“Pronouns”
What’s up with Christian nationalists and religious communities that are so angry when people talk about their pronouns? How does pronoun use relate to and express gender identity? Why do cisgender people also mark their pronouns? Is this more than identity politics and culture war? In this episode, Dan decodes some of the culture war and religious dimensions around the hot-button topic of pronouns.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Hello and welcome to the series, It's In The Code, a series of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am the host.
As always, I thank all of you who are taking the time to listen to this.
I also want to say thank you to the Kapp Center at UCSB, with whom we are offered in partnership.
And as always, I want to thank everybody who continues to send in ideas and topics and reflections and responses to the things we talk about in this series.
And I'm just going to dive right in today because I really am sort of tackling an issue today that's relatively new.
Some of the things that we talk about here are things that I hear from folks who are, you know, maybe they're my age, they grew up in American evangelicalism, or maybe they grew up in conservative Catholic circles, or whatever it might be, but these things are familiar.
And they remember them from when they were young, they're still part of those traditions and so forth.
A topic I want to talk about today is something that figures more recently, I think, in conceptions of sort of American religion and politics and the kind of things that we talk about on the podcast and in this series.
It's something that wouldn't even have figured in a lot of religious discussion even a few years ago.
And I think this is actually more true of traditionalist or theologically conservative traditions.
But a lot of people have reached out to me about this, and it's the issue of pronouns, the debates that go on about pronouns, about people's, as we often say, preferred pronouns, the pronouns that they want to have used of them.
Pronouns that they feel reflect their identity and I've had people who have reached out to me who are queer folk who have been hurt by their religious communities refusal to use the pronouns with which they identify or maybe it's family members who are attached to religious communities and so they refuse.
to use the pronouns of which they identify.
I've heard from people and I hear from people all the time who kind of hear a lot about the sort of increasingly hot debate about pronouns and it's kind of this feels to many as a sort of a new front in the culture wars, but there's still a little murky about kind of what it means and where it comes from.
I've heard people who are familiar with these kinds of discussions, maybe from their workplace or maybe like me, they're part of the academy where discussions about pronouns and pronoun usage and what pronouns to, you know, use for somebody are common discussions and that's been going on, but they've been kind of caught off guard by the heated discussion that this has generated within religious communities.
I've heard from people who affirm the use of the pronouns with which somebody identifies, but who don't understand why people whose gender identity might be obvious, quote-unquote, somebody who, you know, identifies as, say, male and passes as male and everybody recognizes them and is going to sort of default to the assumption that they identify as male, why that person would signal their pronouns.
And so really, I've heard from a lot of folks who have asked questions.
I've responded to some of you.
I've written some emails.
But you eventually get to where you get enough of these.
You're like, you know what?
This is something to pay attention to.
So I want to take a look at this.
And the fact of the matter is that pronoun usage has become a contemporary culture war issue, right?
And as a culture war issue, it has become an issue within Christian communities.
We talk about this all the time, you know, go and listen to Straight White American Jesus or listen to other episodes in this series.
When we talk about things about, quote unquote, culture war, whether it's LGBTQ plus rights or Black Lives Matter or abortion or whatever, We know that religious communities, especially traditionalist or theologically conservative religious communities, they loom large in this, right?
And so it has become a hot-button issue for many of those communities.
And even though it's a relatively new issue, those of us who did grow up in certain kinds of religious traditions or are observers of those traditions, It's not going to be surprising that this has become an issue because it is an issue that connects with and extends long-standing opposition to LGBTQ plus rights within traditional religious communities.
So even though it might seem new to many, it might seem novel, it might even seem surprising or out of place, if we contextualize it within the broader response of these communities to queer rights generally, maybe it's not so surprising.
And as I say, even though for many it might be a relatively new issue, maybe not as long-standing or as entrenched as some of the other issues that I've tackled on this series, the many emails I have received—sorry, I get my words all twisted up there—the emails I've received, you know, they tell me that it's an issue that we should spend some time with.
So we're going to do that today.
So let's just start with the basics, okay?
And maybe this is all familiar to you.
If this is stuff that you know, and maybe you live it, and you're familiar with it, please bear with me.
Because as I say, I still hear from people a lot who hear these discussions going on and don't fully understand them, and sometimes might feel a little bit weird admitting that they don't.
So, let's start with the basics.
What's the issue with pronouns?
Right?
And the issue of pronoun usage really emerges within the context of, and has to do, with people who sense that their own gender identity is different from the gender they're assigned at birth.
Okay?
And if those concepts aren't familiar with you, it's just the basic idea that when we're born, the doctor takes a look between our legs and proclaims that we are a boy or a girl, and we are assigned a gender.
And many people, as they get older, they may not be much older, they may be children, they may be adolescents, they may be adults, they come to this sense that the gender they feel themselves to possess is not the gender they were assigned at birth.
And when this happens, right, when people have this experience, they take steps to live in such a way that their expression of gender and the gender that others perceive them to inhabit, that they're in line with their experience of their gendered identity.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire Swadge archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
