This spring has produced a number of opportunities to speak to groups of pastors and Lutheran congregations. At almost every gathering, during the Q&A time, someone has asked something like, “My niece wants me to call her ‘he/him.’ Should I do that?” I was not well prepared for that question and I am afraid I did not give a very well-thought-out answer. As a result I’ve been doing some thinking and research and the next couple of blog posts will address that question.
First of all, why is it that some people struggle to use the pronouns that are preferred by the person they are interacting with? Here’s what I found…
For some people, it is a matter of truthfulness. In the “Nashville Statement” published by the Center for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the following is written: “We affirm our duty to speak the truth in love at all times, including when we speak to or about one another as male or female. We deny any obligation to speak in such ways that dishonor God’s design of his image-bearers as male and female.” One of the signers of that statement put it even more succinctly, “I would be lying to call a he a she.”
Underlying this view is the idea that the sex someone is assigned at birth is determined by God, and is, therefore, a truth that trumps all else. Because of that, using any pronouns that do not agree with that truth is lying to the person and to anyone else who might be a part of that communication. On one hand there is concern for the individual being “gendered” with the pronouns, and on the other hand there is a concern for the public witness to others. There is also a sense that using any pronoun that is different than a person’s assigned sex is dishonoring the God that gave them that gender.
There are three assumptions that underly this view:
Assumption #1: Assigned sex is indeed determined by God and is a gift from God to the individual. The problem with this assumption is that it does not account for intersex people whose assigned sex was done by a doctor or parents at birth. It also ignores the fact that, because we live in a broken, fallen world, there are many things about the bodies we are born with that may not necessarily be part of God’s ultimate plan for our lives. Finally, it dismisses the idea that someone’s assigned sex and their self-affirmed gender might be different and that might be exactly what God intended for that person.
Assumption #2: Pronoun gender only refers to someone’s sex assigned at birth. The problem with this assumption is that grammatical gender, which includes pronoun gender, is extremely flexible and means different things in different languages and at different times for different people. In some cases it is purely grammatical and has nothing to do with assigned sex or a person’s self-affirmed gender. In other cases people may use pronouns based on appearance alone, ignoring both assigned sex and self-affirmed gender.
Assumption #3: When I use a pronoun it is my intended usage that matters, not how others use it. The problem with this assumption is that language does not work that way. If I ask for “biscuits” in London I will get something very different than I will get if I ask for them in Tennessee. Simply using the word the way I intend is not enough, and may end up with unintended consequences.
The most common usage of pronouns in America today is to use them to refer to someone’s self-affirmed gender. So when I say, “he” about someone I am NOT saying “this person is male,” I am saying “this person says he is male.” That fact is true whether you believe they are male or not, or whether you believe God says they are male or not. All you are doing is recognizing what they believe about themself.
Clearly, I believe the most effective way to communicate with anyone and everyone is to use the pronouns they would use for themselves. It is grammatically correct and the caring and polite thing to do. But I also believe there is a much more important reason to do this, and will address that in my next blog post.
(A lot of my thinking on this issue was shaped by a pastoral paper entitled, “What Pronouns Should Christians Use For Transgender People?” by Gregory Coles. Greg is the author of Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity. While I do not necessarily agree with everything he writes, I am thankful for his compassionate and intelligent approach to this topic!)
Thank you for these well-thought out & thoroughly explained points. This has been a hard topic to consider, one that people ask my opinion on, and you have given me more to think about. We tend to look at things from our point of view only, and being open to consider another’s viewpoint – as well as have loving conversation with them – seems to me like what Jesus would do.