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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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