Talking the Talk

By Jane Haladay

"OK, what's 'intersex' again?" I asked my housemate back in California over the phone from my motel room.

"That's a geometry term for the point at which two lines cross," he answered.

"Very funny. Come on, now. I have to get this straight."

"Kindly do not use those hetero-normative adjectives with me," he replied.

"Daniel, please! Help me out, I'm dying here!"

It was late the first night of my two-day job interview at a prestigious Midwestern liberal-arts college. I was one of two finalists interviewing for a postdoctoral fellowship, and though I'd come with all the appropriate credentials, including a Ph.D. earned less than a year earlier, I already felt that the cutting edge of my gender-studies lexicon was about as sharp as a butter knife.

I hadn't felt that at other interviews. It was this place, with its zeal for academic jargon, that scared me.

In a particularly cruel hazing ritual, my interviews that first day were spaced 30 minutes apart between breakfast at 8 a.m. and dinner with students at 6 p.m., after which my job talk was slated for 8 p.m.

Did they want to see me crack? I refused to give them the satisfaction, then pondered the fact that I already felt myself on adversarial terms with people who might soon be my colleagues. It didn't bode well.

As I walked from building to building that first day, I read fliers in the stairwells advertising happenings like this one: "The Ascension of Polyvocality in Inter-Ethnic Labor Discourses Across the Transnational Marketplace. Student brown bag lunch in Harrington Hall, February 10 at noon. Free chips and salsa!"

I understood about the brown-bag lunch and free chips, but the meaning of the lecture title left me completely bewildered and slightly anxious. Who were the students who would show up for this conversation? Who were the students who organized it? What would their brown-bag lunches consist of? What about their futures? Would I be able to teach students who used words like the ones in the flier without having to use them myself? Would there be enough chips and salsa?

Earlier that evening, I had met with undergraduates in the humanities program sponsoring the fellowship. My faculty guide led me into a comfortable room in the Multicultural/LGBT Student Center, where about 12 students were gathered around open boxes of pizza and bottles of soda on a coffee table. A few looked up and smiled at me, and my faculty escort called one of them over and introduced her.

"Leslie, this is Dr. Haladay from the University of California. I'll leave her to speak with all of you until around 7:30, then I'll come and take her over to the job talk."

"OK," said Leslie, a pale young woman with short black hair and Buddy Holly glasses. "Nice to meet you, Dr. Haladay. Should we start off by introducing ourselves?"

Leslie asked the students to assemble in a circle and told them what was happening. "OK, we're starting with introductions, everybody, so why don't we all say our name, our year in school, our major, and our pronoun. I'll start."

I suddenly felt like I was back in the stairwell trying to decode one of the fliers. Pronoun? I didn't have time to dwell on it.

"My name is Leslie, I'm a fourth year in comparative ethnic, gender, and global studies, and I go by 'he.'" I stared at Leslie a little too long as I tried to grasp "his" words and readjust my obviously gender-biased and inaccurate first impression. Then I smiled, probably too much.

The next person in the circle was a young Latina with thick, long hair and a red hair band. "My name is Nana, I'm queer, and I go by 'she,'" said Nana. "I'm in sociology, and I'm about to graduate. Yay!"

Jonny wore a black leather vest and motorcycle boots, and had multiple facial piercings, sparkling blue eye shadow, and a goatee -- and also claimed the pronoun "she."

Three-quarters of the way around the circle, Gabriel introduced himself. He was a quiet young person who had looked like a man when we had first started going around the circle, and who, to my relief, actually was one. After meeting Leslie and Jonny I had begun to question my ability to discern certain general qualities about human beings through a visual reading. This experience was humbling, and it was nice to have Gabriel throw me a bone by claiming "he" as his pronoun.

It dawned on me that having a Ph.D. in ethnic studies with an emphasis in gender studies had probably only bent, but not broken, some of my archaic conceptions of gender identity. Born and raised in California, a San Francisco resident for 15 years with a diverse circle of friends, and fancying myself a liberal, I now found myself in a circle of strangers with a slice of cold pizza on my lap, deeply questioning my true capacity for thinking outside the box. Or was "box" a geometrically biased term?

About two introductions before my turn, I realized that I would, of course, have to identify myself with a pronominal declaration. That had never been asked of me, and up to this point my identifying pronoun had always seemed so clear. But, after all, this was an interview, and I was learning to expect the unexpected. Things that were taken for granted in the outside world -- like my female appearance marking me as someone who would probably be referred to as "she" -- were not taken for granted here.

Here, I was to make myself and my intentions explicit. OK, I thought, I can dig it; no biggie. The students looked at me with pleasant expectation after they had all introduced themselves. "Well, my name is Jane Haladay, as you know," I began. "My Ph.D. is in ethnic studies, with a designated emphasis in women's studies." I was definitely hedging, stalling for time, thinking of other details I could toss out to avoid the inevitable. Finally, I succumbed. "And I go by ... she."

Later it occurred to me that the entire pronoun-identification process was unnecessary because people speaking to one another directly use the ungendered pronoun "you" or the person's name. Still, maybe it came in handy to know pronouns when they wanted to talk behind one another's backs.

After meeting with the students, I had a short break before my job talk. I asked Leslie, "Is there a restroom I might use?" She pointed me around the corner. There was only one door so I knew it had to be the bathroom. But there was no universal icon of a male with two stick legs or a female with a triangle dress demarcating the water closet here. No words announcing "Men," "Women," "Unisex," "Other," or "All of the Above." Nothing as simple, even, as the words "Restroom," "Toilet," "Facilities," or "Loo."

Instead, there was a plaque inscribed with a block of prose in rather small writing explaining the gendered politics of the public toilet. I wish I had written down the exact wording, although that might have looked a little strange. It said something about antiquated iconography, dialectical challenges embedded in the politics of public spaces, and the matrix of gay, lesbian, trans- and cross-gendered, intersex, and otherly abled identities. It also said something about washing your hands thoroughly and limiting your use of paper towels.

Later, after recounting my mind-boggling day to Daniel, I fell back on the motel-room bed, exhausted. Have I come to all this too late? I wondered. It's entirely possible. Can an old dog be taught new tricks? I wasn't so sure anymore. Ah, come on, I told myself; you still know stuff. It's just different stuff from what some of these young multigendered undergraduates know. Ready for a hot bath, I walked toward the bathroom and pushed open the blank painted door, grateful that I didn't have to read a manifesto before entering.