Years later, in another life, before giving a reading, the organizer asked me for my preferred pronouns. I never knew I had a choice. “He/him” I said, after a pause, suddenly unsure. But I felt a door had opened—if only slightly—and through it I had glimpsed a path I had not known existed. There was a way out.
But what if I don’t want to leave this room yet, but just make it bigger? Pronouns like they/them are, to my trans friends and family, a refuge—a destination secured through flight and self-agency. They/them pronouns allow an interface where one can quickly code oneself as nonnormative, in the hopes of bypassing the pain and awkwardness of explanation or the labor of legibility when simply existing can be exhausting. Would I, by changing pronouns, appropriate myself into a space others need in order to survive?
As a war refugee, I know how vital a foothold as small as a word can be. And since as a cis-presenting male, I don’t need to flee he-ness in order to be seen as myself, I will stay here. Can the walls of masculinity, set up so long ago through decrees of death and conquest, be breached, broken, recast—even healed? I am, in other words, invested in troubling he-ness. I want to complicate, expand, and change it by being inside it. And I am here for the very reasons why I feel, on bad days, I should leave it altogether: that I don’t recognize myself within its dominant ranks—but I believe it can grow to hold me better. Perhaps one day, masculinity might become so myriad, so malleable, it no longer needs a fixed border to recognize itself. It might not need to be itself at all. I wonder if that, too, is the queering of a space? I wonder if boys can ever bandage each other’s feet, in friendship, without a password...
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