Q Toon: Persona Non Binarii

Timothy LeDuc, who identifies as gay and non-binary, and who uses they/them/their pronouns when talking about themselves in the third person, and their partner, Ashley Cain-Gribble, have made it onto the United States' Olympic figure skating team in Beijing next month.

NASHVILLE — Early Sunday morning, U.S. Figure Skating made official what was clearly obvious the previous night: The pairs skating team of Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc that won the U.S. figure skating championships Saturday will be going to the Beijing Olympics.

The announcement meant LeDuc, who identifies as nonbinary, will become the first openly nonbinary Winter Olympian.

“It’s really exciting, but I hope that the narrative does not center around me and my journey and my accomplishments but that the narrative switches to queer people having the opportunity to be open and be authentic to themselves and everything that makes them unique and still achieve in sport,” LeDuc said after the team announcement at Bridgestone Arena. “So often queer people have to adjust themselves and sacrifice authenticity to achieve success.”

The singular plural pronouns will undoubtedly pose a challenge to some of the announcers broadcasting the games on NBC and other countries' networks. Sooner or later, someone is going to lapse into the habit of referring to the individual skater as he or him; or someone else is going to be confused as to whether they/them refers to one or both skaters.

English speakers became accustomed centuries ago to the plural "you/you/your" displacing the singular "thou/thee/thy." If this "they/them/their" usage becomes standard, I suppose "they-all" — contracted to "th'all"— will take root in Dixie, and "thinz" in Pittsburgh.

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I will admit that I had some difficulty reaching a punch line for the above cartoon, and I thought that appending a reference to Abbott and Costello's famed "Who's On First" sketch would resonate.

Not, it turns out, with the editor and publishers at the syndicate office, none of whom recognized the reference.

Maybe I should have drawn Abbott and Costello watching the television coverage. Or maybe nobody under the age of Dirt remembers Abbott and Costello any more.

Oh, well. My editor asked for a "tweak" to the cartoon, which is not as easy as "tweaking" a text editorial. Ideally, I could have had the TV announcers veer into the routine: 

Tara: "Okay. Let's say Timothy and Ashley skate out onto the rink together. Who's non-binary?"

Johnny: "Who's on first."

Tara: "Nobody's on first, they skated out together."

And on and on. But I didn't have six more panels to work What, I Don't Know, Tomorrow, Because, and I Don't Care into the mix. For that matter, I didn't even have a whole lot of space in that fourth panel for my television viewers to say much in the first place.

So anyway, here's the change I made to the final panel for my editors and you young whippersnappers out there.

I'm hoping you don't have to be familiar with Spike Jones for this.