What's in a pronoun? Transgender gets judged by the San Diego Reader and KUSI

[Butterfly]

What's in a pronoun?
San Diego City Beat
By David Silva
April 8, 2009


http://www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/what_s_in_a_pronoun/7949/


Should a San Diego Reader reporter have honored the request of a transgender artist to use feminine pronouns when referring to her in a story? And what was up with local TV station KUSI not allowing the artist to appear on a program because she was dressed as a woman?

At the center of the controversy is Ernie Grimm's March 25 Reader cover story on Micha Cárdenas' performance-art  exhibit, Becoming Dragon, at UCSD. Cárdenas, who was born male but has undergone hormone therapy and identifies as female, says she was initially reluctant to be interviewed by a Reader reporter given the weekly's socially conservative leanings.

[Hazumu]

By David Silva

The Reader didn't run Grimm's piece until three months after the interview. During that interval, Cárdenas and Grimm traded e-mails in which she asked him to refer to her in print using feminine pronouns, and Grimm informed her he would not.

"My belief is that none of us chooses our gender, that our genders are chosen by our creator," Grim wrote to Cárdenas in February.

Grimm's story ran March 25 as the Reader's cover story. Throughout the long piece, Grimm referred to Cárdenas as a man: "he," "his," "him."