He/She/Ze/They

In order to have students open up in the dorms and classrooms, teachers and community assistants have always asked for personal information, such as where we're from, our major, and a couple fun facts. It wasn't until this past year that my teachers and community assistant started asking about preferred pronouns. Originally, I thought there was nothing wrong with asking about preferred pronouns because the intention is to have everyone be comfortable with how they are addressed by the staff of the school. However, after reading Dembroff and Wodak's article "He/She/Ze/They", I realized how intrusive asking about someone's preferred pronoun can be.  No one wants be offensive by accidentally using the wrong pronoun, but asking about someone's preferred pronoun can be a violation of privacy. I agree with Dembroff and Wodak's Moderate Claim of having a duty to not use binary gender-specific pronouns when referring to those who do not want to use he or she. I believe that we should respect those who want to be called otherwise. Everyone has a right to be whoever they want to be.

Overall, I think the Radical Claim from the article is harder to grasp. I believe not using gender-specific pronouns at all will avoid the issue of invasion of  privacy. However, it is a change that all of society needs to embrace for it to fully work, as well as having children understand. I cannot think of any ways to change the issue of privacy when asking. The easiest solution is to only refer to people by their preferred names and nicknames. I don't fully understand why teachers need to know this level of personal information. I believe that  if one is comfortable with disclosing this information with teachers, staff, and other students, then they should be able to do so. The big picture that society needs to focus on is the acceptance of others and letting everyone be who they want to be. 

Comments

  1. Dr. NoraSeptember 2, 2020 at 2:03 PM

    Hi Audrey,

    It sounds like one of your biggest worries about the Radical Claim is that it will be too difficult to implement in practice. Do you think that it is impossible or just difficult? What about over a long period of time?

    You write: "I cannot think of any ways to change the issue of privacy when asking." I take it that Dembroff and Wodak think that using "they" for all persons would eliminate the privacy-breech issue. Do you disagree with that or were you referring to something else?

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    1. Audrey DubauskasNovember 8, 2020 at 1:15 PM

      I believe the radical claim is not impossible to implement; it would just be difficult, and would be accomplished over a long period of time. I do agree that using "they" for everyone would eliminate the privacy-breech issue. When I was talking about how I could not think of any ways to change the issue when asking, I was just referring to other options other then using "they". Besides using "they", I could not think of a way of asking someone without any kind of privacy-breech issue.

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  2. Natalie VuSeptember 2, 2020 at 2:24 PM

    Hi Audrey,

    Great job on your post! When I read Dembroff and Wodak's piece, I believe that I felt somewhat similar to the way you felt about the Radical Claim. I felt that the Radical Claim was slightly harder to implement in our society than the Moderate Claim. One long term solution I thought about when thinking about the issue of privacy would be to have the question of "what are your preferred personal pronouns" just become very normalized. I believe that the more we talk about personal pronouns as a community, the easier it will be to ask for them and for people to share them. I wonder what you think of this?

    ~Natalie

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    Replies
    1. Audrey DubauskasNovember 8, 2020 at 1:21 PM

      Hello Natalie,

      I agree that a long term solution could be asking " what are your preferred personal pronouns". I think this has been starting to become normalized and people are even starting to put their personal pronouns on their social media bios. I agree that the more we talk about pronouns as a community, the easier and more comfortable people will be with asking and sharing. However, I think "they" might be an easier long term solution because some people might not be comfortable sharing, even if our community is comfortable. I believe the pronoun "they" could be implemented first, while the community becomes more comfortable with sharing and asking.

      ~Audrey

      Delete

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