weird, clunky universe inside my skin that other people can’t see, and for that reason, I’m okay with people who need to use that instead of “it.” Does the job, but with insufficient clarity as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes insufficient clarity is all right; “close enough for government work,” they say.

“It” is specific, but not definitive, and that’s the thing about it that feels right. I would like to be specified by others - particularly noticed, individually appreciated, etc. - but not defined by others. I would like to be able to participate in things, interact with people, take part in activities, without having to submit to others’ definitions in order to do that. I’m not super sure why it’s required that I should let someone else describe my emotional experience, preferences, assumed perspectives, and inevitable behavior based on my appearance in order to, say, purchase groceries.

Present a picture of your genitals

That’s what it is, you see. That’s what a gendered pronoun does, and the only reason cis folks don’t notice that is because they’ve never found themselves in conflict with the pronoun being used on them. Until the pronoun is wrong, it just seems like one of those little throwaway meaningless words, a helping word like “to” or “a” - not something that even could be wrong, because it doesn’t really have meaning on its own. They don’t realize that a pronoun is describing their characteristics because that description has never been inaccurate - like music, when it’s all going right, you don’t hear any one instrument. You only notice the dissonance.

So just take this journey with me, for a moment. Inhabit this idea with me:

Dig if you will a society wherein, before you are permitted to say words, accept resources, enter spaces, or in any other way make contact with any other human being, you are absolutely required to present a picture of your genitals and make sure that everyone has seen it. If there’s any confusion about how your clothing relates to your genitals, you’ll have to address that confusion before you can do whatever you came here to do. If people don’t like the picture, or your face, they might hurt you, or murder you.

And everyone around you… well, they’ve been here so long, and they were holding up pictures of penises and vulvas for so long before you arrived, that they just kind of know that there are only two kinds of pictures people hold up, so they don’t even really bother to hold them up anymore. They don’t even know what you’re talking about when you complain about having to show people your genitals all the time. Why would you have to do that, they say - why are you bringing genitals into this? We didn’t have to think about genitals at all before you showed up. Look how you’re ruining this space for everyone.

This is cool by you? This is the world you want? Cause this is the world we have. This is the world I step out into every day, refusing to hold up a picture of my genitals, and every single person I meet all day long needs me to explain to them why, and definitely can’t listen to me speak, look me in the face, or give me my change until I do.

Using the word “it” to refer to myself is simply me refusing to offer you a picture of my genitals before we talk. If you want to get deeper into it, it’s me asking you to consider whether my genitals are relevant to the conversation we’re having. Ideally, it shouldn’t be something you react to at all, because it should be the default. Yes, not knowing what strangers’ genitals look like instantly after you’re introduced should be the default. Why do people act like I’m the crazy one for saying this?

And this is what’s referred to as “dehumanizing.” People say the pronoun “it” is dehumanizing, but for me, gendered pronouns are dehumanizing, literally set me apart from humanity, because gender is so inextricably interwoven with every day-to-day interaction and activity that in order to qualify as human, I must align myself with someone else’s preconceptions of a certain demographic. I can do this, I can fake it, yeah. I pretended to be a good little secretary with big tits for ten years.

Every second felt like sandpaper on my skin, every word I said felt like a lie. I was walled off from the world, like living inside a spacesuit, everything muffled and slow and untouchable. It shut down my emotions and genuine responses, in favor of the emotions and responses people expected and wanted to see when they looked at my big tits and decided that was all there was to me. I felt like I was not a human, because this has always been the human experience, dealing with gendered expectations, and I found it so intolerable that I wanted to die. Like being a freshwater fish in the ocean, all the fish around me saying, “Well, have you tried taking bigger gulps of the saltwater? Why do you have to make everyone else feel bad by not being nourished by the same things we are?” I thought they were right. I thought this was it, it won’t ever get better, I won’t ever be able to live here, so I might as well gulp down that seawater and put an efficient end to this farce.

After years of therapy, I’ve learned that in fact, being incompatible with our greedy, vicious, flesh-chewing, soul-devouring system does not make me unfit to survive. It makes these circumstances untenable, do you understand? I’m not broken because I can’t drink toxic waste - the world is broken because it’s convinced so many people that there’s no other option but drinking toxic waste, and now they’re so used to it they like the taste. We shouldn’t ever have tied “human” to “one of two genital structures” in the first fucking place, is the thing, and gender essentialism hurts all of us.

So dehumanization is not something I get to opt out of or forget about, ever. I dehumanize myself when I express myself authentically; I am dehumanized by others as a prerequisite to interacting; the world’s existing structure dehumanizes me constantly and calls this the price I pay to eat and live indoors; the human experience is profoundly inimical to my sanity and health every second that I try to fake it, and trying to fake it does not improve outcomes or ameliorate anyone’s discomfort with me. Under these circumstances, using anything other than “it” to refer to myself would seem simply irrational, a nonsensical act that bears no relation to reality.

The Saga of Sean P.D. Puffy Love Diddy Combs, Esq.

So that’s the deal. And ultimately, I would rather have a conversation about pronouns. Talk to me about the ones you want to use with me, and explain to me why. If you’ve got a solid reason that makes sense to me, I’ll probably be down! Let’s really investigate what characteristics are making you react that way, and why that might be. Let’s dig into your gendered assumptions and where they come from. We all grow up in this world, with these baseline assumptions - I did too! In order to break down that indoctrination, I have had to think about this every day, for decades, my whole life, and I still screw up my own pronoun sometimes.

All I want from other people is, if we’re going to be interacting again, think about the pronoun you choose to use on me even one-tenth as much as I’ve thought about it. If you screw up, correct yourself and move on. Don’t make it a big deal, don’t make someone soothe you about your mistake. Just do what you’d do if you mispronounced someone’s name - correct yourself out loud, carry on with the conversation, and try not to do it again. That’s it, that’s all you gotta do. Just what you do for Puff Daddy every time he changes his name, y’know? Ultimately, I’m just asking to be treated with one-tenth of the respect we give Ol’ Diddy.