An advancing Tennesse bill by Republican Senator Mike Bell attempts to reduce all youth in the state to their anatomy through a violent policing of bodies that weaponizes pronouns as a mode of discrimination by non-supportive teachers against their students.

The Tennesse bill would give public school teachers or employees the power to refuse using a student’s accurate pronoun so that they are not civilly liable for misgendering a student and are not subjected to any action by their workplace, against their misgendering of a student.

“Tennessee's House of Representatives passed the measure on Monday by a 67-to-25 vote, and the bill advanced in a state Senate committee on Tuesday. Advocates say that this type of legislation has previously been proposed in West Virginia and Rhode Island, but has never passed through a state's legislative chamber,” NBC News reports.

Trans folks are often read as ‘hyper-sensitive’ because of cisgender-misperceptions about the significance of names and pronouns. These misperceived notions grow into a generalization towards all people – automatically dismissing the multitudes of transness.

There is no one-size-fits all guide to pronouns – some folks might use any or all pronouns, and might feel that pronouns can be done away with altogether. The relationship with pronouns, and their significance may change over time. The baseline is to respect the right to self-determination.

Cisgender folks sometimes seem to forget that they have pronouns too, and that being misgendered and deadnamed stems from a violent, binary policing of all bodies.

When you misgender or deadname someone on purpose, it basically means that you are reducing that person to your perception of their body, and that they don’t have the right to self determination.

It continues to feed into the harmful narratives that perpetuate cisgender-heterosexual inscurities painting our bodies as controversies, and leading to fatal violence that is increasingly used again trans women and femme folks at intersecting marginalized identites.