PERSPECTIVES
Advocating for pronoun usage on campus Words, Photo & Design | Olivia Giorgio
In the spring of 2021, I had a huge final project for my Art Therapy class, Creative Community Development, that involved coming up with something to do with a community, whether at Mount Mary or a group outside of Mount Mary. Normally, group projects are an absolute chore for me, but this one was different. For once, I didn’t do all the work while my group members did nothing. The two other girls, who eventually became my friends, and I all put equal effort into this project. We came up with two ideas for our community project. One project focused on accommodations for Mount Mary students. The other idea was about pronouns and how we can normalize asking pronouns on campus. The pronoun idea made me realize that only one of my professors in the last two years asked what the students’ pronouns were.
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I started to experiment with my pronouns at the time going by she/they pronouns instead of she/her pronouns. Yet, no one knew that I was changing my pronouns because professors never asked. It made me wonder if anyone else on campus noticed this. We ended up going with the pronoun idea for our project since we all agreed that asking people’s pronouns should be normalized on campus. And the way we were going to help normalize asking pronouns was by making pins. We were originally going to make pins with different pronouns like she/her, he/him, they/them, she/they, he/they, etc., but we thought there wouldn’t be enough pins for all of those combinations. So what we settled on were pins that said, “Ask my pronouns,” hoping that seeing the pin would encourage people to ask.
