Blog / 2025 / What We Owe Each Other

“It would be easier to remember to call you ‘they’ instead of ‘she’ if you’d dress in a more non-binary style.”

On the one hand, you could argue that this person was trying: she’d revealed that she wanted to use the pronoun that I’d told her would make me the happiest. On the other, she was suggesting that it was my fault that she’d failed.

She was doing something that society as a whole does really well.

She was making my differences into a problem and, more specifically, a problem I had to solve.

This kind of pressure comes in billions of flavors, one for every kind of difference a person can have.

For example, at some point, you may have experienced the ageist pressure of society telling kids that, if they want to be taken seriously, they need to stop saying “like” so much. And, whether or not you’ve consciously noticed it, you’ve almost certainly witnessed the ableist pressure of society informing people who use wheelchairs that they don’t get to cross the street because building and maintaining curb cuts at every corner is expensive. There are racist pressures galore, including requiring everyone to speak “standard English” (code for “white-sounding English”), murdering Black kids because they happen to be wearing hoodies, and everything in between.

In all these cases, society is making its problem—ageism, ableism, and racism—into the individual’s problem, with the ire-clad logic of: “if only you’d do this one thing society has arbitrarily decided on and that I’ve chosen to believe for no good reason, then I’d be able to treat you like a human being.”

Women and femme-presenting people like me endure myriad sexist pressures. For instance, we’re supposed to wear makeup, but not too much or we become harlots. And as if it isn’t hard enough to thread that eyebrow, it’s also impossible to know how much makeup is too much, because each of society’s representatives—which is to say each individual on the planet—has a different idea of what qualifies as overdoing it when it comes to putting pigments on our skin.

When I was calling myself a woman, I was forever being informed that I needed to work on my womanning. I was pressured to shave my legs and my armpits, and I was harassed both directly and indirectly about the amount of space I took up.

Now that I’ve finally found the courage to ask people to call me “they,” I’m being told that I’m not genderqueering correctly, and not by some expert in genderqueerness, which doesn’t exist, but by an individual who’s frustrated that she hasn’t found it easy to use “they” seamlessly.

Here’s the thing: I don’t either.

Every day, I work at using the pronouns people ask me to use and at calling them by the names they’ve told me they prefer, and I do my best to purge my language of gendered references whenever possible. But I still mess up.

We don’t owe each other perfection. The non-expert in genderqueerness doesn’t have to always use “they” when talking about me, and I don’t have to adjust my wardrobe so that I read as “they” to her.

What we do owe one other is a recognition of each individual’s nuanced and complex humanity.

None of us are simple. Where we get in trouble is when we fail to acknowledge that another person’s interior world might be just as tangled and elaborate as our own.

By asking me to dress a certain way in order to match her idea of my gender, the non-expert in genderqueerness was unraveling my identity into something a little more linear, because that made more sense to her. But, like her, I’m a beautiful knot of joys, fears, ideas, and experiences.

If you feel like a complex live flamingo among stiff plastic birds, I encourage you to check out my mental health series Everything’s Fine.

This fall, you can see the collection in person at the Lambertville Free Public Library, and you’ll even be able add your own work on the wall! There will be coloring page versions of the paintings available for you to fill in and pin up next to my art.

Lambertville Free Public Library
6 Lilly Street
Lambertville, NJ 08530

Open: October 11^th through November 26^th
Reception and coloring social: Wednesday October 22^nd from 7p to 8:30p