If while profiling a non-binary person a writer fails to use the person’s correct pronouns, he/she could be (and most likely would be) attacked as some kind of bigot. So I realize that Melena Ryzik had no choice but to follow the proscribed form in her N.Y. Times profile of Emma Corrin.
But I still find these three paragraphs in Ryzik’s piece infuriating. I’m counting seven “they” pronouns contained in eight sentences. How many centuries were “he” and “she” the only pronouns in town among English-language speakers and writers? They (i.e., the two gender pronouns) apparently came into being sometime in the 12th century, and within the last…what, three or four years the pronoun game has gone insane.
A thousand years of the old way, and and now and for the foreseeable future we’re all doomed to reading paragraphs like these three below:
Ryzik doesn’t mention that Corrin came out as queer in April ’21, apparently because naming a person’s sexual preference is regarded as too invasive.
In July ’21 Corrin posted Instagram photos of herself wearing a homemade chest binder, which is a thing among certain younger queer women who want to avoid looking too womanly-curvy in the eyes of certain queer lovers or friendos, or something like that.
I find the idea of breast-binding (along with breast-flattening surgery for that matter) a little creepy. Partly because the basic notion of “binding” one’s natural biology…well, that was a heinous practice in pre-20th Century China, no? I also find it weird because my mother, self-conscious about her feet not being petite enough when she was in her early 20s, forced herself to wear too-small shoes when she was a working girl in NYC (BBC, NBC). Her feet were permanently disfigured the rest of her life.
