As Matt Montesano and I wrapped up a very nice interview on the GOP convention with Sally Rosen last week, I reminded her that I used gender neutral pronouns, and would like to be referred to with them in the upcoming article. Sally said something to the effect of “Definitely. No problem.” And that was that.

So when I read on Tuesday that “B Lake ’06” reported that “he came to…work as a street medic [but] he spent the week defending his liberties” from the NYPD, I was disappointed, if not especially surprised. For one thing, I’d say that in the prizefight of Me and My Civil Liberties vs. the New York Police Department, I didn’t do much in the way of defending. I got arrested and locked up for 20 hours, and my civil liberties went to take a breather until I got out. Moreover, I don’t know anybody by that name who uses those pronouns, and I certainly never ran into him in the streets or in jail.

So I immediately emailed Sally, and explained, in what must have been a VERY condescending fashion (sorry, Sally), what I had meant by “gender neutral pronouns,” that I use ze and hir, not he and him, to refer to myself, that this was important to me, but that I realized this was just a mistake of a new reporter (like I said, condescending) and I didn’t blame her.

Except Sally already knew all that. Turns out, she’d known exactly what I meant, and had submitted a final draft of the article in which I DIDN’T get male pronouns stuck on me. So now, instead of a novice reporter unfamiliar with certain terms, we’re dealing with the editorial staff. They’ve all been here a while, and more importantly, they’ve done this kind of thing before, editing and spellchecking genderqueer identities out of existenc—nless the headline has the word “gender” in it. Because if you look at the September 10 Argus, gender-related issues dominate the news coverage, the editorial, and the editorial cartoon. Never mind that those articles on gender neutral housing refer to hypothetical students as “he or she,” assuming that all students fit one of those two pronoun sets. Still and all, gender issues are apparently firmly on the Wesleyan Argus Radar.

This little pronoun booboo, then, becomes part of a pattern. In recognition of that pattern, I offer the following points of clarification. These are the same points I offered to Sally, when I was crassly assuming she didn’t know her gender-ass from her gender-elbow. It seems like somebody at the Argus needs this explanation, though Sally certainly didn’t.

1: This is important to me. It’s not nitpicking, because calling me “he” actively erases part of my identity, and it makes me kinda queasy when people call me “he,” and it’s not an accurate way to identify me.

2: People’s preferred pronouns getting edited back into gender conformity has been an issue in the Argus before, and apparently the problem hasn’t been fixed.

And 3: In conjunction with the coverage on gender neutral housing, changing my pronouns helps maintain the impression that queer-identified people are only involved in one type of activism (i.e. campus-based, not out in the streets and the “real world”), that queer people and queer politics are ephemeral creatures that cease to exist outside Wesleyan campus, and that we have no involvement or bearing in a huge range of different struggles beyond the “Wesleyan bubble.” Queer politics didn’t come from Wesleyan, or from academia, and you don’t have to read Foucault to get it. All the rest of the medics I got arrested with identify as queer/genderqueer and use some assortment of unconventional pronouns, and we were neither majority Wes kids nor majority college kids, and we weren’t the queer exception among the RNC medics.

When we were in jail, segregated by (assumed) biological sex, and had the Sylvia Rivera Law Project tracking our queer asses through the system, making sure we just came out sleep-deprived and sore, and not assaulted or abused or raped, our queer identities certainly felt like they had bearing on the real world. Which would be why I tore all my queer buttons off and lost them on the floor of the paddy wagon, and hid inside the persona of a straight boy. I don’t want to hide like that here.