Arabian Nights explains why adding pronouns to our name is necessary

I added my preferred gender pronouns (she/ her) to my bio a couple of a couple of years back.

Adding it on Twitter didn’t require much thought. I wanted to show solidarity with non-binary and transgender persons, and this is an easy way to do so. Yes, adding “she/ her” to my bio opens me up to attack from bigots who want the entire world to be as straight as they think they are, but isn’t that the least one can do if one considers oneself an ally?

Adding gender pronouns to my LinkedIn profile took a little more doing. LinkedIn reflects my professional identity and one tries to keep one’s personal views/ politics out of the professional space. As a cis-het woman who’s gender identity was never in question, would adding gender pronouns to my name seem like virtue signalling?

That is when I realised that I need to do more research into the genesis of adding gender pronouns to names.

To step back…
We have grown up thinking that sex and gender are the same. But they are not. Sex is what is assigned to you at birth based on your sexual organs and chromosome composition. Gender is what you identify as, regardless of what sex was assigned to you at birth. There are transgender people whose gender may be different to the sex assigned at birth. There may be non-binary people who may not identify as either male or female (or both interchangably).

Since the gender pronoun of a transgender or non-binary person may not be obvious just by looking at them, to avoid being misgendered, they specify their preferred gender pronouns.

Why should cis allies specify gender pronouns?
While this explains why transgender and non-binary persons specify their gender pronouns, why should a cis-ally who’s gender is “obvious” specify the gender pronouns which they prefer?

A the most basic level, adding preferred gender pronouns is a way to display a symbolic solidarity. It is a way of telling transgender and non-binary persons that they have our support.

This, however, is not the only reason. For that, we need to go back to a story from the ‘Arabian Nights’. We have all heard/ read/ watched ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, where when the thieves realise that Ali Baba has discovered the location of their cave, they mark a “X” on his door, so they can come back at night and kill him. The loyal slave, Mariam, sees the mark, and foils the plan by putting identical “X” marks on all the doors in the neighbourhood.

By specifying gender pronouns, cis-allies do exactly what Mariam did when she marked an “X” on every door- they make it harder to single out transgender and non-binary persons.

Transgender and non-binary persons are often the target of hate. While by specifying their gender pronouns, they avoid being misgendered, this also makes them more visible and therefore more vulnerable to hate. By specifying their gender pronouns, cis people destigmatise the “otherness” and help create a community where it is harder to identify a transgender or non-binary/ gender queer person from a cis person.

Putting our pronouns in the bio is a small thing we can do to make non-binary and transgender people feel more accepted, and to destroy myths around gender identity.

June is #PrideMonth. Let us do our bit.