The LGBTQ Resource Center Team – Attending to World Perspectives on Gender Identity

Staff and student leaders of the campus LGBTQ Center have successfully launched an inclusivity campaign centered on the needs of transgender and non-binary students. The campaign titled “My pronouns are …” seeks to normalize pronoun sharing in institutional spaces like classrooms, meetings and other public events to raise consciousness to community members who live outside the gender binary and to intervene the harmful effects of mis-gendering.

Staff and students of the LGBTQ Center hope that more faculty, staff and students adopt a practice of introducing themselves with their gender pronouns (i.e., he, him, his; she, her, hers; ze, hir, hirs) in hopes of raising campus consciousness and sustaining dialogue on issues of gender and gender expression. The team has invested heavily in designs for social media outreach, buttons, flyers and a kickoff event.

Staff is pleased at the reach of the campaign. Social media posts have been shared widely and are among the most-heavily trafficked in the center’s history. It seems faculty and staff are quickly adopting the practice in their classrooms and meetings. The Provost and President of the institution have opened speeches by sharing their own pronouns.

Amidst the resounding positive feedback, the LGBTQ Center staff start receiving feedback over social media and through word-of-mouth that the pronoun campaign is very confusing to students, faculty and staff who do not speak English as a first language and international students, faculty and staff in particular. The center staff come to understand that some community members struggle to switch quickly between singular and plural pronouns. Because of the fervor and popularity of the campaign, community members who do not fully understand the context, intent or practice are falling silent during pronoun sharing activities. Among the community members who feel disconnected from the campaign are international students who also identify as transgender.

The LGBTQ Center staff quickly identifies that the development of their campaign did not consider global dimensions, nor did it include the voices or consultation of queer and trans international perspectives. The LGBTQ center team assembles to discuss the oversight and consider what short-term actions can be done to redress the situation and how the campaign can be revised going forward to better attend to the full participation of all community members. 

Key Take-Aways
  • The Issue: A pronoun-sharing campaign intended to further the inclusion of transgender and non-binary students, faculty and staff did not account for the perspectives and needs of international students and English language learners.
  • The Deliberation: The LGBTQ Center team is made aware of the oversight. The group convenes to process the feedback and deliberate short- and long-term solutions.
  • The Growth: The team is able to find a path forward that better includes international and English language learning perspectives, while maintaining the momentum.