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For many faculty members, the semester begins with the now-familiar call to students to “introduce yourself with your name and pronoun.” Some of the more adventurous of us add a request for a personal fun fact, favorite flavor of ice cream or some other icebreaker. Our intention in asking about pronouns is to signal an inclusive, safe classroom where everyone is respected. In my experience, however, this practice is becoming more problematic than useful.
For a time, the pronoun question seemed like a step forward. When I first started teaching, professors were provided with a list that included the legal names of each student that had registered for class. We were expected to stumble through it on the first day of class in order to begin learning names, to ensure that everyone who needed to be on the list was, indeed, registered, and to identify students who had dropped the class. Invariably, that process was followed by a number of corrections: “just call me Amy” or “I go by Taylor.”
Eventually, registrars caught on, and class lists began to include nicknames or preferred names alongside the legal name of each student. At least at my institution, those names had secondary status and did not appear on Blackboard, email or other commonly used class resources. Now, thanks to work on behalf of transgender students by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Transgender Law Center and others, we know that student legal names need not even appear on class lists since those lists are neither official nor legal documents. Once our institutions modify their practices to reflect this, Amy and Taylor can relax. But what about pronouns?