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Picture this: You’re a new freshman at Colorado State University. Across many tours and events, you find yourself in several rooms of students where people of authority tell you all about student life and the various resources available to you. When time comes to get to know each other, a leader asks you to share “your name, pronouns if you’re comfortable and where you come from.”
That line, “pronouns if you’re comfortable,” has been heard by us students many times over: the tacit, inclusion-oriented reminder that students are encouraged to clarify their gender identity among peers. This practice has gained traction in recent years and garnered many opinions across the political spectrum.
An entire subdomain of CSU’s website concerned with the use of gender pronouns has gone offline. According to the Wayback Machine, the site hasn’t been seen since Feb. 22 —now redirecting to the university’s main page.
This comes at a time of increased alarm and confusion around CSU’s response to the Trump administration’s policies, particularly regarding diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The pronouns website seems to be one of the latest subjects of CSU’s response to those directives.
Although it’s unfortunate that anyone would fear sharing perspective because of identity, it’s pertinent to state that I’m a transgender person. I’ve been medically transitioned for years, I hold an X gender passport — a marker recently banned by the Department of State — and I’m from a state where health care I received as a child has been criminalized. Nevertheless, I’m largely opposed to the former statement.
When I encountered that statement as a new student, I felt humiliated. The thesis phrase “pronouns (i.e., zir, they, per, she, he)” is utterly alienating. The notion of a “zir” or “per” pronoun being so parenthetically mentioned exemplifies the massive disconnect between that phase of CSU’s public image and the common person. It made me afraid that people seeing such a promoted statement would then think all transgender issues carried that level of absurdity.
Further, the practices it encouraged of regularly asking people’s gender pronouns and declaring them in introduction settings are counterproductive.
I remember being a closeted trans person. I remember not feeling safe to declare what I was working toward. The pronoun circle rituals brought about by that website’s directives were especially cruel situations. Being made to declare as something I wasn’t, something that wasn’t safe or appear bigoted by ignoring the pronoun question altogether was a helpless predicament.
To this day, I do my best to avoid them and lead by example, presenting myself as best I can and learning what people like to be called through personal conversation.
Don’t get me wrong, I support education about gendered terms. I appreciate all gestures of kindness and allyship from cisgender people, and even pronoun questions can make me feel cared for in private settings. But I support CSU in deleting the pronoun website because promoting those practices in the widespread public manner that it did has brought more harm than good.
However, I hope the silent manner of doing so doesn’t become the norm moving forward.
It’s possible the administration found elements of the former website strange or embarrassing to a point of not wanting public inspection and discourse prior to removal, but that’s guesswork on my part. In the future, the university needs to be more communicative when changing its organization of LGBTQIA+ resources.
CSU must clarify that taking down a particularly ill-advised webpage doesn’t mean they’re no longer an ally to transgender students and faculty. Our health care is under attack. Our civil rights are under attack. These are real dangers that our university can’t ignore.
Our lives would be made so much worse if campus became a hostile, crueler place to transgender people. Republicans winning the last election didn’t make it OK for CSU to stop protecting our well-being and our right to occupy spaces that don’t threaten us.
We are still here, and we still matter.
Devy Ballard, Colorado State University student
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Ellie • Mar 31, 2025 at 9:37 am
TLDR: Even trans people can be transphobic.
As a trans woman I don’t agree with this statement. It’s gross to go through all this effort to highlight the struggles you have faced as a trans person just to turn around and call other people with similar issues “absurd”. I don’t use neo-pronouns, but I respect anyone that does and they have every right to feel just as welcome at this school as any of the rest of us.
Bear • Mar 14, 2025 at 12:10 pm
When I was living in Nebraska for a year there were people at my high school who didn’t know what the trans flag looked like. I had a counselor who didn’t even know what the word bisexual meant. There are a lot of people that come to CSU and a not insubstantial amount have no idea about why something like pronouns matter to a person and by having a page dedicated to it allows them to understand and not be dumbfounded when confronted with this questions of what their pronouns are. It also encourages them to learn from a place that is an ally to the trans community so they’re not going to more conservative sources that pain the whole idea poorly and encourage that hostility towards trans people. Now I don’t necessarily think a person who knows nothing about pronouns should be introduced to the concept by having to understand pronouns like per before they even understand why people use different pronouns form their sex assigned at birth in the first place but I disagree with some of your critiques here.
A big reason why they say “if you’re comfortable” is to give you the space to side step the question, so you don’t have to out yourself or deny your gender. At least for me, I’ve never noticed when someone doesn’t answer the pronoun question because half the time I forget to answer it anyway when it’s all jammed together with other introductory questions like name, major, year, ect. And even if I did notice that a person didn’t say their pronouns I would assume it’s cause they forgot or that there’s a reason, I don’t think I’ve ever jump to the conclusion that they’re a bigot.
I’ve met one person who uses ze/zir and I’m friends with two people who use he/it and they/it respectively. I can’t say I completely understand why people use neo pronouns but as a fellow trans person (one that has also been medically transitioned for years since that seems to be something you considered important enough to include) I understand that I can still respect it without having to fully understand and I can put in the little bit of extra effort to make them more comfortable by using their preferred pronouns.
By calling these pronouns absurd you’re basically excluding a group of people because of an inconsequential request to be refered to in a specific way. Doesn’t that just sound like the same thing that transphobes do to us? Gender is already such an abstract social idea, there is no gender or pronouns that are more ligitimate than others because it’s all just made up.
To all the transphobic people that actually matter, to the ones that actually want us strip of rights or even exterminate us – we’re already too absurd to taken serious. We’re already quacks who “deny basic biology” and shouldn’t deserve respect whether you’re a trans person who uses more common pronouns like he/him or uses ze/zir. So what do we gain by drawing these imaginary among ourselves? We are a community because we have similar experiences and face a common enemy. You can go chasing respect from a transphobe all you want but so long as your not cis you’re never going to find it.