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ABSTRACT
Accommodating non-binary transgender people, many of whom use gender-neutral pronouns, poses a unique challenge to schools and universities, even in contexts with legal protections for transgender rights. This article explores a recent Canadian controversy around gender-neutral pronouns, and assembles a theoretical framework to analyze the argument that legal protection for transgender peoples’ pronouns poses a threat to ‘free speech.’ The framework bridges queer theory, affect theory and Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage theory to propose a threshold between ‘extra’ and ‘excessive’ effort to accommodate social difference in everyday life. Free speech objections produce some peoples’ pronouns as requiring ‘excessive’ effort. This extra/excessive framework was exemplified by a recent Canadian social media campaign that sought to produce transgender peoples’ pronouns as requiring merely ‘extra’ effort, which entails de-politicizing pronouns. Community responses to the campaign carry significant implications for gender-expansive educational policy and practice.
Acknowledgments
I acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback, which greatly strengthened the paper and with which I will continue to engage, special edition co-editors Wayne Martino and Wendy Cumming-Potvin, and my collaborators on the No Big Deal Campaign. Errors and omissions are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Lee Airton is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.
Notes
1. My discussion of gender-neutral pronouns as taken up for gender identity purposes is confined to Standard English and, for the most part, singular they/them due to its particular challenge for native speakers (see Bjorkman Citation2017). I do not engage gender-neutral pronouns in French Canada; this is because English and French differ markedly in structure to the extent that they present two distinct fields of inquiry in this area. I refer readers to Hord (Citation2016) for a comparative exploration of gender-neutral language in the German, Swedish and French (but not specifically French Canadian) languages.
2. Some have written on GNP as a tool of gender liberation, or ‘the next responsible step in the struggle to create a nondiscriminatory common language’ (Wayne Citation2005, 89); however, writings that focus on GNP as a broader political tactic and not a need of some transgender people fall outside the scope of this article.