I’m walking home from town thinking about my non-binary colleague and their pronouns. It’s the kind of rambling thought that’s kinda philosophical I suppose.

Writing about my colleague and using their correct pronouns is easy. Maybe that’s because it uses a different part of the brain, or because it’s possible to think more before coming to the word I want to use – and if I don’t like the words, it’s really easy to change them.

I noticed that while my inner monologue rattled off as though narrating my thoughts to me, that it occasionally used the wrong pronouns and corrected itself. Which is what prompted this thread of consciousness.

While that inner voice is chuntering, it’s almost responding to mental images of people. I wondered “is there a short circuit between sight and speech that aids fluidity when talking?” Basically, I see certain cues and my vocabulary is buffered with key words ready for quick insertion into a sentence … useful things like names, themes, and pronouns.

If that were so, that would explain why there is an inertia about using a person’s correct pronouns: it actually isn’t easy because the head gets in the way!

Thought experiment: what if I abolished gendered pronouns from my personal vocabulary?

I don’t really believe in gender as a thing that exists as an objective concept. Feeling that it is more how one feels about oneself than anything else. I have read a lot on gender as a social construct, and seen a view videos (my favourites being by Abigail Thorne on YouTube).

Gendered pronouns require assumptions be made of the person being referred to, unless they have explicitly stated what they want a particular set used. I suppose that pronouns are socially inferred most of the time, but ethically negotiated some of the time.

I return to my mum’s statement of referring to her in the third person while she was present: “who’s she? The cat’s mother?”

And there’s a little mean streak in me that says “let’s see how the binary folks like it when they get referred to using the wrong pronouns!”