How gender neutral language is working for non-binary people, and how it’s developing in English, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Portuguese and Hebrew.
How gender neutral language is working for non-binary people, and how it’s developing in English, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Portuguese and Hebrew. Featuring Avery Hellman (Ismay), Cara Nguyen, Dana Dela Cruz, Tyler Broderick (Diners), nwaobiala, Tuck Woodstock (gender reveal), Dan Everton, Jaq Victor, Em Jiang, Lior Gross, Eyal Rivlin (Non-binary Hebrew project).
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I started using the term Non-Binary for me a couple years ago. I knew a few people who identified that way, but for a long time my assumptions about those words made me think they didn’t apply to me. But once I started to embrace the vocabulary, so many things began to make sense. The language directly changed the way I understood the world, and myself. And still, that language is unfamiliar to a lot of people, and it’s constantly evolving.
I’m Fil Corbitt and this is the Wind.
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This Episode is called They/Them
(Bell #2)
(Music)
Avery Hellman: Yeah, my name is Avery Hellman, and I use they/them pronouns preferably.
Cara Nguyen: So my name is Cara Ngyuen and I use they/them pronouns… Non-binary is so broad, so it feels weird to say “oh I’m non-binary” because I feel like that encapsulates so many different things.
Fil Corbitt: All right. So to start, can you introduce yourself?
Em Jiang: I hate these!
Fil: You can just say your name if that's easier.
Em Jiang: Okay, my name is EM (laugh)
Fil: So you so you use they/them pronouns and identify specifically as non-binary, Correct?
Em Jiang: I’d say yes. It's not. I think it is like an identity for me, but maybe it's more like choosing not to choose anything. I mean, there is some sort of pride in owning it, but I don't feel like, oh, I found myself I'm non-binary. You know, it's kind of like a liberating identity in that it's choosing nothing.
Fil: So, like, instead of finding yourself, it's like you lost yourself. You're non-binary.
Em Jiang: I’ve released myself from the binary and now I'm just floating around the ether doing whatever I want.
Tyler Broderick: Hello? My name is Tyler Broderick. I'm a musician and I release music under the name Diners.
Fil: Did you like did you notice any difference in the way you interacted with people when you started using gender neutral pronouns?
Tyler Broderick: Definitely. I think that... I noticed that when people started using them for me, I felt really seen and really respected and… Just very bright.
Fil: Have you noticed any difference in, like, your interactions with people, assuming they, you know, they know your gender identity or your pronouns like, Have you noticed that those interactions have changed?
Avery Hellman: So when I'm in places where people say, “say, your gender pronouns” and it's clear, like made clear who I am, I notice two things. One is that people see me as I am in a lot of ways…But simultaneously, it does make for a much more like tense language between us, which is sad. I feel sometimes people feel very conscious about trying to do everything right, and then sometimes they're just kind of like tenseness of not wanting to mess up and not wanting to hurt my feelings, which is great. But that, you know, that makes me wish that this was already part of the culture. And we didn't have to go through this transition of, like, people making mistakes and blah, blah, blah. But it's just, you know, people have to make mistakes. They have to try. They have to forget. And then, you know, I think I think we'll get there eventually.
nwaobiala: Sure my name is nwaobiala, I’m a Nigerian-American trans non-binary multi-disciplinary artist. I do art ranging from film to photography, digital collaging, writing, I’m trying to get into music right now. A little bit of everything, yeah. // It really started to expand my imagination of what I could define myself as. Because before I had just called myself a tomboy or like, I don’t like to do these things that girls are supposed to do, so I’ve always known myself as that but I didn’t know there were words for that. I didn’t know I could identify as something else completely. So through that space I was really able to grasp that language and learn more about it.
Tuck Woodstock: My name is Tuck Woodstock. I am a journalist and a gender educator, and I make the podcast Gender Reveal. // The difference is just that a lot of straight and cis people don't know a lot of people who use they/them pronouns, and so it's a new thing for their brain to do and it requires practice and it requires speaking more slowly sometimes. And it requires thinking before you speak sometimes. And we're not always used to doing this. // I understand that you can't go from zero to 100. And when someone introduces the concept of they/them pronouns to you the next day, you're not going to be like batting a thousand on getting them right. But there are things that you can do to work on it, such as practicing in your own home. Like something that we suggest is like writing a story about someone that uses they/them pronouns or talking about someone in your life who uses they/them pronouns just to practice or even using they/them pronouns for your pets because they don't care if you misgender them because they are animals who don't speak English. And so, you know, start using them pronouns for your dog and practice that way.
Dana Dela Cruz: My name is Dana Dela Cruz. My pronouns, are they/them/theirs. // I am most aware of gender when I'm with other people. I feel like when I'm by myself… don't even know if I feel it. // Especially with quarantine happening, I realize that I don't have to perform gender, right, because I'm just with myself. Who am I trying to perform it to?
Em Jiang: I don't know. It feels like an outward thing to address something that's like very inward.
Fil Corbitt: “An outward manifestation of an inner escape. Slouching toward civility.”
(Bell #3)
Em Jiang: And so if I'm just, like, constantly engaging with it inwardly and, like, comfortable with myself, then I'm not really too bothered with how other people perceive me necessarily.
Fil: Yeah. So, like what? What do you what do you do?
Avery Hellman: I am like so many people in our generation, trying to be many things at once. But I would say primarily I'm a musician and I'm also like a ranch manager.
Fil: You also live in a pretty rural place and you like identify as rural to some degree. How are those things…. Like how do they mesh in your life?
Avery Hellman: For me, it kind of like, you know, moves in two places. One is that I feel because I am alone a lot more and my relationships to nature are just as important as my relationships to other people in a lot of ways, they’re just as consequential, I have more freedom in a sense, like I'm interacting with things that don't know gender anyways, they don't care, like horses or trees or grass or whatever. They don't care. But then when it comes to people I'm interacting with…// I just care a lot about being in these spaces and I have to negotiate with the fact that they may or may not ever kind of shift to understand gender the way I do.
Jaq Victor: Hello, my name is Jaq Victor. When I first came out specifically around gender, I was using the term genderqueer and I remember even talking with my mom and trying to explain to her I was like “queer” means “weird” mom. And so I'm like "gender weird," You know what I mean? She's like… no!
Em Jiang: I mean, change and growth is just natural. So it's hard. It's hard to determine what is because of this change in pronouns and what isn’t, but it's definitely freed up a lot of space to just like engage with whatever I want without thinking about the binary, you know, because it's present in everything, like every single choice that we make is somehow tied to gender, it feels like.
Jaq Victor: Yeah, I think it’s really… that makes me think about my work as a therapist. So a lot of my work consists around having a radar for binary responses, which often are acute stress responses, are trauma responses, because, you know, when our systems are overwhelmed and threatened and we have a perceived danger of like, you know, life threat, we need a binary response to survive, that says perpetrator, victim danger or safety right? Black, white and all, nothing. And so, so much of my work is being sensitized to picking up on binaries and helping people have more of a spectrum, more nuance, more gray, so that there are even three options as opposed to just two let alone three thousand. And so there is this way that I have this deep love of the the term non-binary, because not only does that denote more freedom for my gender, but it really aligns with the work that I do as a therapist and a healer because there are so…there are matrices of possibility, once we have options besides the binary.
(music)
Lior Gross: My name's Lior Gross I use they/them/theirs pronouns and I'm currently on occupied Piscataway land in Reisterstown, Maryland.
Eyal Rivlin: And my name is a Eyal Rivlin and I use he/him/his pronouns. I teach at the University of Colorado and run the Hebrew program here.
Fil: And Lior, can you introduce the name of your project and what it's all about?
Lior Gross: Sure. It's called the non-binary Hebrew project. And we are using the already gendered system of Hebrew grammar and following it in parallel to create a third option that is more expansive.
Fil: That's how I found you with somebody retweeted your tweet onto my feed about the Vietnamese pronoun... And is it pronounced Chanh?
Cara Nguyen: It's pronounced Chanh.
Fil: Chanh. So can you describe how that works?
Cara Nguyen: From what I know, the origins are from the Bay Area, from this group who would do intergenerational dinners for Viet folks and like specifically queer Viet folks… At one of their dinners they decided to coined this term, Chanh. // And how that works is it’s a combination of two titles. So, “Chị”, which is what you would call an older sister and “Anh” which is what you would call an older brother. And so they combined the two words to create Chanh. So that's where it comes from. And I really like it because it also means lemon.
Fil: The reason I reached out was that you came up in another interview and they sent me that Vimeo video that you had like that multi-generational dinner… I wanted to ask you about that project and how that came about.
Jaq Victor: It came together because I also was grappling with my Vietnamese identity in a sense that I came into the dinner with a ton of shame and embarrassment, that I did not speak Vietnamese as well as some of the other folks there. And so I… people were sharing their pronouns and I embarrassingly said, well, it's not Chị which is sister or like a female pronoun. And I said, it's not Anh which is brother, the male pronoun. And then I just put them together with my hands like Chị Anh and then Chị and Ahn together sounds like Chanh and in Vietnamese Chanh means lemon. And it just…even though I'm the one who, like, said it quote unquote first in that dinner, like we all... like our energy all came around it together and we were all a Chanh! and it just became this like inside joke that was so liberating for all of us because Chanh as in lemon is like sour and refresh, refreshing. And we just had like… This pun held so much of our healing and our pain together. So we're like hella fresh.
Dana Dela Cruz: The Philippines is home to over 100 languages and within those, there are so many regional dialects. So I can only speak for the Tagalog, which is like one of the major languages in the Philippines. And in the Tagalog, there actually are no gendered pronouns. The default for everyone, no matter who you're talking about, is going to be Siya, which is spelled s i y a. Yeah…like when, when my family first moved to the United States, I remember there was so much confusion around when to use He would do you She which is kind of funny. Like, I feel like people in the U.S. or people whose native language is English don't think about that. // So it feels a little bit different because as much as I love like they/them pronouns sometimes, especially when everyone around you or most of the people around you don't use those pronouns, it can feel a little bit othering. Whereas Siya is just, you know, that's it. That’s what everyone is.
Cara Nguyen: Maybe this is even bigger! Well, there are people in Vietnamese, who like it, don't use Chanh at all, like people who are non-binary and don't use Chanh at all and instead developed a new term...which is Cam and what Cam means is Orange. And so I think we really liked the whole lemon thing and decided, we’re gonna stick with the citrus theme everybody!
Eyal Rivlin: One thing that I've noticed and I enjoy watching, you know, on my family threads on whatsapp and different things, how the language is evolving. So a few examples that are happening already in the language. For example, in Hebrew, when you address a group, a mixed group. The default is is masculine, masculine, plural is for a mixed group. And that has been that way for years. However, in the last really know, three, four years or so and more and more progressively, people are starting to use an ending that actually holds both the masculine and the feminine. So it adds two letters so “Chaverim” as friends like Hello Friends, Chaverim is the masculine plural and “Chaverot”… Rot ending is the feminine plural. So people are now writing in their texts Chaverimot like putting both of them together… // It's actually a way to honor the group and its diversity, regardless of, you know, non-binary. Just even saying, hey, group. And but not defaulting it to the masculine. That's something that's happening already even in parliament, in Israel. Like people are using that, Well, women, I should say, are using that in parliament. The language is evolving and those things have been slowly accepted because they're within the thought paradigm.
Dana Dela Cruz: There is a huge debate just on social media and the Internet… because dictionary dot com added Filipinx as an entry in the dictionary. And so Filipinos back in the Philippines saw it. And, you know, I think the general gist of the debate is that some Filipinos who in the homeland, in the Philippines feel that 1) Tagalog and the other languages in the Philippines are already gender neutral…women and men will both call themselves Filipino...just because it ends with an O doesn't mean it's necessarily coded as man or male. So they think that changing it to an X is redundant because Filipinos are already a gender neutral term. I think the other grievance with the term Filipinx is that X is not a letter that is in sort of the Philippine alphabets. And so it feels like like a westernization, right? Or like a Western encroachment on a Filipino term…on the other side of that debate the Filipinos in the diaspora are saying that, you know, Filipino might be might be generally accepted as a gender neutral term in the Philippines, but in the U.S. context, we're used to words ending with O having, you know, like a male connotation and then the words ending with a having like connoting like womanness.
Dan Everton: I'm Dan Everton. I am based off of New Bedford, Massachusetts… So my my mom and actually my whole side of that family actually immigrated from a place called the Azores. // The default is if you kind of say El or especially if the person is in the room, you can say El and even though technically He if you use the subject, if the subject, you know, is like Maria, which is like a big thing in Portuguese culture, especially Portuguese Catholic culture, everyone’s named Maria and everyone goes by their middle name. So, you know, you know, you're talking about Maria and you say El it's not kind of like a dissonance in a way. Especially if you're speaking very quickly, because some people do speak that way. But that was one way to cheat…I have actually done an Eles, which is like..Eles is the plural and it is E-L-E-S. Yes. And even if and technically it is proper in Portuguese to use Eles even for a singular. So like the English they it is you can use it for, for singular.
Tuck Woodstock: Something that I like to think about is just that, like Oxford English Dictionary has tracked the use of singular, they back to 1375, which is actually before singular you. We used to use you as a plural and thou as a singular. And now we use you as a singular. And so whenever Cis people are like society is going to collapse if we use they/them pronouns because it's too confusing I just like to remind them that society didn't collapse when we introduced a singular you either. And like, we'll be we'll be OK. Like, we're gonna make it.
Lior Gross: It is our right, as people who speak a language to get to say this isn't quite working for me I'm going to figure out a different way to do this, going to figure out a new word for this. That describes my experience better. That honors my experience better. And so even though, like, we can, yes, reach back to Chaucer and say that they/them was used as a single pronoun, I don't think we should have to justify our existence.
nwaobiala: I’m telling folks that we’ve always existed but even more that us in the present — Nigerian queer and trans folks in the present — are demanding a grander way of living that what we were previously afforded in our indigenous cultures. It’s happening! I can’t even explain my excitement and how hyped I am but it’s happening right now. Like we are really changing our culture, we are changing the way people behave people act, the way we’ve been allowed to exist. So I’m just really excited.
(music)
Fil: Getting the language for this so dramatically changed my understanding of myself. But at the same time, there are parts of it that are totally lacking and it's not necessarily a shared language. It's not fully universal yet…how is this serving us and how is it not serving us, you know?
Avery Hellman: I guess all I'll say, the way that I felt like growing up, like I just felt so confused being defined like as like a woman like being called, that made me very uncomfortable. I didn't understand that not everybody felt the way I did. And it wasn't that I felt that women were this thing, all the same, and they were all like defined by these seven factors that made you a woman or whatever. But I, yeah. It was more like I didn't like the word. I didn't feel part of that group. I had no qualms with people who were part of the group or with any characteristics they had. It was just like, I'm just not that. And it took me a long time to understand that. And then of course, the new language that we have in our culture helped me understand that I wasn't alone and that I wasn't, like, insane for feeling that way.
Jaq Victor: It makes me think about this idea of Critical Yeast. Often in political movements we talk about critical mass and critical yeast is around like a catalyst, something that makes something grow. The critical yeast of that moment was the magic of not being isolated anymore.
nwaobiala: I feel like in this day and age we hear a lot about afro-futurism and I don’t know, black panther and whatever but we also wanna talk about like…the future is happening right now. And it’s in this present moment. The future doesn’t happen in the future, it happens in the present moment. So what are we doing right now? How are we living right now? How are we making history right in this moment?
Tyler Broderick: I truly do feel like it’s a blessing that this is happening in my lifetime.
Jaq Victor: When I think about linguistic technology or pronouns, whether it's Chanh or they/them it’s… Is it serving you? And for me, Chanh, and they/them and non-binary trans, all of these linguistic tools have served me very, very well.
Avery Hellman: In some ways, I think like being out in nature, being with horses or animals, it feels like that future that we're kind of trying to work towards. Because I feel like that sense of not being seen as this gender that you're not by your external world and people not imposing these ideas and words and stereotypes on you that are coming from humans. I guess in some ways I think that, like, nature kind of represents that freedom.
Lior Gross: Language is merely a tool and a vehicle to get to the place we’re trying to be, which is fundamentally honoring each other's experiences as worthwhile and important and holy and valid and beautiful. // …even if we do everything, we can't really encapsulate what it is to be us. But we can definitely try our best to be honoring and respectful and seeing how much of a gift it is to get to have language to share that in a more precise way.
nwaobiala: I would describe this moment as necessary change. It was going to happen. It had to happen. yeah.
[goodbyes]
(Music: Parade Canceled by Lily and Horn Horse)
The Wind is produced by me, Fil Corbitt. The best thing you can do to support the show subscribe on your podcast app. And if you’ve done that, leave a review on apple podcasts or share an episode on social media. You can find us at on instagram and twitter @thewind_org, or our website TheWind.ORG.
The Music in this episode was 2 tracks from the public domain, and this song Parade Canceled by Lily and Horn Horse. I definitely recommend their EP Republicans for Bernie. Link on the website.
A huge thanks to Cara, Avery, nwaobiala, Tyler, Dan, Dana, Em, Jaq, Lior, Eyal and Tuck for sharing their experiences, and pretty much every single one of these folks has a project. Bands, podcasts, films, photography, etc., so I will link all of that at TheWind.ORG - definitely check out their work.
Thanks for being here, and remember to keep listening.
(Music: Beauty by Diners)