It’s understandable why: Fewer than twenty states legally accomodate people who would prefer their official identification documents to include a gender marker other than “M” or “F”. Not all nonbinary people occupy a space where they feel comfortable using “they” pronouns. There are good reasons why nonbinary people do not prefer they/them pronouns, and there are good reasons why people who are not nonbinary do prefer they/them pronouns. They are not explicitly or exclusively nonbinary. Merriam-Webster made headlines a few weeks ago when it announced that it was adding a new meaning to the pronoun “they,” as a word “used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.” Though a welcome sign of progress, this definition is nevertheless misleading, because while nonbinary identity and a preference for “they” pronouns are often related, they are conceptually distinct. His response implied that while many nonbinary people do prefer to be referred to by they/them pronouns, many do not that while most people who are not nonbinary (to use the term broadly) do not prefer to be referred to by they/them pronouns, some, in fact, do. Yet in the years following that night, I’d grow to appreciate how Jerome had reacted to my first stab at coming out, when I had assumed that my wish to use they/them pronouns was inextricably tied to being nonbinary. This prompted a slightly more dramatic response, though certainly not overblown, which I valued. Later that night, I would tell Jerome that I no longer identified as a boy and that I was pretty confident I was nonbinary. But Jerome seemed to react as if I had told him that I was changing majors, not eschewing the gender I was assigned at birth and had lived as, with increasing degrees of discomfort, for over twenty years. I had expected wide eyes, a gasp, maybe even a tear.

What does pronoun mean