On the first day of my stats class, there was maybe half an hour of lecture before we took turns introducing ourselves: name, year, major, something interesting about yourself. At the end of my list of facts, I added a note about my pronouns and said that it'd be great if the class could please use them to refer to me. My professor nodded enthusiastically and said "Oh - yeah, uh huh." People continued introducing themselves and then she went back to the lecture: explaining how to study different types of variables.
Peculiarly, "gender" was suddenly no longer simply gender when she was looking for some stock dependent variable. This time, it was "gender identity, like how people identify, like within the binary, and also, well, otherwise, because, you know, things aren't that simple anymore, but people thought it was binary, so sometimes we treat it that way in this class, because traditionally gender was just male and female - so...yeah. Gender identity." It was hard to keep my laugh. She was so sincere. Awkward, but also beautiful in a weird way. It's a sigh of relief when people at least try.
She messed up my pronouns twice the first week, but the second time she seemed really apologetic and backtracked. She hasn't used any pronouns for me since - she manages to avoid to. I can respect that.
A couple days ago, she used the masculine pronoun to refer to a peer of mine, but then backtracked and covered up the pronoun with something more generic, the way she seemed to have done for me when she's needed to use pronouns. The person in question is someone I'd read pretty strongly as the Token Urban White Cis Gay Guy That Actually Is Socially Progressive Like For Real Despite His Homonormativity. He'd even brought up transgender suicide rates as an example of a social problem with a large dark figure, so obvs big brownie points with the genderfuck kid in the room, and in other classes I've had with him he's seemed uniformly intelligent, well-informed, and passionate about liberal politics. He really didn't seem nonbinary to me, but then I don't either. I checked myself and bookmarked it, telling myself I could ask about it later.
We were standing around the literal water cooler the next day at break, and I mentioned the professor's hesitation. "Nah," he says, "I kind of wondered about that too. I definitely identify as 100% male, but like, go inclusivity, I guess?"
I distributed a survey for this same class that gave five options for gender: cis/trans female/male and nonbinary. Four responses were nonbinary, something exciting to me. I know who two are and have strong suspicions for one more - they sit behind me in class and queercode as clearly as they possibly could, but haven't said anything explicit about being queer - but I'm enjoying the process of entertaining whether the other queermo's another classmate in hiding.
Things have been weird in general in that class, perhaps compounded by the professor's obvious apologetic benevolence. The data sets we've been running tests on for practice just so happen to be from weird ultra-conservative populations, 57% of whom believe "homosexuality" is "always wrong" and 7% of whom believe it is "always right." She discussed this in detail, though she prefaced her explanations with a disclaimer that these results obviously did not reflect her views, but skipped over the data set showing a correlation between homeownership and race. This seemed to be because she felt that it might be uncomfortable, or exclusive, or triggering, or something, to recognize verbally that black people are less likely to be homeowners than white people... Simply strange, given that black people's comparatively low rates of homeownership is the factual systematic output of discrimination, while homophobia is itself raw discrimination. What would it be like to study a question that yielded a 57% "always wrong" response to a question that inquired into the right of black Americans to own homes at all?
Whelp. Whatever. I really can't blame her, at least she's really trying.
There was a kid in that class - one I've read as Genuinely Progressive Cis Gay Guy Number Two - that used my pronoun last week in a totally normal context, without hesitation or correction or any reference to gender whatsoever. He has no idea how rare that is and how disorienting it was to actively feel included in such a cis-dominant space (read: public).
To him: thank you. I kind of hope you're not the other nonbinary person, because I love to think that there are more cis people like you out there learning to grow.
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