By Anna Hovey

Shige Sakurai, director of leadership initiatives and associate director at the LGBT Equity Center, founded the first ever International Pronouns Day, which took place Oct. 17.

The day of recognition seeks to make asking and respecting gender pronouns an everyday standard.

Sakurai, who goes by they/them pronouns, endured abusive and threatening comments in college for their gender nonconformity and activism against “anti-queer and misogynistic hate speech,” according to an article they wrote in October.

After being featured on CNN last year for becoming the first person in the United States to receive a non-binary driver’s license, Sakurai said they received hateful comments via Facebook, and an editorial writer for The Washington Times purposely misgendered them, claiming to know the sex listed on their birth certificate.

“These kinds of threats of violence, hate speech, lies, and erasure of my existence,” Sakurai wrote in their article, “is what underlies the need to address good practices around personal pronouns and inclusive language. These examples remind me that starting with something as simple as addressing people respectfully can be powerful.”

Sakurai said the best way to determine someone’s pronouns is simply to ask.

Maria Aragon, who serves as president of UMD’s Pride Alliance, said they look up to Sakurai for consistently advocating the rights of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals. Our society is used to cis-normative pronouns (he/him and she/her), which can negatively impact gender-nonconforming people who are misgendered as a result, they said.

“As someone who was casually misgendered this morning, there is nothing more invalidating than attempting to share your pronouns and realizing that sometimes, even then, folks don’t recognize it,” Aragon, an English and film studies double major, said in an email.

To celebrate International Pronouns Day, Aragon sported one of the pronoun pins handed out by the LGBT Equity Center. UMD also celebrated with social media posts as well as a panel conversation and a professional development event.

International Pronouns Day has been endorsed by more than 300 organizations from around the world, according to Sakurai’s article.

Alexander Friedman, a junior psychology major with a certificate in LGBT studies, said he was “super excited” for the first ever International Pronouns Day. To celebrate, he posted about the day on Facebook, reached out to his friends and wore his pronoun pins around campus.

“People are starting to…internationally recognize trans people as existing, which is huge,” Friedman said. “The fact that it’s being acknowledged is awesome.”

Friedman is hopeful that the introduction of International Pronouns Day will make LGBT students and staff, particularly those who are transgender or gender-nonconforming, feel more welcome at this university.

“It’s kind of becoming a more normalized aspect of being trans,” Friedman said. “It’s not weird to ask someone their pronouns [anymore].”

On the whole, Friedman said he has been happy with the university’s handling of LGBT issues on campus, and that the introduction of International Pronouns Day further reaffirmed this.

“Obviously, there’s the occasional incident with students doing something dumb or hateful,” Friedman said. “But the administration… has been overwhelmingly good.”