Pronouns and PIFA

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this, somewhere in the land between hatred for queer and transgender people and the fear that, should you incorrectly acknowledge the identity of a person who does not conform to your customary gender concept, that person will pounce on your error in a flare of offense.

Somewhere amidst the rainbow

The stakes are higher for journalists, who write about people of all persuasions. At BSR, as at any publication, we have a responsibility to portray artists accurately. (On that topic, here’s a cool Rep Radio podcast with Darnelle Radford and nonbinary transgender Latinx performer Eppchez! (pronouns ey/eir), about eir work on Simpatico’s 2017 production of Taylor Mac’s Hir.)

Taylor Mac is coming to town this spring, headlining the Kimmel Center’s 2018 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA) with A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Mac, a theater-maker and performer extraordinaire, uses the pronoun judy.

“If they let me check ‘genderqueer,’ I’ll check that,” Mac told The Advocate in 2016 about how judy fills out forms identifying gender. “Sometimes people can identify you in a way you don’t like. I feel gender is fluid. Why do I have to decide if I want to be a man or a woman?”

But none of the Kimmel’s promotional or press materials indicated Mac’s preferred pronoun, and there’s a mix of he and judy in past coverage. Writing a preview of the fest, I asked the Kimmel’s press office about this. They answered that they’d reach out to Mac’s rep “to gain clarity.”

About six weeks went by with no answer from the Kimmel on the great judy question, and in the meantime, I contacted Mac’s representative, Matt Gross. Mac, touring in Mexico, wasn’t available to comment. “Taylor typically uses he/his/him in daily life but prefers judy when discussing stage/performance work,” Gross told me, and referred me to the Advocate interview above, which asks Mac if using judy is “a sardonic comment on gender-pronoun mania?”

In choosing a pronoun, Mac says that using judy (also an homage to Judy Garland) could “connect some lineage of queerness with my pronouns.”

“It allows me to give people pause — that’s the job of the arts,” judy continues. If you scornfully over-emphasize judy, you’re “exposing your own ridiculousness … and it’s fun. It brings a little joy or stupidness into it. That’s good for gender activism, because it can be a little self-serious. People get stressed out when they try to get your gender pronoun right. It’s like, ‘Relax, Mary.’”

"Engage. Respect. Try."

I wanted to speak to a local performer about this, and when I heard spoken-word artist Osimiri Sprowal at Asian Arts Initiative in February, I had to reach out.

Sprowal, a 20-year-old Temple University student double-majoring in social work and Africology, came out as transgender about three years ago. He’s been writing since he was 14 and poetry slamming since he was 16, and much of his work focuses on his experiences as a trans person of color with a disability affecting his mobility. (During our interview at a Rittenhouse coffeeshop, an eavesdropping stranger slid a note to Sprowal onto our table: they knew Sprowal’s poetry and were a big fan.)

“For a lot of cis people, it’s not even on their radar,” Sprowal says, of respecting the identities of trans and nonbinary people. He tells curious cis people, “These are my pronouns, and they say, ‘Okay,’” and then they go right on misgendering him. It’s like they’re saying, “I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing,” because that’s “easier than doing the work of acknowledging who you are.”

Even after performing poetry spotlighting his experience and identity, he says audience members often come up to him to praise his work but misgender him to his face. He called this “apathy” among many cis people “disturbing,” and the real root of the discrimination he feels: not open expressions of hate but frequent, casual denials of who he is.

And the truth is, “it’s just about trying.” Sprowal doesn’t care if you accidentally use the wrong pronoun, as long as you’re making a sincere effort to remember. Cis people who feel confused or intimidated by what seems like a blossoming of the gender spectrum should not recede from others for fear of getting something wrong. Engage. Respect. Try.

If you can just ask someone, “What are your pronouns?” and really listen, it’s easy enough. But what about a situation where a large organization presents the work of genderqueer, transgender, or nonbinary artists, and doesn’t confirm those identities or pronouns before commencing promotions, or communicate them to audiences or the press? What is the presenter’s responsibility in that situation?

That’s what I asked representatives of the Kimmel before I wrote this piece. (They said Mac’s pronouns were not difficult to clarify; they merely forgot to follow up on my original query — oops.)

“The language the Kimmel Center uses to talk about either performers or performances is provided to us by the artist or the artist’s management,” a spokesperson said. Which isn’t really an answer to my question about responsibility, but maybe it’s an example of how these issues continue to challenge us. In booking the PIFA lineup, maybe the Kimmel wasn’t made aware of Mac’s preferred pronoun as a performer or did not check before announcing the show to the press (despite the specification in the first sentence of judy’s official website bio).

It may be an innocent and innocuous gap in this instance, but getting it right still matters, especially for a globally notable event like PIFA. As Sprowal said, by making a simple effort to honor someone’s pronouns, what you’re really saying is, “I love and respect you as a human.”