"they"

 I have finally reached the age when I just don't understand new things that everybody else younger seems to have no problem with.

I have spent my entire life knowing that "woke" was the past tense of "wake."  But now it's not.  I hear everybody talking about how this or that person is "woke" and even given the definition ("alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism") I can't quite get it into my head when it's being used in conversation.

And then there are gender situations.  I grew up with gay people in my life.  My grandparents had a gay couple who were good friends of theirs and so I never had any strange feeling about gay people.  Even trans people became normal after Christine Jorgensen her her sex change operation in the late 1950s.  
But I'm having difficultly with "non binary" people.  It's not that I don't accept them, it's just that I have a difficult time around having to use the pronoun "they" instead of "he" or "she."  I was thinking about this last night watching the Tony awards.

I was surprised when Alex Newell won an award for best actor and came to the stage to accept the award.

Newell was the first non-binary person to win a Tony and I learned that the pronoun to use is "they," not "he" or "she." In making thank you comments, they said, "For every trans, nonbinary, gender non-conforming human — whoever was told they couldn’t be, couldn’t be seen, this is for you…" Newell, wikipedia tells me, identifies as both non-binary and gender fluid."  I can't wrap my head around that! Not sure what that all means.

While I was working on Newell, J. Harrison Ghee won an actor award for Some Like It Hot.

Ghee played the Jack Lemmon role. Ghee also uses the pronoun "they" I have to shake my head when I read this in Wikipedia.  Ghee grew up the child of a Southern Baptist pastor and an educator in Fayetteville, North Carolina. They began playing cello in elementary school, later switching to play the bass. Ghee then learned to play trombone, so that they could be in the E. E. Smith High School marching band. After graduating high school in 2007, Ghee attended the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Ghee first tried drag in college when they played a female wrestler.

I have a friend who has a child who identified as binary and used the term "they" until she fell in love with a guy and decided to have a child and then went back  to using the female pronoun.

I guess at 80, I'm just not able to fully understand all of these new gender identifications or to use what I consider plural pronouns to refer to a single person.  Not that I don't accept them.  I just have a difficult time understanding them.

But I had no problem with the win of Bonnie Milligan for featured actress.  Milligan is not svelt and sexy and had this to say:

“I want to tell everybody that doesn’t maybe look like what the world is telling you you should look like, whether you’re not pretty enough, you’re not fit enough, your identity is not right, who you love isn’t right — that doesn’t matter, because guess what?” she said. “It’s right, and you belong somewhere.” 

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

Bonnie Milligan

                                                                                                                                                           

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