Including Personal Pronouns
Recently I added my personal pronouns across all online communication – my email signature and my social media.
I got the idea where and when most good ideas are born – late at night while scrolling social media. I saw a post from one of my friends who is active in the LGBTQ community. He mentioned that he added his pronouns to his email signature and encouraged his friends to do the same.
Curious, I Googled adding personal pronouns to email signatures and came across this article by Max Masure called, “Why I Put Pronouns on my Email Signature (and LinkedIn Profile) and You Should Too.” In the article, Masure states:
Normalizing the usage of pronouns is a concrete, impactful way to show your advocacy for LGBTQIA+ individuals. It takes some practice to transform the unfamiliar into the familiar.
Masure, M. (2019, March 14). Why I Put Pronouns on my Email Signature (and LinkedIn profile) and You Should Too. Retrieved August 13, 2019, from Medium website: https://medium.com/gender-inclusivit/why-i-put-pronouns-on-my-email-signature-and-linkedin-profile-and-you-should-too-d3dc942c8743
Why is inclusion so important?
The prevalence of suicide attempts among respondents to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality, is 41 percent, which vastly exceeds the 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population who report a lifetime suicide attempt, and is also higher than the 10-20 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults who report ever attempting suicide.
Haas, A. P., & Herman, J. L. (2014). Suicide Attempts among Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults. 18. [PDF Full-text]. Retrieved from: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf
Including personal pronouns can save lives by providing a space an individual is comfortable interacting with the world as they are – accepted, instead of judged – where the focus isn’t on what gender they may or may not be, but on the day-to-day business at hand. Essentially, including personal pronouns allows people to be people – to share their pronouns as easily as they share their name.
In a world where many people do not identify with the pronouns associated with them, it is very vulnerable and scary to go ahead and call out and say, “Wait a second, I don’t identify with the pronoun you may want to put on me.”
Why I Put Pronouns on my LinkedIn profile—Argo Collective featuring Craig Forman—YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved August 13, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riftvPlU-xQ#action=share
Personal pronouns can and should be added across all platforms, anywhere you include your name:
- Personal email
- Work email
- Business cards
- Social media, including: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
To find best practices on adding your personal pronouns, The University of California San Francisco’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Resource Center has compiled Signature Samples. The University of Maryland’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Equity Center has put together Good Practices: Names and Pronouns, including a video on Learning About Pronouns.
A recommended resource for adults is Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans by Brynn Tannehil. To talk about gender identity with children, George by Alex Gino is a great book for middle school and elementary age children on this concept and It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health (The Family Library) by Robbie Harris is an inclusive guide to puberty for all children. It is important to note preferred personal pronouns are not necessarily indicative of the gender that person identifies with.
To find out how else you can be an ally, contact associations like The Modern Military Association of America, whose mission is to support and advocate for the military and veteran LGBTQ community, or volunteer with your local Pride chapter. If we want the world to be open and accepting, we must boldly be open and accepting.
What other resources do you have to share? I’d love to hear about them!
Thank you to JKB for sharing truths and resources with me, including the importance of adding personal pronouns to communications, Brynn Tannehil’s book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans, and information on The Modern Military Association of America.