There are a fair number of people who say “your organization should normalize sharing pronouns!” and also a fair number of trans people (or people at some point on their journey of self-understanding) who say “forcing me to out myself or lock this down prematurely harms me, please don’t” and I think there are ways both are right.

I don’t have a full answer to this dilemma, but one simple thing would be to change the call “normalize sharing of pronouns” to “normalize sharing and changing of pronouns.”

For most of my adult life, I’d had the mindset “I don’t particularly feel like A Man the way other people describe it, but I don’t have dysphoria so I guess I don’t mind being one.” It wasn’t until I was 32 when I learned that someone could be trans without having gender dysphoria, and that most other people have an active experience of having a gender beyond whether or not they have gender dysphoria. Did some research, and turns out that yeah, I’m agender. Changed the pronouns in my email signature, and most people didn’t comment on it except for one co-worker who asked how they could support me.

My point with that story is that while a lot of people understand their gender as teens and children (and if you belittle trans kids’ self-understanding I will eviscerate you in prose), there’s also a lot of us who didn’t have access to all the information growing up and are at different points in our journeys. Make the world safe for us, too.

(I’d hope it doesn’t need to be said, but this doesn’t apply to transphobic jokes like “my gender is Aircraft Carrier, hur hur hur” – those people are being assholes.)

Updated to add: This post was tangentially inspired by the post “#NYLA2020 : TERF Wars – Transphobia, libraries, and trans workers” over at Digitization 101, and I definitely intend it as a “yes, and” rather than a condemnation of anyone. I just started following Jill Hurst-Wahl’s blog recently, and it’s already become a valuable resource for me.