You Op To Know: We should be conscious of nonconforming pronouns
Welcome to You Op to Know, The Daily Orange Opinion section’s weekly podcast.
This week, The Daily Orange Opinion section brought on one of our gender and sexuality columnists Michael Sessa to discuss his column “We should be more conscious of gender nonconforming pronouns”
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to submit a letter to the editor at opinion@dailyorange.com.
Check back next week to listen to a dialogue about the most viewed column.
SUKESH: Hello everyone, I’m your guest host and co-producer Aishwarya Sukesh and welcome to The Daily Orange’s opinion podcast You Op To Know. Tonight we have Gender and Sexuality columnist Michael Sessa on the show to discuss his column “We should be more conscious of gender nonconforming pronouns”. Welcome Michael!
SESSA: Thanks for having me back.
SUKESH: So, why did you choose to write this column?
SESSA: Well it’s kind of a hot topic it’s definitely an emerging issue in the LGBT community. Anything in the transgenderism or gender non-conforming pronouns I think tends to be more controversial, hard for people to adjust to, than just being gay or bisexual. So I thought it was an interesting topic to explore, how people are referred to impacts them.
SUKESH: So talk about gender, and the gender spectrum. How do you define gender?
SESSA: So that’s tough. So I talked to a lot of people, professors both in the field of gender and sexuality and just other people working in syracuse who are gender non conforming. I think the crux of it is that it’s much more fluid than most of us grew up believing. There’s a lot more to it than how your chromosomes are positioned. It has a lot to do with how you perceive yourself and mental predispositions. It’s more fluid, a gradient, as one of the people I talked to said, not just black and white.
SUKESH: Speaking of those predispositions, when you are born you are assigned either a blue blanket or a pink blanket. There are a lot of labels in society. How do labels function? Should we abolish labels altogether?
SESSA: I think we have a desire, an intuition, to label things. From a practical sense right, it makes things easier to say you’re a woman and I’m a man on a driver’s license or a photo ID. I think that denies a reality that we are just starting to come to understand. I think in that way labels are restrictive. They also hold back the conversation. I think most people have a problem with calling someone they or he or she when they perceive them as a different gender or sex. Because they’ve been brought up in a world that only exists in a binary wight so they’re not exposed to possibility that there may be something more than you know. Labels inhibit critical thinking in some ways.
SUKESH: How do we get people to adjust to They/Them pronouns.
SESSA: I think part of what the column really pointed to and the people I talked to mentioned, it’s obviously a hard thing for people adjust to especially people older and have been brought up in the society the dialogue. It’s hard to accept. It’s not something where you can accept a staunch revolution overnight about. It’s important to remember that there are people are behind the discussions. We are not just talking about abstract feelings of sexuality, there are people that the way we discuss these things impact. So, what I took away from talking to these people is that, there’s a way to have intellectual and academic debates while still respecting people’s humanity as a person. If someone wants to be, I shouldn’t even wants to be, if someone is gender non-conforming, they don’t feel comfortable in the gender they were assigned at birth then, I think it’s mentally advantageous to call them what they want to be called.I don’t see that as me ceding some intellectual muster as some people would. There’s a lot of conversation about biology and the science of it. I think the science is more fluid than people would like to believe. Regardless of what you believe you and still find a happy medium where you can respect a person and still engage in a constructive dialogue about what they’re going through.
SUKESH: Do you think part of engaging in that constructive dialogue is encouraging professors to use those pronouns?
SESSA: I think definitely a lot of professors have taken that proactive approach. A lot of syllabi I have received at the beginning of courses, a lot of professors put their pronouns on there even if they’re not particularly unconventional ones. Part of what I talked about with a few people in the article is that it’s important that they shift from calling them preferred pronouns to just pronouns it’s not a preference they’re pronouns it’s the pronouns that embody who they are as a person. I think exposing students to that is powerful. A lot of people haven’t been exposed to that at all. To hear it spoke about it so nonchalantly, hearing it woven into the conversation. These are my pronouns, and they may be unconventional, not even making a point to talk about it in class kind of normalizes it.
SUKESH: You touched on the gendered bathroom debate in your column. Where do you side on the issue, and what are your solutions to the problem?
SESSA: I talked to Dr. DiPietro who is in the Women and Gender Studies department and I think she said it best. The bathroom debate probably came to be so high strung and controversial because it is one of those few places where we are forced to encounter people that aren’t like us. Regardless of that race you are, what gender you are, or where you come from what you sound like, what you look like, all those things. The man peeing next to you in the bathroom could be any one of those things and it does make you uncomfortable. It does force you to question the way you perceive the world since you’ve grown up. If someone comes into the bathroom and they don’t look like how you think they’re supposed to look. It sets alarm bells in your head. I think the takeaway from that is that it’s an invalid concern, and you know what gender I am, I think you are the one with the problem not me. It shouldn’t be an issue. It’s been conflated so much. The percentage of people who go to bathrooms to be perverts or sexually assault people is completely minuscule, and it’s not something to worry about. It’s a straw man debate, you are conflating issues to not discuss the real problem which is your uncomfortable with gender non-conforming people.
SUKESH: Was there anything you didn’t get to discuss in your column and wish you could go deeper on?
SESSA: I’d say at the end of the day, just how important conversation is, engaging with people. I am pretty open minded when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality, and even I haven’t spoken at length to people who don’t use he or she pronouns or are gender non-conforming gender non binary. You come to realize that they are just like we are, they are no different, they are just trying to find their place in the world like everybody else is. They are not looking to rock the boat. Professor Grygiel said it best. She’s not looking to put a fist in the air and cause a bunch of problems, she just wants to be accepted for who they are. That’s a powerful thing and I don’t see a problem with doing that.
SUKESH: Thank you so much for joining us this week Michael!
SESSA: Definitely!
SUKESH: Stay tuned for next week’s podcast where we will begin discussing some of our columns. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to submit a letter to the editor at opinion@dailyorange.com. We’ll talk to you next week!