This Stagnant Water Is Really Starting To Reek

Emily Paluba, 2023

   If you feel uncomfortable about change, whether it be on a personal or political level—although arguably, those are one in the same—you might be trying to resist the one thing that is consistent about human life. 

Or, odds are that what you perceive as something changing is really a truth coming to the forefront after many years of being silenced. It may be a change for you, but it’s liberation for others. And if you feel uncomfortable about it, or even hate it, you are actively infringing on progress, freedom, reclamation, space for people to exist as they truly are, not what American society, or the world, wants them to exist as.

        Let’s start with pronouns. This is only the beginning. Many people are frustrated that suddenly there are so many queer, nonbinary people in the world, when in reality, nonbinary people, just like queer people, have existed since the beginning of time. But it’s just grammar, right? I’m here to show you that grammar is not important, or at the very least, as important as inclusivity. And that is coming from someone who has a Bachelor of Arts in English. 

If you can’t imagine a non-confusing use of the singular they pronoun, although it’s already unknowingly baked into your language, I encourage you to do the following: imagine someone just cut you off. You’ve been trying to hone in on your unreactive Buddhist practices, but you fail sometimes, and in this moment you exclaim to your passenger, “What the fuck! They just cut me off!” 

Or maybe you just left the gym, and you see keys lying by the curb. You do your civic duty and go to the front desk, telling them, “Someone dropped their keys out there.” There are countless other examples, and I encourage you to pay close attention to your language, more dynamic and fluid than you may think, as you communicate throughout the day.

        The stagnation required to hold onto the categories of her or him has a ripple effect. It is the same stagnation that prompted Anita Hill to be asked, “Are you a scorned woman?” from multiple White men in court, as she testified about the sexual harassment she experienced, the same hurtful, stereotypical insinuations Christine Blasey Ford had to endure only decades later. This creates a world in which sexual assault is unsurprising. And this should surprise us all.

It is the same stagnation that does not allow men, and people assigned male at birth (amab) in general, to be feminine, or to be believed as victims of sexual assault. Alok Vaid-Menon, a transfeminine poet, activist, and thinker, works through this conditioning through their work, as an outwardly feminine person who is also hairy and Brown. 

It is the same, white-knuckled persistence, or the quiet resignation of people who don’t bother to have their voice heard, that is pushing anti-trans and anti-choice bills into law, showcasing how anti-free our “free” country really is.

        It is the same stagnation that requires physical education teachers to lead health and sex education classes, arguably the most important class for young, developing minds and bodies, often resulting in a stunted environment, where there are young people either socialized to laugh at the information or to be too quiet to ask the real questions that come up for them.

In my experience, I have felt like those teachers were forced to be there, that I was not given the right and/or adequate information to prepare me for the erotic side of my life, or just a life in my body in general. I was conditioned to be afraid of STIs and pregnancy. And instead of learning “male” and “female” anatomy, I wish I could have learned about pleasure, about healthy relationships with others’ minds and bodies as well as my own.

        It is the same stagnation that encourages genital mutilation, moving or removing the clitoris of people assigned female at birth (afab) to control them and their pleasure, or to try to show that the “real” problem is their “vaginal frigidity,” that they should be able to have orgasms solely through the vaginal canal—even though the clitoris has double the nerve endings, therefore double the sensitivity, of the penis.

It is the same stagnation that lets it be argued that trans women have no place in sports, when in reality, what is really true and factual is human variation. Trans women are women. Between them and cisgender women, and nonbinary folx as well, there is a wide variation of height, build, etc., just like in all humans. The root of the problem is how sports are so strictly sexed to begin with, with no space for people who fall outside the binary.

        We can make our language whatever we want it to be, because truly, language is just something made up to begin with. And in the same spirit, we can make revolution, wholly and inclusively, through the way we speak, letting it seep into action. 

With this kind of revolt against stagnation, against the status quo, we can begin to dismantle the puddle of poison that has been festering in our country and the world for years: rape culture, sexism, racism, homophobia, islamophobia, ableism, you name it. All of these interconnected issues stay in place because we let them, either actively fighting against change or not actively fighting for it. It’s time to embrace the forward momentum many activists are already creating.

        We can choose flow and movement. We can finally start to do something about the stagnant water that is reeking so bad, I’m surprised so many people are able to pretend that the stench is not there, or genuinely haven’t yet let the smell sink in. Just because change and growth aren’t easy doesn’t mean they’re not good. 

As someone who uses both they and she pronouns, I didn’t even know what being nonbinary meant until I came to college in 2019. I still mess up sometimes, although I have noticed that with consistent effort, gender neutral language has become so much easier for me, impacting how I view myself and others.

        Where can you go from here? The next time you want to talk about a stranger by assuming their gender, try to take a step back, recognizing their humanity first, along with the faux importance of grammar and the binary. Think about all of the lives on the line if such a strict dedication to the binary world, a this or that, continues to be upheld. 

Challenging ourselves to both think and speak in ways that break oppressive structures is just the first step in achieving a world in which all of humanity is not accepted, but rather celebrated, in its fullest, most authentic, most intersectional sense. This would be one without sexual, racial, legislative and any other form of violence. No exceptions, just movement.