There’s a softly dense article on JSTOR I haven’t read yet but plan to. It’s by one Robert C. Solomon for the Chicago Review from the year of our lord, 1978. Their Spring issue. The title is simple and incredible: “A Pronoun is a Small World.”
Here’s how it begins:
Solomon may very well be queer, trans, nonbinary for all I know, because, well, I don’t. That’s one of the gifts of the Pronoun Revolution that fragile culture pundits love to mock. The fear goes: queer propaganda taken to an extreme means anyone could be this or that. What’s next? Abraham Lincoln was a trans woman? EXACTLY. Except this does not go far enough. While queer is one way of holding and naming the doubt and fracture, it is not restrictive to queer-identifying folks. There is an irreducible gap between appearance and being, not just in philosophical treatises but in the lived experience of gender mystery of everyone.
Hence a mantra I try to live by, and remember, by Juliana Huxtable: “I guess everyone’s a little trans.” (And why I, like some others, prefer the language trans and non-trans, but never use the word ‘cis.’)
