Words Are How We Show Up

On language, identity, and the small act of holding trust.

I want to tell you about a moment that stayed with me.

A young person — someone bright and searching and still becoming — said at an event in our

family, quietly and with some courage: “I’m gay”

They watched my face when they said it. I noticed that. The watching.

The waiting to see what I would do with the thing they’d just handed me.

And I thought: what an act of trust. What a brave thing, to offer someone the true shape of

yourself and wait to see if they’ll hold it carefully.

This young person then said to my daughter: “Gee, that was easy.”

I have been thinking about language ever since.

Language is not just description. It is action.

We tend to think of words as neutral — as containers we pour meaning into, then pass along.

But language does something. It does not simply reflect the world; it shapes it. Every time we

name something, we make a claim about its reality.

Every time we refuse a name, we make a different claim.

When someone tells you who they are — when they offer you the word that fits them, the

pronoun that makes them visible to themselves — and you use it, you are saying something.

Not just about grammar. About them. You are saying: I see you. I believe you.

You are real to me.

And when you don’t — when you stumble deliberately, or sigh, or say “I just can’t keep up with it

all” — you are also saying something. Whether you mean to or not.

You are saying: the effort of you is too much for me.

Language does shift and expand, and keeping pace takes effort, and effort takes energy, and

not everyone has an abundance of that on any given day.

These are real things. I am not dismissing them.

But here is what I keep coming back to: we learn new language all the time. Without complaint.

Without drama. Without declaring it an imposition on our way of being in the world.

We learn the names of new colleagues, new neighbours, new partners. We learn the difference

between a latte and a flat white because it matters to the person ordering. We learn the

preferred shortened form of a name — not Elizabeth, Liz; not Michael, Mike — without treating it

as a philosophical burden.

We do all of this because we understand, instinctively, that getting someone’s name right is a

basic form of respect. That it costs us very little and means a great deal to them.

This is no different. It only feels different because it is newer, and because some of us were

taught — implicitly, by the culture we swam in — that certain identities were not quite real

enough to require accommodation. That teaching was wrong. The newness will pass.

What the young voices are telling us.

I listen to young people talk about identity with something close to wonder. Not because

everything they say is fully formed — they’re still becoming, as we all are — but because of the

clarity with which they name their own experience. The vocabulary they have for inner life that

many of us were never given.

When a young person says I am they, they are not asking for confusion. They are offering

precision. They are saying: the words you have been using for me do not fit, and here is a word

that does. They are doing the hard work of self-knowledge and handing us the simple gift of the

result.

The least we can do is receive it.

Not perfectly — we will stumble, and that is allowed, provided we correct ourselves without

theatre and keep going. But willingly. Openly. With the understanding that this small linguistic

shift is not about us at all. It never was.

Gee, that was easy.

There it is again. Still surprising me.

You matter to me.

I think about that young person watching my face. About what they were really asking, beneath

the words.

They weren’t asking me to understand everything. They weren’t asking for a seminar or a

statement or a perfectly calibrated response. They were asking something much older and

simpler than any of that: Do you still love me? Am I still safe here? Will you hold this carefully?

And using the word they have given me for themselves — consistently, without fanfare, without

making it a moment each time — is my answer. It is the most direct way I know to say: yes. You

are seen here. You are whole here. You matter to me.

That’s not politics. That’s not ideology. That is the most basic human contract: I will take care

with the words I use for you, because you are worth taking care with.

Today I am grateful for the young people who still show us how to be braver, more precise,

more honest with each other. For the gift of trust offered across a room, and the extraordinary

ordinary act of receiving it well.

More soon, Jenny x