What to do When You Misgender Someone
If you make a mistake, you can still learn and make the world a better place.
Confidence and Joy is a newsletter by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Subscribe here. You can also follow Emily on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!
Last week, I wrote a basic “why the binary is not really a thing” post. It was a hypersimplification, but hopefully it helped “explain gender” to my fellow cisgender people. You can read it here.
Now let’s focus on making life easier for folks whose lives are more difficult because of the gender binary.
One common point of friction: misgendering a nonbinary person, using a pronoun that doesn’t match their identity.
Some (not all!) NB folks go by the singular “they,” as in “Cindy Lee Alves is a shimmier. They shimmy their way through anti-oppression education!”
And look, the first time I had to talk about a NB person in the third person, it felt very weird. It’s okay for it to feel weird at first. You’re a smart and capable person! It will feel easy with just a little practice! And the discomfort you feel using different pronouns is nothing compared to the discomfort and exhaustion and frustration experienced by a nonbinary person who constantly has to explain and re-explain what their pronouns are and what their gender is (or isn’t!).
And then… you’re going to screw up sometimes. It will hurt the nonbinary person when it happens, even if you really didn’t mean to hurt them. It matters that you didn’t hurt them on purpose, but whether or not it’s on purpose doesn’t change the harm they experience, just as if you accidentally bump into someone and knock them to the ground doesn’t hurt less, just because you didn’t do it on purpose.
What should you do? So simple:
Apologize.
Verify their pronouns.
And get it right in the future.
Cindy Lee Alves, the teacher I talked about in my first newsletter, is nonbinary, and we talked about what cisgender people can do with the moments when they make mistakes. Cindy Lee says, “Just because I’m not learned in this, that has nothing to do with your inherent worth.”
It’s advice that works for people with any kind of dominant identity—cisgender people, straight people, white people, people with citizenship, people who speak English as a first language, people with higher education, people who grew up affluent or are affluent as adults. Even trans people can have cultural dominance over nonbinary people, as gay and lesbian people can have cultural dominance over bi/pan folks.
Especially if you’re in a position of power with that person—you’re their boss or their medical provider or in any kind of “expert” role—it’s important to be explicit that your mistake or misunderstanding doesn’t invalidate them.
And it goes for you too: Just because you made a mistake, that has nothing to do with your inherent worth. You’re going to screw up sometimes, and if you care about making the world a better place, part of you might be inclined to beat up the part of you that screwed up.
Know that the part of you that screwed up deserves self-compassion and tenderness. Screwing up does not make you a less worthy human being. You too were raised in and injured by the gender binary. All of us have spent a lot of time and energy trying to jam ourselves into the box we were assigned, even when it doesn’t fit—and no wonder we did. The culture will try to punish us if we don’t cram ourselves into the box we’ve been assigned. When your identity doesn’t fit neatly into one of those boxes, it can sometimes feel like you can only choose between the discomfort of trying to fit in a box that isn’t right for you… and the discomfort of being punished for not fitting into that box. That’s true for everyone.
(I find my way to compassion for people determined to say that “gender identity” is not a thing by recognizing that they’ve been so wounded by the binary that they can’t forgive anyone who dares to deny it.)
Your genuine apology, your verification of the NB person’s pronouns, and your future correction can’t undo the hurt experienced by the nonbinary person. That’s a wound they’ll have to heal, with or without you. If you’d like to go further, you can help prevent future harm by being kind enough to yourself that you can be empowered to step forward and “run interference,” correcting other people’s use of the wrong pronouns… even when the nonbinary person is not there! It is powerful for a cisgender person to be there for NBs, even when the NB person isn’t in the room.
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