Hi, my name is Meg and I use she/they pronouns.
Those of you who have been around for a minute, either in my personal life or in the corner of the internet I occupy with this blog and website may be somewhat surprised. Or maybe you aren’t surprised at all. I’ve never been very good at closets.
Whether it is a surprise or not, it definitely represents a change both in self-conception and in what I’m presenting to the world. I have been on a gender journey for years, trying to figure out exactly where I fit on the continuum. I have presented in a variety of ways ranging from masc (oh Seattle Meg, I sometimes miss you and your buzz cut) to superfemme (look, wearing lipstick even whilst in the swimming pool is a totally valid life choice, okay?). I have been chased out of bathrooms for being a man in the women's room and I have had myriad men hold doors for me and call me miss. I have identified pretty squarely as cis through all of that varying presentation.
My pronouns never wavered. She/her forever. Or something.
I first questioned my gender at a presentation in college about what it means to be genderqueer. That was 2003 and two genderqueer folks at Whitman College blew my fucking mind about what gender meant and could be. I maybe should have paid attention to the little voice in the back of my mind saying “huh…that sure could be something.” Maybe not. I wasn’t done incubating yet. Hell, I had barely started.
In the 21 years since that presentation I have gone up and down and all around about my gender. For much of that time it was a vague wondering in the back of my mind. Every time someone said something like “If you spend a ton of time wondering if you are cis, you probably aren’t cis.” I would laugh to myself, little did they know, I was totes cis and totes questioning all the time.
Things have taken on clearer shape in the years since I started specializing in queer and fat folks in my therapy practice. My interest in working with the trans community in particular has led to a lot of self-discovery as I’ve tried to learn more and more.
A client introduced me to the term demi-gender and something clicked into place. Yes. This. Here was a place for me. I no longer identify precisely as demi-gender, but it is still a close approximation of how I generally feel and it was the closest to finding a label that I had felt at that moment. Now I’m exploring using the label nonbinary because my gender experience is one that doesn’t fit into the gender binary. We’ll see if I stay here.
Last March a friend/colleague (friendleague?) told me that they had assumed my pronouns were she/they and I confessed in a rush that while I still felt like she/her was the right pronoun set I was pretty sure that demi-gender was how I identified. I had days where I felt very female and days when I felt like no gender or all the genders or some swirling mass of gender. Those days were not she/her days. The two friendleagues I told were supportive and, high off that conversation, I started coming out to the people in my life about being demi.
Many people asked about pronouns in that moment and I assured them that there was no pronoun change, nor did I identify as trans. I was gender expansive, but still cis, still using she and her. However, since the moment when the first person asked about pronouns I started thinking HARD.
At first I tried they/them on for size and they weren’t quite working for me. I then decided on ze/hir because they were the first gender neutral pronouns I’d ever encountered (I’m old you guys, and Leslie Feinberg came into my life way before they/them became a more recognized gender neutral pronoun set). I road tested them with some friends and I liked them.
Then I took them out on the open road and they just. didn’t. work. I think the third time I got a blank look and a “wait, can you use those in a sentence” I tapped out. I tried to picture telling my family and how painful it would be when they inevitably didn’t use them. I tried to picture the well meaning cis people in my life who would misgender me until the end of time. It was too hard.
If it was hard for me, a person with significant social power and lots of supportive people in my life, it must be hard to a power of a million for folks in more difficult situations. I can’t imagine how hard it is, and though I’ve said that before, I mean it in a much more concrete way now that I’ve tasted it. I know how hard it was for me to do it for a week. I am in awe of all of you who do this over and over again for a lifetime.
I retreated away from ze/hir and have moved more thoroughly into she/they. She/her feels accurate to me, but it feels somewhat incomplete; they/them is the same. Accurate for sure but not complete. Combining them, having both show up on a nametag or hearing people use both at various moments in conversation feels good and affirming. It feels like they fit together to make up parts of the little puzzle that is Meg’s gender. Maybe this is a step on the way back to ze/hir, or maybe it’s a step to using they/them exclusively, or maybe it’s just where I will be forever. I don’t know. I can’t know and I kind of like that.
Sometimes I feel like I'm too old to be figuring this shit out, too old to be on the phone with my friends going, “okay but does that make me cis, or trans? What do you mean there’s not a right answer? That fucking sucks.” Too old to be binding my breasts for the first time and realizing how good it feels to go superfemme with outfit and makeup but have the binding tape be visible past the neckline of the dress. It feels so good to fuck around with gender, how did I get to be so old without really knowing that?
That being said, it was profoundly uncomfortable to sit across from my parents as a person in my 40s and explain to them what demi-gender means “but don’t worry, there is no pronoun change.” and then a few months later to tell them through a zoom screen that “oh, yeah, actually there is a pronoun change.” (zoom because I moved, not zoom because of discomfort discussing it with my parents).
It is profoundly uncomfortable to check the likes on a facebook post where I mention new pronouns to try to see if I need to come out to certain people or if I can assume that if they liked it they read it and that’s that. I bought a pin that says she/they and opening the package was some of the purest gender euphoria I’ve ever felt. Sometimes I wear it but mostly it lives on my purse and it makes me very happy.
My gender feels like a moving target, like there isn’t a way to nail it down and language is inadequate. Picking pronouns feels like I should have some sort of permanent sense of things and I just don’t have that. I might not ever have that and most days that is totally fine with me. What I want is to cultivate play, flexibility, and change.
I do sometimes feel like I'm somehow behind. When people in Durham, my lovely new home city, meet me and I tell them my pronouns they hear it as though I’ve had those pronouns for more than ten minutes. They assume I have a history of them. People ask me questions as though I know the answers, as though I can speak for anyone outside the bubble in my head. I barely have answers for me, I certainly can’t represent anyone else.
A week or so after I moved but before I first attempted a pronoun switch (before ze/hir) I had what I consider a gender summit all by myself. I spent the weekend alternately napping and listening to music or having the TV on as background while I tried to figure out what was true enough to unveil. I knew that if I was doing new pronouns now was the time to do it. I could easily introduce myself with the new pronouns to all the new people I was meeting and it would be a hell of a lot easier than changing mid-game.
Of course to do that I have to actually introduce myself to people with the pronouns instead of just shoe-horning them in at random moments and only landing them with half the people with whom I talk. I’m pretty sure most people, new in my life or not, aren’t using they/them at all which bums me out. I’ll figure this out somehow. I’m working on it. The pronoun rollout is still in progress. I will say this, when I hear someone use they/them it feels amazing. It feels like they really see me, or are at least trying to see me. It’s intoxicating. I still like she/her but at this moment it feels a lot like people are using it without even trying to incorporate they/them and it kind of sucks. If you are a person who can only manage one set of pronouns per person, please know that they/them brings me great delight.
I am at a moment of great change in my life. Moving to a new city and state, managing all the things that have come up in that move and in my life, meeting a ton of new people and trying to make connections that stick have all caused me to question all the foundational pieces of my life. Of course my gender exploration has become a piece of that questioning. It has been messy but also joyful and I like where I’ve landed. The timing is terrible, but as a friend said to me a few days ago, “never waste a crisis.”
Gender is complicated and sometimes scary. Pronouns are just as complicated and sometimes just as scary. I don’t know if I’ve landed in a forever place with she/they. I just know that right now it makes me feel good when people use both sets. Right now I am exploring and my ideas of my gender are expanding. I hope that you can see that, and that you see me.
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