How to Stop Being Performative and Genuinely Help Trans People

Focus on the medical, legal, and economic disparities trans people face — not the pronouns in your bio.

Screenshot of a study titled “What’s in a pronoun: Exploring gender pronouns as an organizational identity-safety cue among sexual and gender minorities.” by Johnson, Pietri, Buck, and Daas (2021).

Recently, I was dismayed to read this article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, examining how companies benefit when their employees list pronoun in their bios. The paper really encapsulates the disjoint between trans folks’ medical and economic needs, and cis folk’s vested interest in turning trans allyship into a personal and corporate branding effort.

Study authors Johnson, Pietri, Buck, and Daas found that when employees at an organization listed their pronouns in their bios, cisgender participants felt more positively toward the organization, and were more likely to believe it was a safe place for LGBTQ folks. In two follow-up studies that included trans participants, this effect was found to hold regardless of whether the company merely encouraged employees to list their pronouns, or required them to do so.

I saw a lot of cis people spreading this study around online, presenting it as proof that listing pronouns is a meaningful act of trans inclusion. But there are several massive problems with the paper’s methodology, and with how people have interpreted its conclusions. And examining these…