Pronouns Matter!!!

Commentary By Benji Mallory  Photo by Micheal Jonyer

Hi, my name is Alex/Antwanae. I have two names because I am gender fluid. This means I don’t really have a certain gender I go by. It just depends on my gender expression or identity over time. The pronouns I have are she/her/he/him/his/they/them, basically every pronoun in the book.

In 6th grade I really started to realize that I was taking on a gender fluid role as well as being bisexual. But I wasn’t totally ready to believe it until I was in a relationship with a male. After a while, we broke up. Then, a girl asked me out on a date and I accepted. That was my real first experience with a female which really led me to fully believe that I’m not straight, but bisexual. Over time I started to realize that I don’t like being tagged as a female or male because certain days I feel masculine and then other days I feel femmine. Being gender fluid has made me start to really explore and express myself more as a person. All in all, I like being gender fluid and bisexual. :) 

The LGBTQ+ community has its own individual tags: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual. According to sources by therapists and doctors on news.gallup.com, at least 7.1 percent of people were a part of the LGBTQ+ community back in 2021. The community also uses pronouns that people want and are identified by. The usual pronouns are he/him or she/her, because when a person is born they are either identified as a male or female and people have grown used to these pronouns. Throughout time, more and more people in the gay community have changed their pronouns to just the orginal he and she. 

But many people have used many different pronouns. Some people think that the pronoun change is only for someone who is transgender but that’s not the case at all. In the LGBTQ+ community, there are people with many different pronouns. For instance, males can use the pronouns she/her/they; females can use he/him pronouns; some people may want to use they/them and sometimes certain people don’t mind being called any pronoun no matter their gender.  

There’s people in the LGBTQ+ community who are called gender fluid that basically denotes/relates to people who don’t identify themselves as having a fixed gender—but refers to change over time in a person’s gender expression, gender identity or both. 

One thing that comes up as an issue is something called Gender Dysphoria which is a clinically significant distress or impairment related to a strong desire to be another gender.

Because people in the LGBTQ+ community use so many different pronouns, many people have asked a lot of questions that can be overwhelmingly disrespectful. “How can you go by he/him if you’re still technically a female?” “You’re a male, so why are your pronouns she/her?” “God only gave you one gender and that’s the gender you're born with!” “How can you change your pronouns when that’s how you originally identified?” “You're a female, so why are your pronouns he/him?” “You can’t just not have a gender, how will you be identified?” 

For example, Benji, that’s me, have received my fair share of questions and criticisms from people believing I’m not “right” about the pronouns that I give myself. I go by he/him even though I have all the parts of a female. I have come to the belief that I suffer from Gender Dysphoria because since I was a little girl, I’ve never felt or liked the feeling of being a female and it wasn’t because most of the time I was surrounded by males. That’s how I felt. I felt that I was always born in the wrong body and gender, especially whenever I would look at myself in female clothing. I remember telling my mother, ”Mom I don’t really like wearing female clothes,” so many times when I was younger but it really didn’t change much. Now, I do have some boys’ clothes that I wish to wear but I still want more…and more than that, I’d like to actually go through all the changes that can make me the man I want to be. 

Nowadays, it does bother me sometimes that I’m really trying to change my gender so that I don’t feel uncomfortable anymore. I want to feel more comfortable when I finally get the chance to be the man I want to be…right here and right now.  

Benji Mallory is a junior at Friendship Collegiate Academy