On pronouns and corrections

The third Wednesday in October each year is International Pronouns Day. This is talking about third-person pronouns, or the pronouns you use when talking about another person without using their name. For example, I use they/them pronouns, so someone talking about me might say something like, “Ryn? I know them from twitter. They make bad jokes complaining about computers. I saw one of their conference talks once, it was full of puns.” Easy enough, right?

Not always! Pronouns are a thing people sometimes struggle with. Maybe their first language doesn’t have gendered pronouns, so learning a language that does is a bit of a challenge. Maybe they grew up like I did with old-school relatives who loved to scream about how “they can’t be singular” even though it can and has been for a while. Maybe someone they know has changed pronouns recently and they’re struggling to break old habits. Whatever the reasons, sometimes people make mistakes.

Honest mistakes are one thing (hell, I accidentally misgendered myself for a while, old habits are hard to break), but one pattern I’ve noticed that really gets under my skin is something I’m calling the preemptive non-apology. It looks something like this:

The scene is some sort of meeting (certainly a Zoom call these days), and we’re starting off with a round of introductions. When we get to me, I give my normal intro: “Hi, I’m Ryn, I use they/them pronouns, I argue with computers for a living (or whatever other info is relevant to this particular meeting).” The very next cis guy to introduce himself then inevitably says something like, “Hi, I’m Bob, and if I mess up anyone’s pronouns, hahaha, please just correct me, this is so hard lololol.”

At first, this annoyed me because, let’s be honest, Bob is not going to mess up any cis people’s pronouns. There is a reason that this sort of statement always comes after my introduction, and not before. In this situation, he’s not going to mess up anyone’s pronouns, he’s going to mess up mine. I end up feeling singled out and othered before the meeting has even really begun.

But there’s more to it than that. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Ryn, he’s saying that he’s open to being corrected! That’s a good thing, right?” And while it’s true that this is probably better than saying “Don’t you dare correct me,” and while Bob probably means well by saying something like this, there’s actually quite a few reasons why his asking people to “just” correct him doesn’t always work out.

Power dynamics
Correcting people isn’t always easy. The more power or social capital they have, the harder it gets. If Bob is higher up in the org chart, or older than I am, or really well-known in the industry, these factors can make it harder for me to correct him. And before someone comes in and says “but my organization is flat, we have no hierarchy,” yes you do, because making your power dynamics implicit rather than explicit doesn’t make them go away, it just makes them harder to address. Power dynamics exist in the world whether you acknowledge them or not, and if you’ve never worried about the consequences of speaking up like this, you probably have more social capital than you realize.

Is this a genuine offer?
While some people genuinely do mean well, are open to being publicly corrected, and are truly trying to learn, some people unfortunately are not. There are people who will say things like this in bad faith, and it’s not always possible to tell in advance when someone will react poorly to being corrected. Especially if you’re a relative stranger, people will have to do a lot of mental calculus to decide if it feels safe or worth the risk to correct you, or if speaking up will end up being held against them at some point. You can help with this math by following the principle of show, don’t tell. Introducing yourself with your own pronouns and correcting yourself if you slip up does a lot more to show people that you are operating in good faith.

Meeting formats
Some meetings are more laid-back, with natural pauses or breaks in conversation where it would be reasonable to say something like, “Oh, that’s a good point, Bob. Just a reminder, my pronouns are they/them, you called me ‘he’ back there.” Some meetings aren’t like that. Maybe they’re more fast-paced, or there’s a long agenda to cover in a limited amount of time. Sometimes more facilitation means stricter rules about who can talk when and interruptions are more frowned upon. And if the meeting is more of an event, like a virtual conference, panel discussion, or a recorded presentation, it can feel like there’s no good time to correct someone. If we’re doing a more formal talk that’s being recorded, I don’t really want to have a bunch of interruptions and corrections in the recording, because that’s taking away from the content we’re actually trying to deliver.

Repeated interruptions
Correcting someone often requires an interruption. Whether that’s in the middle of a sentence, or waiting until the first break in someone talking, correcting someone who has misgendered me (or someone else) requires breaking the flow of the conversation. That can be annoying to do even once - I have other points I want to make, or questions I don’t want to forget to ask, or maybe I didn’t have anything to say at that point, and taking time out to correct my pronouns (especially if that’s followed by a long Cis-Apology-Waltz) takes away from what we’re actually here to talk about. But when it happens over and over and over? When Bob has misgendered me five times in a row and I’ve corrected him each time, am I supposed to keep correcting him? It feels more awkward each repetition, and at some point it feels like an obvious waste of effort, but just letting him continue to misgender me without saying anything doesn’t feel good either. It’s a no-win situation for me.

Meeting format bonus: Remote meetings
As a bonus frustration, it’s harder to effectively jump in and correct someone in a remote meeting than it is in person. People are more likely to be talking over each other, it’s harder to hear and understand when multiple people are talking at once, we have to deal with muting/unmuting and other AV issues on top of that, so it’s much more difficult to get a quick “whoops - you meant they” in edgewise. Maybe Zoom could add little pronoun emojis that people could react with the way they have the heart and thumbs up emojis, so every time I get misgendered I can just click a button that makes a sparkly “they/them” pop up on the screen.

Who bears the burden
Ultimately, my big problem with the preemptive non-apology is that it tends to be accompanied by not even trying. It is too often a way of putting all the onus on the person getting misgendered, asking them to figure out how to navigate all of the above to correct you, rather than putting it on yourself to practice.

To make a Computer Analogy (TM): yes, code reviews are good because sometimes other people will notice mistakes in your code that you didn’t catch. But, if you keep making the same elementary-level mistakes in your code over and over and over, and every code review involves your coworkers saying “you forgot your semicolons” or “you need to do basic error checking” or “the tests don’t pass please run the tests before you commit and push” day after day, month after month, your manager is probably going to want to have some words with you. Code reviews don’t exempt you from putting in the effort to write the best code you can in the first place. The fact that other people can correct you if you misgender someone doesn’t exempt you from actually trying to get it right the first time. And unlike a compiler or a test suite, people have feelings. While messing up someone’s pronouns might be a non-event or something to be laughed off for you, it can have a huge emotional impact on the people you’re misgendering.

So, if you really do mean well and really do want to get it right, look beyond the intent of a statement like “just correct me if I mess up” and really think about the impact of that request. Stop asking other people to do the work for you and practice yourself. There are tools like this on the internet. There are plenty of blog posts with tips on this. I’m not expecting people to never make mistakes. But I do expect people to put in their own effort to keep trying, instead of relying on other people to notice and correct them.