Something I noticed over these past few days that I find both heartening and a little amusing:
When I first saw the headlines popping up on Twitter and elsewhere that Elliot Page had announced his name and pronouns, I had no idea who this person was. I haven’t watched Umbrella Academy, and most of the headlines were something along the lines of “Umbrella Academy star Elliot Page…”, so it didn’t clue me in, and I just shrugged it off as someone who wasn’t in my awareness. It wasn’t until other headlines also mentioned “Juno” and some Juno-era pictures were shown that I figured it out.
And I think that’s pretty cool, because in all the news I was seeing in my feeds, not a single post or news headline was deadnaming or misgendering Elliot.
Sure, it’s likely that some amount of that is due to my particular circles of friends and acquaintances, who tend to be more aware of these sorts of things. But still, they were linking out to articles, some in fairly mainstream publications, so even if the person posting was being respectful, it wouldn’t have been a surprise if the news articles weren’t.
But it took me nearly a full day to clue in to why this person’s announcement was making so many headlines — and I think that’s pretty cool. I’ll happily spend a little time being mildly confused if it means that cultural progress is being made.