Pride and Shame

My rainbow is imperfect.

By Teresa Swartz Roberts

Blog Post 55. Copyright 2023

I was working with a client in the writing center. We had been crowded that day. Lots of papers were due. This student’s professor was a stickler for grammar rules. The student writer had a pronoun antecedent disagreement issue.

“A child develops in their own time.”

I had said to my students for a few years that I thought pronoun antecedent disagreement would become less of an issue during my lifetime and possibly may even be dropped from middle school grammar books. Meanwhile, I told them, I would continue to teach them how to write around the number agreement. Instead of saying a child, say children:

“Children develop in their own time.”

The writing center had cleared out while I was tutoring. I glanced up at the clock: 3:50 PM. Only 10 more minutes, and I could close the center and send everybody home. That was a good thing; I had developed the muddiness of thought that sometimes came in the afternoon. It was getting harder and harder for me to think clearly. It was partly the dropping blood sugar of hypoglycemia and partly the dropping dopamine of Parkinson’s, but I didn’t know it yet.

As I came around the corner to return to my desk, three of the tutors stopped me. They asked me about what I had just told the student, and I explained the idea of writing around a problem. The three did not seem to be satisfied.

“But will you call a singular person they?”

I answered, “Well, I don’t,” and I wanted to explain further about how I needed to embrace old rules until new rules became more academically accepted. I didn’t get a chance. One of the tutors stomped off and left the room. I didn’t know what I had done wrong.

After I had sat at my desk and waited for our last client to finish her tutoring session, another tutor who wasn’t busy said, “Teresa, that confused me too until I met someone who wanted to be called they.”

I didn’t understand. It was 5 minutes till the writing center closed, 4:00 PM in the afternoon, a long afternoon, and my mind, as my mother used to say, “just wasn’t clicking.” I looked at the young face blankly and said nothing because I didn’t want to try to understand anything. That kind of confusion and apathy are symptoms of Parkinson’s, and I’d like to blame my disease for my refusal to learn.

It’s a decade later now, and at this point I mostly understand all the fuss about pronouns. Rather than being a part of speech that’s forgotten by the end of ninth grade, a pronoun is a declaration of identity.  

I never meant to hurt anybody. I meant to talk about grammar.

I found out a few months ago that when I left that job to move with my family to Georgia, I had the reputation of being transphobic. I told my son the story not too long ago, and his response was, “You weren’t transphobic; you were trans-naive.”

I’ve been thinking about that incident and how I felt about it at the time and how I feel about it now. I’ve taken a long look at my life and the word choices I’ve made through the years. While what I say generally reflects how I feel, I have made some poor choices.

What’s astonishing is that I have evolved to the point that I had forgotten that I started out with a whole different set of beliefs about gender and sexuality and identity. When I found out I was going to be a grandmother, I dug out the journal that I had written for my son as he grew up. And there on one of the early pages, written 32 years ago, was something about the Bible saying homosexuality was wrong. I do not believe that now. I believe that pederasty is wrong. Pederasty involves a victim. It’s child abuse.

I’m embarrassed, and again, so sorry that I hurt people along the way. It’s Pride Month. It’s time for me to take a close look at how I look at others and how I express myself. I could have had someone explain the significance of they all those years ago, but I didn’t let them. I was confused and unable to embrace a new thought. I have trans people in my life, people I love, and I don’t want them to feel less than.

Unfortunately, I can’t blame Parkinson’s for all those years before when I voiced thoughts that seem alien to me now. Maybe we need new pronouns, not only to reflect gender identity, but to stand for my former self. I am not that person anymore.