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The Oscar-winning actress explains how she has learned the importance of respecting a person's identity and pronouns.
Famed actress, activist, and long-time LGBTQ+ ally Jane Fonda is showing that it’s never too late to learn a new pronoun. In a recent interview with The New York Times, the 82 years young American icon revealed how she is doing her part to support the community by changing her process around pronouns.
“I’ve been working with really young people,” Fonda revealed. “When you meet them, they give the pronouns that they go by. I’m going on 83. Do I really have to say what pronouns I go by, you know? The answer is yes and there’s a learning curve.”
Fonda is legendary for not just her artistic performances on the screen, but also her body of activism over the course of her life and career. The two-time Oscar-winner for Best Actress famously faced down controversy in the 1960s and ‘70s with her public opposition to the Vietnam War. Last year she was arrested multiple times during a series of protests she helped to lead around climate change. She has also been an early and strong supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, from campaigning alongside the late Harvey Milk to speaking out more recently in support of marriage equality.
“I think both the LGBT movement and the women’s movement have come a long way,” Fonda told Out in 2015. “But there’s still so far to go. We have marriage equality, yes. But look what’s happening with the right to use bathrooms. It’s just hard to believe what the right wing is up to, what they’re trying to do.”
Fonda is aware of the platform her celebrity status affords, and plans on using it to spread the message of equality, acceptance, and inclusion.
“Do you know what a repeater is?” Fonda told Dowd and The New York Times. “Repeaters are the antennae that you see on top of mountains. They don’t originate the signals, but the bottom-of-the-valley signals get picked up and then the repeaters take them from the valley and spread them to a much wider audience. That’s what celebrities are.”
Fonda’s consideration of a person’s preferred pronouns is just another way in which the actor and activist is serving as a repeater for the world at large, showing others how to be an ally and supporter of the LGBTQ+ community.
“We need to be allies,” she told Out in 2015. “There’s a lot we can learn from what’s happening in your movement.”
