If you are a teacher, you might recognize the following scenario. It’s the beginning of the academic term, and you’re pulling together syllabi, texts, and notes for your first class meetings. You check your email and find a few messages from new students giving you information they consider crucial. Sometimes it’s the names they go by. I am not talking about nicknames or using middle instead of first names or just the initials of first and middle birth names. These students most decidedly do not want to be deadnamed in class—and that new term signals the importance of this issue to them. Rather, these students have taken up new names reflective of their ongoing self-fashioning, and it is these names they need you to acknowledge and use. Such announcements typically contain in the signature line the student’s preference in pronoun use (masculine, feminine, plural, or newly invented forms such as xe, xem, and xyrs). Now imagine remembering the individual pronoun preferences of a class of, say, thirty students. Of course, the ready solution to constant confusion and possible offense is to learn every student’s name (of choice) and to use it instead of any pronouns beyond “you” (which to me always sounds a bit rude). Less easy to know how to handle are other personal markers students also share in emails: “I am trans*” or “I am nonbinary” or “I am a cis-gender male.” What is each declaration trying to say? What is one supposed to do with this information? Why or how does this matter, one asks oneself, in a course on American realist and naturalist literature?