In transition
When even Canada's top LGBT publication struggles to find the right words, will journalists ever accurately reflect the complexities within the trans community?
Alyssa Garrison
January 1, 2013
http://www.rrj.ca/m25737/Elisha Lim, a well-known Canadian queer activist, graphic novelist and celebrated artist, hoped the transition into living as gender queer—an identity that rejects the limitations of the binary female and male, and trades "she" for "they" and "her" for "their"—would be relatively easy. The pronoun change was quickly becoming a contemporary trend in Lim's community: many of their acquaintances were already using gender neutral pronouns. But when Xtra, Canada's largest gay and lesbian newspaper, approached the artist for an interview on their work at Toronto's Feminist Art Gallery (->-bleeped-<-) in April 2011, Lim found resistance where they least expected it. When Lim tried to implement the neutral pronoun in an interview with Xtra, it refused.
"There was this one moment where I said I prefer the pronoun 'they,'" Lim says. "It was kind of my shaky first attempt so I wasn't too confident about it, and the interviewer sort of laughed and said, 'We're not going to use that. But anyway what about...?' I walked away after the interview and thought, 'Now wait just one minute, I think that I should be mad!'"
Lim sent an e-mail to Xtra's editor in protest. A day later, with no reply, Lim took to Facebook. It started with a casual status on Lim's personal wall—something along the lines of: I can't believe Xtra won't let me use "they."
