Pronouns

In this Issue: today we talk about people specifying their pronouns

I am out of the office today at my ’27 Wolfpack’s Orientation, so this is a pre-post of a column I run each summer

We have a new crop of ’27 students getting ready to join us, and they will have to get accustomed to some of the ways that college is different than high school. One of the things your students might see while in college is a line in faculty and staff members’ email signature that specifies the person’s preferred pronouns. People format these in different ways:

John Doe
[title, department, email, phone#, etc.]
pronouns:  he; him; his; himself

(or)

they/them/theirs (or she/her/hers)

My pronouns are they, them, theirs

Similarly, they may see preferred pronouns on a faculty member’s syllabus for class, or people may invite students to share their pronouns (if they choose) in classes or meetings.

The default position is to assume that a man would use he/him/his, and a woman would use she/her/hers. That may – or may not! – be the way a person would like to identify themselves. So these sig files and introductions help people understand how one would like to be referred to by others.

Preferred pronouns are similar to preferred names: my given name is Elizabeth (and that is the name on all my official documents), but my parents always intended that I would be called Betsy in day-to-day life. Every year in school when roll was called on the first day of classes, my teachers/professors asked for “Elizabeth,” and I had to correct them and tell them I prefer to go by Betsy. Betsy is what I feel comfortable with, and what makes me feel like myself. (Elizabeth is the name I got called when I was in trouble with my parents!)

Using people’s preferred pronouns are an extension of this concept – calling people what they want to be called. And we do it all the time – if I had an an advisee whose name was Andrew but he told me he preferred to be called Andy, I would call him Andy. If that same Andy told me he did not want to be referred to as “he” but preferred to be “they,” that is what I would call them.

This is just a way of making someone comfortable by using the language they prefer. Since college is your student’s home for four years, we want them to feel comfortable here and be called what they want to be called.

As an English major, I used to stumble a little over gender neutral pronouns (I felt strange saying “they are” for a singular person, just because subject-verb agreement was beaten into my head for all my years of schooling). But the more I did it, the more natural it was.

This might be new territory for our incoming students or families, so wanted to bring it up now so if they see sig files in emails they receive from faculty or staff, they know why.