LETTERS
The star letter each month earns a copy of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2021, courtesy of Bloomsbury.
STAR LETTER
Pronouns matter
In the October Writing Magazine, Piers Blofeld argues that including one’s gender identification along with one’s signature is irrelevant, a form of virtue signalling, a form of ageism, and exclusionary.
As a trans-woman, I don’t have the privilege of not caring about gender. I often have to tell people what my preferred pronouns are, to avoid being misgendered. (Sometimes I get misgendered anyway, but that’s another story.) When cisgendered people include their own preferred pronouns, they doubtless each have their own reasons for doing so. I will not presume to speak for them all. But some, at least, do so in order to normalise the practice, so that people like me won’t feel weird when we have to do it. They’re not doing it to exclude people like Piers Blofeld. They’re doing it to include people like me.
As for this being ‘an issue which is clearly age based’? I’m 61.
In the same issue, starting on page 28, is a short story competition winner, Human Spirit, by Maria Dean, which, as I read it, is all about not rushing to negative judgements about people who look and behave differently from oneself. In a way, this seems to be what Piers Blofeld is saying too. He asks us not to judge him negatively because he is not in the habit of indicating his own preferred pronouns. That’s fair enough – but it goes both ways. Don’t judge me negatively because I do.