The Power of Pronouns is NOT in the Asking

One Book's Mission to Defy the Status Quo

by Maya Gonzalez

Everything changes when you become a parent. All your beliefs and ideals come to call, along with memories of your own childhood. It can be a lot to navigate a new baby on top of all the gender assumptions that start piling on. This can be especially challenging if you’re a queer/trans parent.

“He’s a little man, she’s a pretty princess,” can be overwhelming on so many levels.

Those first few years my partner and I did our best, but by the time our kid turned 4, we had to get real for real.

Gender policing was coming in hot and heavy. We were seeing kids that we had known for years on the playground and in classes suddenly shutting down and adopting “appropriate gender roles.”

It was all a bit mind boggling, especially in San Francisco’s Castro district, a historically gay neighborhood. If it was happening here, how could we meet the incoming ocean of assumptions and stereotypes that lie beyond our city!?!? What’s more, how could we talk to our kid about it?!? 

My partner started using pronouns to interrupt the constant stereotypical gender messaging our kid was being served. For example, he would reference 6 different people from feminine to masculine who all used the same pronoun. Rigid ideas about “SHE wears this and looks like this” and “HE wears this and looks like this” started to melt away. It was a constant practice, but without a lot of complicated talk, our kid deepened their understanding of how to treat a person like a person without gender overlays. 

 

Original concept sketch by Matthew (with a little help from our then 4 year old)

In 2017, we published the first gender-inclusive pronoun book for kids, They She He Me: Free to Be!. We were actively using pronouns to break down assumptions with our kid at home and it was working beautifully. We put a lot of support and language in the back of the book to show adults how to talk to kids about it.

The trick with any book, of course, is how does it translate into the current culture? Home culture is often very different than school, work, grocery store, church or family event culture…

We weren’t encouraging our kid to ask for pronouns. We actively used a formal singular they or a person’s name. Personal pronouns became just that. Something personal. You learned pronouns through getting to know someone personally. More than anything this takes the pressure off of gender nonconforming kids to come forward with their pronoun in pubic or educational settings, either when no one else was, or when other people did and their pronouns did not interrupt gender assumptions.

 

Sample spread from They She He Me: Free to Be!

There’s zero risk when someone shares their pronouns and they fulfill assumptions. There’s potentially nothing but risk when someone shares their pronouns and they do not fulfill assumptions. As Queer/Trans parents of a nonbinary kid, we were acutely aware of this power dynamic and wanted to create a dynamic that could support our kid not just now, but throughout life.

Sample spread from They She He Me: Free to Be!

 

When I realized our pronoun book was often being framed as a way to ask for pronouns, instead of address and break down the underlying stereotypes attached to pronouns, I was concerned.

I appreciate that any kind of progress is being made for Queer/Trans people in our society, but sharing and asking for pronouns is a slippery slope. It lays all the responsibility, pressure and emotional work on Queer/Trans people, including kids, to come forward and often be vulnerable.

Sometimes QueerTrans people are not ready to share their pronoun and are forced to mispronoun themselves and also give others permission to mispronoun them. Sometimes they are still discovering, are in a time of flux or even fluid. Sometimes it’s not a fully safe environment. Sometimes it’s not anyone else’s business. No matter the reason, a one size fits all of asking for pronouns has gotten into place. In fact, it has become a signal of safe space, but it isn’t always, especially for kids. Sharing pronouns doesn’t fundamentally change assumptions. In fact, a person’s assumptions could potentially remain fully intact.

 

In 2019 we took our pronoun kids from the book, gave them names that followed the alphabet and made an educational card deck. We wanted to create more reflection and hoped that actually playing with 52 gender nonconforming kids on upper and lower case letters would make understanding gender diversity even more accessible. A lot of what we learned about gender we share in the mini support deck, including what we call the Pronoun Protocol.

The cards are not about learning more pronouns or the importance of pronouns. Pronouns are how we use language to translate ourselves into the culture. They’re valuable. But if we’re after real respect and lasting change, we have to go deeper. We need to deal with the assumptions that are tied to pronouns, which means being able to see those assumptions.

The Playing with Pronouns card deck helps us notice how we all make assumptions about who people are, even who people get to be based on their body assignment at birth or how they look or act or dress or even what pronoun they use.

For kids it means staying open and curious. For adults it means looking at how we have been taught to categorize people and have discomfort with the unknown. It means looking at ourselves and what gender assumptions we fulfill. Were these conscious choices? Or were we unconsciously corralled into place? Are we doing that to kids?

Lasting change means taking responsibility for the assumptions we’re taught and how we perpetuate them inside and out. Are we ready to let people be exactly who they are without knowing what pronoun they use? Because as much as pronouns matter, what matters more is everyone feeling respected and perfectly free to be exactly who they are all the time no matter what. I want that for my kid. I want that for me. I want that for everybody.

They She He Me: Free to Be! is still twisting and turning through the culture. There are now a plethora of pronoun books. It has been a tornado of a ride and we’re still not done.

All I know at the end of the day is that learning to treat each other like people instead of gender roles is a huge leap into a new world. It’s a lot more than pronouns and I’m ready for it!

Let’s heal deeper and be freer this Pride!

Learn more about the card deck: www.playingwithpronouns.com

Maya Gonzalez is an award-winning children’s book artist, author, activist and progressive educator. Maya's work addresses systemic inequity in relation to race/ethnicity, sexism and cissexism using children’s books as radical agents of change and healing, both personally and culturally. Maya co-founded Reflection Press, a POC, queer and trans owned independent publishing house that uses holistic, nature-based, and anti-oppression frameworks in their books and materials for kids and grown-ups. Maya is also the creator of the Gender Wheel, a tool to express the dynamic, infinite and inclusive reality of gender, and provides lectures and workshops to educators, parents and caregivers. 

 

Website: www.mayagonzalez.com
Instagram: @mzmayagonzalez and @genderwheel

Color Me INFINITE PRIDE

 

Conveying the Deeper Stories Through Art

by Maya Gonzalez

We know that art can heal.  But how do we get there? 

More than just illustrating text, how do we use art to tell the unspoken stories beneath the words? The stories of belonging, of pride, of freedom to be… How do we as creators reach in and express out in a way that kids can feel these deeper messages when they look at our books...

...even if no words are spoken.

In-process art from The Gender and Infinity Book for Kids

 
I lost my voice once. It was gone for years. If I did write something, I would hide it away. It was back when much writing was still done by hand or on a typewriter. I would take the pages of an accidental poem or story and fold it up and slip it between random books on one of my shelves. I couldn’t handle what I was writing then, but I trusted that one day it would be there when I needed it or maybe understood it better.
 
During that time of mostly silence, I invested in my visual vocabulary. I poured my heart into my drawings and honed the language of the nonverbal. My art began as a place to heal and find my own reflection, but the stronger and more embodied I became, the more my art came in service to my community. On the journey, I let go of my own image and focused on conveying my growing experience of belonging. This is what I healed into and this is what I wanted to pass on, especially to LGBTQI+ and BIPOC kids.
 
In my picture book illustrations I use all the things that healed me in real life. One of the most important things is somatic awareness - or awareness of the body. Holding hands, laying in the grass, looking up into the sky…I use physical experience and sensation as a touchstone to show that my characters are in their bodies, connected to others and in their environment. They are present and they belong.

 

Creating Safe Space on the page - art from I Can Be...Me!

In I Can Be...Me! written by Lesléa Newman and illustrated by me, the kids have the freedom to freely explore who they are without stereotypical gender expectations or pressure to conform. To this end of full and free embodiment, the kids have their own space, take up space, make space, create space, and feel their safe space--to be and do everything they want to. More than clothes and activities, their freedom and presence is visible in their body postures, and their spatial relation to the page. Up front, in your face, full circle, all around…

Creating their magical, mythical safe space was probably my favorite part. I still imagine myself there.

Exploring perspective and experience to convey belonging
In-process art from The Gender and Infinity Book for Kids

 

In my upcoming Gender and Infinity Book for Kids, the kids are a part of nature’s massive flow of infinite diversity all around them. I play a lot with perspective and experience. Kids are looking up into the trees, swimming underwater, gazing into the night, dancing amidst all the different elements of the earth. They are in their bodies amidst the lush and colorful flow of nature. Later in the book the imagery goes stark with pink and blue gender boxes on white backgrounds conveying the pressure on kids to conform in comparison to the lushness of nature’s diversity from the opening spreads.
 
I want to create illustrations that plumb the mystery of our being and celebrate our infinite diversity in a way that kids can feel in their hearts beyond words. People say nice things about my work, but I can’t know for sure if I’m catching infinity or conveying real inner freedom and belonging. I’m still working on it. Sometimes the only thing to do is to go nonverbal and play. 

Grab some color pencils and color some Pride with me!
INFINITE PRIDE! Happy pride! 

Download your Infinite Pride coloring page on the Gender Wheel website. 

Learn more about the Infinite Diversity of Nature:

Maya Gonzalez is an award-winning children’s book artist, author, activist and progressive educator. Maya's work addresses systemic inequity in relation to race/ethnicity, sexism and cissexism using children’s books as radical agents of change and healing, both personally and culturally. Maya co-founded Reflection Press, a POC, queer and trans owned independent publishing house that uses holistic, nature-based, and anti-oppression frameworks in their books and materials for kids and grown-ups. Maya is also the creator of the Gender Wheel, a tool to express the dynamic, infinite and inclusive reality of gender, and provides lectures and workshops to educators, parents and caregivers. 

Website: www.mayagonzalez.com
Instagram: @mzmayagonzalez and @genderwheel

The bias no one talks about when bringing nonbinary representation to children's books

I Can Be...Me, "unbiased" reviews, and what keeps me strong in the face of discrimination 

by Maya Gonzalez 

I illustrated the recently released, I Can Be...Me written by Lesléa Newman, the author who wrote Heather Has Two Mommies in 1989. Lesléa’s written over 70 other books including Sparkle Boy, The Fairest in the Land and more with LGBTQ themes. I Can Be...Me is written in couplets and provides a back and forth volley of options for playing, feelings and clothing. It shows kids that they can do anything and everything they want, including break down gender norms.

Break down gender norms? When I read the manuscript, I thought what a beautiful opportunity to show kids’ natural fluidity. A small community of kids flew into my imagination and onto the page—romping in all their expansive, nonbinary glory through the text. Each one embodied inclusion and showed that a person doesn’t have to be this OR that. To be your full self, you can freely be and do and feel this AND that.  

Initial Sketch from the children's book, I Can Be...Me

Being so clear and free in the illustrations felt amazing. As a genderqueer femme working nearly exclusively with queer children’s book authors over the years, I’ve coded queerness into all of the books I’ve illustrated. But in those books the focus was on Latinx kid lit, so our queerness as the creators was not talked about. It was never denied, but it was never brought up in relation to our books.

I’ve taken moves to change that. This book is one of them. I have to say it feels good to be OUT in traditional publishing. No coding. Just queering. I’m grateful for the work Lesléa has done for so long here. There aren’t many of us OUT in the industry and fewer of us who are BIPOC and OUT. Saying yes to this book felt like a significant part of my children’s book journey.

But as the characters developed and I spent my days painting them onto the spreads, I could hear the questions that readers might ask.

“Is that a boy or a girl?”

“What are they really?”

As the parent of a nonbinary kid and partnered with a person of trans experience, I am more than familiar with the constant questioning. I cannot count the times my kid has been asked what they are. The projections and pressure laid on kids (and adults) about who they should be and how they should act and how that should be clear are embedded in these questions. This is a part of our culture’s gender policing. Gender conformance is at the core of nearly all bullying and this is how it begins when kids are very young.

Naturally, a bit of the parent-bear rose up in me. These weren’t just characters I had made up for a book. The kids in I Can Be...Me are based on people I know or see in my community. I felt protective. I asked if I could include an illustrator’s note. In it I asked readers to not make assumptions, the kids “are who they are, and they are everything they want to be…The practice is to try to keep your mind and your heart open and see kids as people.”

Needless to say, I learned the lesson perhaps all parents learn. We can support our kids, but we cannot shield our kids, even our literary ones, from the world and its limitations. In one of the first reviews from an organization that specifically states that it is “unbiased,” the reviewer somehow wrangled a way to bring in the questions. Through classic cherry picking, re-framing the subject and redirection through inserting a question where there was none, the reviewer’s discomfort with the unknown and gender nonconformity clearly comes into view. It was all summed up in just one line. “With no characters gendered in the text, the conversation about ‘who any of these kids are’ is left as a more open-ended question.”

Implicit bias is amazing to witness. It’s so powerful. I’m asking my readers to not make assumptions and to just let the kids be. The kids in the book are stating clearly that they know who they are and what they’re doing. They’re good. There are no questions.

Yes, but who are these kids really? I can’t tell who is a boy and who is a girl? How can I make sense out of this?

These are “the open-ended questions” lurking inside their review. They are not only showing their own discomfort, they are demonstrating the kind of constant pressure our kids experience in our society to conform, comply and categorize themselves all the time. They can’t just BE. Just BEing is seen as unacceptable, even dangerous to some people.

What if I treat you like a boy, but you’re female? What if I treat you like a girl, but you’re male?

This is so much more than one review. This is a window into the world at large. This is the playground and the classroom. On the extreme end conservatives don’t want their kids to know that LGBTQ+ people even exist, let alone feel free to just BE. I imagine like me, they think they can shield their kids from the world in some way.

But people like me and my family do exist and none of us can shield our kids from the world. We can show our kids that the world is our learning ground. We can go OUT and BE who we are and find our way, together. It can be confusing. There appears to be two hugely opposing sides, conservatives and liberals. Ironically, I think most folks are somewhere in the middle with good hearts and layers of old messaging and outdated education.

Things are changing fast. How do we make sense out of it all, and more importantly, how do we talk to our kids about it? Can we find our ground to see through the hype and the bias? How do we stay strong in our LGBTQI+ family? And our work?

For me one of the biggest questions I grapple with is how do we create bridges that will help us reconnect with each other and come together? I want lasting change.

I’ll confess, there’s a part of me that sometimes gets so overwhelmed with it all that I just want to go hide in a cave with my family and my paints. The stories and the issues and the sides seem too convoluted, conflicted and inflamed. If it weren’t for the Gender Wheel I may have walked away years ago. It’s the only thing that keeps me coming back and finding my way. I could not have guessed in 2010, when I first published the Gender Wheel that it would become my compass through these tumultuous times and give me the ability to see through everything, including a book review embedded with implicit bias.

The Gender Wheel can hold me because it’s based in nature. The Wheel is both a physical educational tool, and an approach that shows the reality of nature’s immense diversity and our place in it. It helps us understand and value nonbinary, gender nonconforming, trans people and everybody else through a holistic perspective. It expands our understanding to see that no one can be left out. The Gender Wheel moves us away from politics and moves us toward nature. It provides a place in the center where we can find our commonality and slowly, but surely all come together again.

This month my partner and I will be releasing our first Gender Wheel newsletter and one of the first things I’m going to share is how to use the Gender Wheel Educational Tool to look at all the amazing characters that are in I Can Be...Me. There is a place for everybody on the Gender Wheel because everyone is necessary and everyone belongs.

Learn more at www.genderwheel.com and join our mailing list.

It’s a powerful time to be OUT in the children’s book industry.
We’re here. We’re queer. We make books! Happy Pride month, dahlings!!!!

xomaya

Maya Gonzalez is an award-winning children’s book artist, author, activist and progressive educator. Maya's work addresses systemic inequity in relation to race/ethnicity, sexism and cissexism using children’s books as radical agents of change and healing, both personally and culturally. Maya co-founded Reflection Press, a POC, queer and trans owned independent publishing house that uses holistic, nature-based, and anti-oppression frameworks in their books and materials for kids and grown-ups. Maya is also the creator of the Gender Wheel, a tool to express the dynamic, infinite and inclusive reality of gender, and provides lectures and workshops to educators, parents and caregivers. 

Website: www.mayagonzalez.com
Instagram: @mzmayagonzalez and @genderwheel