Over the course of the past year, participating in book clubs at my local library, one of the things that came up was video conferencing etiquette around pronouns. One of the moderators asked us to state our gender pronouns at the beginning of the call. I went with it that first time, but I felt really uncomfortable about it.

I have girl parts, and I’ve lived in the most traditional of female roles for basically my entire adult life. But ever since I was a kid, I felt ambivalent about being a girl.

I was the kid helping my dad do construction projects, catching toads and using them to scare my female friends. I hated pink and dresses, switched to baggy clothes at puberty to hide my body, and many of my friends growing up were boys.

Eventually with my book club, I said I was still working out my pronouns, and stopped providing them at the beginning of the call. What in anticipation felt like a confrontation, passed quickly like water under a bridge. It wasn’t an issue at all.

When they/them first started being more widely accepted as pronouns, I bristled. I couldn’t untangle the part of me that likes to think of language as stationary, even though I know it’s not. That change-averse part of my brain that said those were plural pronouns and couldn’t be used singularly. And then there was my ambivalence about gender identity and the gender spectrum.

… language is not static, nor is culture, and I think we can both agree the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend toward grammatical precision. That’s why the person harrumphing new usage quickly becomes the one sounding uneducated. –Carolyn Hax

I got used to they/them, though. It started to feel like maybe that was the answer to the ambivalence I felt around gender.

“She” and “her” are such loaded words in English. Especially when they are used in place of someone’s name. Especially when that person is present. Because of that, I don’t know if I don’t like them for that reason, if I’m embracing the part of me that’s drawn to the androgenous, or if it’s a more complex identity question.

Recently, I was listening to the radio, and there was a piece about a football player who came out as gay. The host interviewed another football player who was gay, but who had waited until he retired to go public due to the consequences of coming out at the time he was playing, as well as the macho culture that surrounds football.

What the man said caught my attention. He said the reason there is such an issue around coming out is because sexism is at the root of homophobia. Men are trained not to consider women competition, but as less than. And by extension, gay men are also put in this “less than” category.

…when people can articulate why [a gay football player] is going to help them rethink manhood, rethink masculinity, then you start to see a fraying of that old ancient bargain that says men are only one way and women are only another way.” – Wade Davis, Jr.

Not all dudes are macho. Not all women are super feminine. Filling in those grey areas around gender will fill in the spectrum that already exists – and make it safe for people like me (“You know, if you cut your hair that short people will think you’re a lesbian.”) as well as for people further out there. In other words, make it more OK for people to be different.

I will be the first to admit that my brain wants things to be black and white. It will be my life’s work to accept that nothing is that uncomplicated. It reminds me of something Richard Rohr said in What Do We Do With The Bible? In it, he says that nature is God’s first communication with humans. The vast variety in nature tells us that things aren’t binary, that they don’t need to be.

There are fish and other critters who change genders to meet the needs of their community. There are cultures where third genders are an accepted part of life. Maybe it’s our Puritan colonial heritage, but it doesn’t always seem easy to accept that a whole lot of people don’t fit in the boxes that society has built – there aren’t ENOUGH boxes, and really, why boxes at all?

I’m not making an announcement – if you’ve been calling me she/her, you can keep doing that. I don’t feel that strongly about it. I’m just working out where I fit in a world where we’re learning to make space for all the ways that human beings are, and by extension, making room for ourselves.