Why I Stopped Using They/Them Pronouns After 13 Years

The very first person I told about my new pronouns was my roommate, a punk vegan chef, in our crowded Montréal apartment in 2011. I was sitting on the edge of his bed, wringing my hands in my lap. The sun, dappled by the trees outside, spilled through the windows onto the wooden floor. I watched the dancing motes of dust like my life depended on it.

“I think I might be non binary.”

My roommate visibly relaxed, clearly predicting much worse news. He clapped me on the back and affirmed what I’d said.

“How do I know, though, if I’m really non binary? I don’t want to appropriate an identity that’s not mine to claim.”

“I don’t think you should worry about that,” my roommate said. “If you feel that you are non binary, then you are.”

I considered him an expert on such matters, since he was a trans-masculine person with a bachelor’s degree in gender studies. He was the first trans person I’d ever been close to, and he was patient in teaching me how to respect him and people like him, despite how many times I put my foot in my mouth. I looked up to this person. We shared an emotional intimacy often reserved for lovers, although we never touched, (except for one accidental NYE champagne kiss we both pretended never happened).

When I later heard him refer to me as “they” to our friends, my cheeks flushed: I glowed with an inner pride and a sense of belonging.

As a young queer person, my social circles were filled with people who’d been shamed and rejected for their desires, or for failing to correctly perform their gender. Our choirs, dodgeball leagues, dance parties, and potlucks were places where we could feel normal, where our differences were not only okay, but maybe even hot.

Coming from a high school where only two people from my graduating class of 360 were out of the closet, I revelled in this newfound freedom. No longer would I let suburban hairdressers tell me how ugly I would be with short hair. We were creating our own looks, our own trends, and we didn’t need the world to understand. In fact, I relished how unwanted male attention withered away as I strove for a more masculine look.

I began binding my chest, getting haircuts at the barber, and considering a testosterone prescription. This uncanny feeling I’d had for so long at girls-only sleepovers and change rooms—that I did not belong, that I was not a real woman, that I would be exposed and tossed out—finally had an explanation: I simply wasn’t a woman. I was something else, something liminal, in-between, something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Embracing this ambiguity, declaring myself as an oddity, as outside and beyond the whole mess of gender, was comforting. It felt a lot like home.

Before I went to the gender clinic for the first time, I’d asked a friend of mine to coach me on what to say—and what not to say— to the doctor in order to get testosterone. I didn’t fabricate anything, but I was strategic in what I shared, because my goal was not to discover whether gender dysphoria was an accurate diagnosis for me. I’d already diagnosed myself, and was not open to the possibility that I was wrong. My only goal was to do what I needed to in order to get the prescription.

My childhood was sprinkled with evidence of masculinity from a young age: I went to school as a moustachioed Robin Hood for Halloween in grade two. I always ended up playing the boyfriend in make-believe games with my friends. I cut my hair short several times in high school, despite dire warnings from the aforementioned hairdresser.

And yet, I insisted on wearing a thrifted flower girl dress to the first day of kindergarten. I loved beading, sparkly gel pens, and not playing sports. I often lamented that my last name was gray, instead of pink or purple.

Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I can’t say that I was ever gender dysphoric. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t recoil. Nudity and sex were not distressing to me, not in any special sense. I’d never dissociated from my body the way I’d heard some trans friends describe. And although I’d always had this out-of-place feeling in girl’s and women’s spaces, it is no longer clear to me that the best explanation for this is gender dysphoria.

While I was grappling with all of this, the definition of trans was morphing: lines were blurring. People were starting to say you didn’t need to have dysphoria to be trans—perhaps you simply experienced gender euphoria when you dressed in a gender nonconforming way. It was becoming unpopular and old-fashioned to think of transition as a linear change from one gender to its opposite, entailing a specific set of medical treatments.

I remember discussions about micro-dosing hormones to achieve an ambiguous presentation, and how you could always stop taking them, so it wasn’t a big deal to experiment. Some people spoke of gender-affirming medical treatments as if they were simply another type of body modification, like piercings or tattoos.

In this environment, it was easy for my discomfort in women’s spaces and my flirtations with masculinity to combine with a vague yet ordinary twenties misery into a shape that looked a lot like gender dysphoria.

You may be wondering whether I feel that I was convinced by my social circle to pursue this, and the answer is no. As young and dumb as we all were, my friends were thoughtful, kind, and understanding people. I don’t think the occasional digs at cis people caused me to go on hormones: remember, as a non binary person, I was already exempted from this dreaded category, even without physically transitioning. We were all very into body positivity, so we did our best to offer support and affirmation to each other in our current forms.

That being said, the queer world is not free from social influence. As I alluded to earlier, it’s incredible to go from being an undateable third wheel along for the ride with your straight friends, to finding a place where your strangeness is considered beautiful. It was a revelation that I had options other than continually failing at femininity. I loved the swishy twinks, the handsome dykes, the buff ravers, the vintage femmes and the goth t-girls swirling around each other at queer dance parties. I still do.

But every subculture has its beauty standards, and the queer beauty standard is often reacting against what’s considered to be the heterosexual mainstream. So the more ambiguous, the more androgynous, the louder, the stranger, the better. Queers purposefully make themselves unappealing to straight people, and find it hot when others do the same. I’m not saying that queers are ugly, because beauty standards are arbitrary and ever-changing, and besides, rejecting them can lead to fascinating aesthetic innovations. What I’m saying is that many queers intentionally choose to look ugly, just as many punks choose to look poor. Fuzz on the upper lip, a mysterious vocal pitch, a statuesque figure in a dress, curves clad in menswear: there were various ways to turn heads at the potluck.

While people aren’t pressuring each other, queer beauty standards do make gendered body modifications more appealing. Moreover, many queer people go out of their way to encourage and affirm gender nonconformity in others to try and counteract the harassment and disdain that so often accompanies it.

Transition didn’t work out very well for me: I developed ulnar nerve entrapment from binding my chest, became psychotic after skipping a single dose of testosterone, and was experiencing too much chronic pain to seriously consider surgery. At a certain point, it became clear that physical transition was neither possible nor advisable for me.

This put me in a rather unique situation, given the subculture I was in: I had to come to terms with my body as it was. This was a daunting prospect. Binding really had boosted my confidence, and I liked the lower voice my time on testosterone had given me. I’d spent years by this point trying to make myself gender-ambiguous in public, and building friendships based in part on that shared experience. I still had a strong aversion to being perceived as female, even though I’d never passed for anything else in the larger world.

For the next number of years, I tried to work with the idea that non binary was a feeling, a mindset, a spirit, which did not require me to adjust my appearance at all. I could wear lipstick and a dress and still correct people on my pronouns. I did stop calling myself trans, because that was too much even for me. But I still held to the belief that I was something other than male or female, outside and beyond the gender binary that ensnared so many unthinking others.

I told myself that I was a clever interloper who gave brilliant and convincing performances as woman.

Using they/them pronouns was never easy. Being an early adopter, I’d lost track of the awkward conversations I’d had, trying to explain them to people who remained utterly baffled. These experiences developed into a baseline unease in social situations, especially ones involving either new people or those with whom I’d already had The Talk. Most excruciating was to be inadvertently misgendered by someone who loved me—someone who should “know better”. It caused strife and tension in many relationships with relatives, normie friends, and those in older generations.

It also caused a sort of detachment when I was at school or work. After a couple of attempts to come out as non binary brought me nothing but embarrassment and regret, I stopped sharing my pronouns in such places, which left me feeling as though I was hiding a crucial part of myself from my colleagues. It caused a distance: I never felt close to anyone, nor did I believe anyone really knew me.

When I’d first taken on these pronouns in 2011, I’d thought that I was joining a cultural vanguard: my friends and I would sally forth to educate the world, which would eventually agree to our demands. It was only a matter of time until non binary pronouns were widely understood and used without fuss—we just had to blaze the trail.

As the years went by, however, what I saw was a lot more complicated than that. Sure, many more queer people adopted they/them pronouns, they became widely discussed in the mainstream press, public figures were coming out as non binary, and pronouns-in-bio became increasingly common in white collar workplaces.

On the other hand, there was also fierce resistance. Pronouns worked their way into punchlines for many standup comedians, and the scrutinizing of gender nonconforming people seemed to be getting worse, not better. Non binary became associated with an emerging archetype within leftist politics, the social justice warrior, who was widely mocked for its excesses. Reforming the culture was a much more daunting task than I’d initially thought it would be.

One day, I realized that it was no longer clear to me which was causing my strife and discomfort: my gender, or my non binary identity. And so I started experimenting.

First, I stopped telling new people I met to use they/them for me, and examined my reaction to being referred to as a woman. This helped me recognize that, 99 times out of 100, no one was trying to insult or disrespect me—in fact, the occasional miss’s and ma’ams were earnest attempts at the opposite. When I stopped constantly bracing for the impact of being misgendered, it didn’t seem to hurt as much when it happened. I gradually became much more relaxed and spontaneous in social settings: my social anxiety faded away.

Working as a clerk at a hospital was transformative for me, because in such a multicultural work setting, everyone was at risk of putting their foot in their mouth. I found myself both on the giving and receiving end of such moments, despite my best intentions, and my colleagues consistently offered me grace before refocusing on the task at hand: taking care of our patients. My pronouns paled in importance compared to the medical emergencies that surrounded me.

My newfound freedom was palpable: I began to feel as though I could talk to anyone and tolerate surprises that might arise. I spent less time in the mirror, adjusting how shirts fell across my chest. I felt more present in the world, more attuned to my interests and hobbies as my self-consciousness decreased.

During this time, I thought a lot about all of the masculine women that had come before me, and how they were perfectly beautiful just the way they were. Perhaps I could follow in their footsteps, and hold it down for the tomboys still growing up.

Looking back now, I can see that my presentation has always fluctuated between masculine and feminine, ever since that flower girl/Robin Hood days. I don’t believe this will ever stop, and I no longer think it needs to.

Hear me out: maybe the best way to understand they/them pronouns, within the context of a pluralistic democracy, is as a subcultural norm, a way for LGBT people to show respect for one another within our community. That sense of belonging I felt when I first found queer spaces was profound, and if using gender-neutral pronouns gives someone that gift, I am all for it.

But I do wonder if we are setting people up for hardship when we tell them that they should hope for, expect, or insist on they/them pronouns being used by everyone they encounter, and that they will be emotionally injured every time this fails to happen. In my thirteen years, misgendering was rarely malicious, and yet it still fed into a wounded identity and a suspicious worldview.

To be clear: I still use other people’s preferred pronouns, and I recommend that you do too. Most simply, it’s a gesture of respect.

And I don’t expect that people who actually suffer from gender dysphoria can simply do what I described in this essay and feel better: the very fact that my life improved after dropping my chosen pronouns is evidence that I never had gender dysphoria to begin with.

No, I am writing this for people like my younger self, for anyone on a precipice, who doesn’t quite fit in where they are supposed to, and may not yet realize that this anguish is the cost of being human. It is, to some degree, felt by everyone. So before reaching for a fix, consider the possibility that nothing in you is broken.