I spent at least several minutes each day of the last long weekend debating what I was going to write about for today’s column.
Of course, instead of actually writing anything I went bike riding, skateboarding, went to a handful of get togethers, announced a roller derby bout, watched wrestling and went to an amusement park.
It was the first nice weekend in Montreal, it was bound to be spent outside of the house.
Anyhow, this topic is a little serious, so I apologize in advance if I use any of the wrong language to properly communicate my feelings.
I have been announcing roller derby bouts off and on for about 8 years now. The sport is very recognized as being as being extremely supportive of the LGBT community. Over the course of that 8 years I’ve met a number of great people transitioning one way or the other to the gender that they identified with, even if it wasn’t the gender they were physically born with.
Part of my job as announcer is to validate the rosters of the teams playing so I have the correct list of names to refer to the skaters. Something that I started recently (maybe not recently enough in retrospect) is to double check with the coaches if any of the skaters have a preferred pronoun, gender neutral or otherwise.
It’s a small thing, it takes two seconds of my time. If a skater doesn’t identify as a female, I shouldn’t be the asshole throwing around female pronouns to a crowd of derby fans, misrepresenting them and their identity.
There’s something about subcultures accepting other subcultures that made that easy for me to do. I’m a straight, cisgender male. I have no direct experience with any sort of gender based discrimination. But, I’ve always thought of myself as LGBT friendly. I questioned my own sexuality a lot in highschool, wondering if I was gay or bi, one of my best friends in high school was a gay woman (who would go on to get a PhD in Art History and Gender & Women’s Studies) and I made plenty of queer and trans friends in college. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
