Discovered this week that one of our daughters is gender diverse.
She seemed surprised we didn’t know she was nonbinary, but was also understanding that we older folk can be a bit slow on the uptake. Then of course I was nervous about pronouns, and was she still our ‘daughter’, and did she still have the same (undeniably female) name? Luckily she was very flexible about all that, which makes our lives easier. As far as pronouns go, she, he, or they are all good. “They” seems an odd choice to a grammarian, but there’s not a lot of options out there in the English language. Apparently the trans/non-binary community tried “it” for a while, until the trial of one bloke who thought it was ok to bash one of them to a bloody pulp. The lawyer’s argument was that since the person called themselves “it”, they were clearly a thing and not a person after all. Presumably then the assaulting person could only be charged with property damage. Horrific. Barristers like that deserve all the lawyer jokes they get, IMHO. (What’s the difference between a lawyer and a catfish? One of them’s a scum sucking pond dweller – and the other one’s a fish.)
She sent this infographic as an explanation of her gender:
Which made me laugh, assuming that she meant that it didn’t matter what her gender was, she’d always be scary (a family joke) but actually, maybe it means that to the more conservative/religious members of the population, anyone who can’t be easily pigeonholed by their sex is threatening. I wish someone could explain that attitude to me in a satisfactory manner.
As far as I’m concerned, as long as words like “doofus”, “spoon” and “plonker” are gender neutral, I don’t think any of our future interactions are going to be awkward at all.