Apologies for the delay but here they are. As per usual, if your pronouns aren't in the list, please comment them here and I'll see that they get added.
UPDATE: “Undecided” and “None/Use Name” have now been added.
Apologies for the delay but here they are. As per usual, if your pronouns aren't in the list, please comment them here and I'll see that they get added.
UPDATE: “Undecided” and “None/Use Name” have now been added.
doe/deer was a serious ask and should be respected. I think the problem is that people aren't sure if the cat one was or was not and the person who requested it has been banned. I think they're just taking it out of caution. better to accidentally validate a joke than to make someone have to fight for their right to be recognized, right?
deleted by creator
yeah, the same way your name refers to you, pronouns do as well. both are also capable of gendering you. for example, I'm trans and I prefer to be gendered as a woman. same way, some NB people do in fact want to be gendered but as some gender that doesn't fit within our binary -- so there are no pronouns for them to use and they're forced to create new ones.
but really, this comes down to really basic respect for the identity and self-determination of another person. it ultimately does not matter why someone wishes to be referred to a certain way. would you balk at addressing someone by a particular name? what if they're parents gave it to them? what if it's a joke in your culture but serious in theirs? why do you get to be the arbiter of how someone else is referred to?
The only actual critique I can think of his is trying to use the pronounce "cat/girl" in a sentence will make it read very very weird??? Thats basically the only ilk I have with neopronouns
yeah, I'm worried about that one too. I don't want to normalize people not using people's flaired pronouns but at the same time I totally get the desire to err on the side of caution when it comes to not invalidating someone. easiest thing to do is practice.
doe/deer otoh is very easy because it sounds like other pronouns so it's more like learning a new meaning for a word (and dropping the old connotations) rather than something entirely fresh. in reality, both examples are the same but the similarity in sound helps for whatever reason.
its whatevs. It seems like the people actually using those flairs also have she/her or anypronoun marked as well so i will just use she/her or they
deleted by creator
how something is intended and how something is received are not the same thing. you might intend they/them to be heard as simply confirming the referent's gender but I, for example, will always feel like an alien when I'm called they. he makes me feel like I've been punched. she makes me feel happy. one of these is correct, the others are wrong.
the same thing is true of people with genders outside the binary. if they/them makes them feel weird, why would you insist on calling them that?
deleted by creator
yeah, that's the generally accepted social norm.
so you're assuming there is a single spectrum on which genders lie. the truth is that there are as many genders as there are people who have ever been or who ever will be. many cluster close enough to man and woman that they do for the majority. but for many others, their genders don't fall on a spectrum between man and woman.
deleted by creator
first, gender identity isn't something you prefer -- it's something that's innately part of you. if I could prefer not to be a woman, there's no way in hell I would have transitioned. second, pronouns are preferential when we're discussing how people label themselves but they aren't really preferential either. like I pointed out up thread, I don't exactly have a choice with my pronouns.
but yeah, generally when you're talking to someone and they tell you which pronouns they'd prefer (or their gender identity, though that's considerably more personal), you know none of: 1. their actual pronouns; 2. their gender identity; 3. very much about them at all except that at this moment in time they prefer these pronouns or that gender identity.
also, gender identity is not a person's whole identity by any stretch but it's certainly a very complicated and personal part of who they are. the only traits that make up gender identity are things internal to a person that you can't know from the outside. gender identity is at least as complicated as identity. "at least" because in many ways it's a social experience as well in a way that our identities are not (or, well, are not any more... that's kind of capitalism and alienation) -- I share my gender with other women and there's a collective experience in that, the same and different from your own experience of sharing masculinity with other men.
all I can say is that confusion about all this is very normal. understanding comes from experience and even with experience it's tough to make sense of. now imagine trying to figure all this out while trying to make yourself cis again and having continuous panic attacks about it and you've got a decent description of the trans experience, lol.
deleted by creator
The pronouns people want you to use are a preference, and that is why this situation is so confusing. The discussion is about people listing their prefered pronouns, which is only a related concept to gender identity. People are thinking of pronouns as a proxy for gender identity, which is only partially correct.
Now if you talk about "misgendering" someone, does that mean you assumed the wrong gender identity, or merely used the wrong pronouns? If someone is male-presenting and tells you their pronouns are he/him, but they identify as a nonbinary gender... if you call them he/him assuming they're a cis guy... have you "misgendered" them? Good question, I don't know the answer!
I am seriously asking for cat/boy.
if it's not a bit, I have your back.
It depends on what you consider a bit. I'm a cis guy (apparently the cat options were a trans in-joke?), but I kind of identify more with "boy", but also it's not really a pronoun (for me anyway).
But I did really like having "he/him / cat/boy", it felt right.
Also cat boys are cute UwU.
trans in-joke in that trans women in particular call themselves cat girls on a fairly frequent basis on the internet. but that's more "I am a X" and less "my pronouns are X".
if you legitimately want people to address you with cat and boy the way other people do with he and him:
then I support you. that it makes you happy is enough for me.
Like I said, not really a pronoun for me, but I liked it being there after he/him, with the expectation that people would just use he/him, but if people used it that'd be fine.
I guess I'd basically be using it the same way trans folks do, the way you described: "but that’s more “I am a X” and less “my pronouns are X”".
If it's considered unnecessary or will be misconstrued as mocking the pronoun system or something like that I understand. I just thought it was nice.
they're adding user flairs at some point, which will be the best place for that. it is cute :)
"if your identity doesn't have a unique pronoun, it's second class"
???
you are saying "fawn" and "fae" are first-class identities because they have their own pronouns, so they privileged to be listed formally in the "gender" field, but catfolk is a second-class identity because it doesn't have a unique pronoun and can only go in as a custom flair once they are added. actually none of them are genders, so either cat/boy should all be included or doe/deer and fae/faer should be removed.
no I'm not, I'm saying the way trans people use the term cat girl is as an identity signifier, not as pronouns so it doesn't make sense to include it in the pronoun tags. those are about how other people refer to you. there's a separate flair system coming that's better suited for identities -- the current system is intended to ensure people don't get misgendered, not to signal identity.
correct, the only things that are getting added are pronouns. you're confused about the purpose of this system.
edit: you do realize pronouns and gender identity are completely distinct things, right? the point of the pronoun tags isn't so people can tell each other their gender identities, it's so that people stop calling each other "he" by default and refer to people the way they actually wish to be referred to. it's about reference, not how we each identify.
catfolk are a valid identity and I'm not disputing that in the slightest. if there are pronouns that catfolk or anyone would else would like when referring to them, those should go into thread in !transenby_liberation@hexbear.net. identity labels (which I'm fully in favor of) should wait until there's a flair system for it. I believe that one will be open so people can type in what they like (or maybe not given the last two days...)
what is the purpose of listing pronouns if not to respect gender identities? big difference between, for example, nonbinary he/him and cis guy he/him. or another example, that is common in gay culture, to use feminine pronouns for each other situationally. that has nothing to do with gender identity. but it makes no sense to put she/her on my list of pronouns, because i am a cis guy. you are saying it's about only grammar when i think everyone understands pronouns are a proxy for gender identity. if they weren't, if it was purely about grammar as you are suggesting, there would be no big deal about people not declaring them.
it's just bizarre to defend doe/deer or fae/faer neopronouns which is explicitly tied not to genders but to otherkin identities, but saying cat/boy has to be removed because it's unserious or not grammatical. i don't know why they can't just add cat/boy back, clearly people want it as an option. why are catboys are being oppressed by this grammarian pedantry? it's not as if you are saying you won't add cat/boy, it's that it was there, people liked it, and it was taken away. which would have been reasonable if they hadn't added doe/feer and fae/faer. which i have no problem with! but cat/boy should not have been removed.
no one expects pronoun tags by themselves to bring respect for gender identities. it's just one step on a much longer road.
yeah, I fully agree and we should be able to denote that. it's just not feasible in a pronoun system without confusing people with an unsophisticated understanding of gender (read: most everyone on this site) -- they can barely keep straight what the individual pronoun tags mean.
<edit> let me give you some examples of conversations I've had about this in the last couple of days:
I don't think that's true. I've seen a few people using he/him/she/her and I think more cis people should use the system in that way. set your pronouns to reflect the way you'd actually like people to refer to you.
I'm not saying it's about grammar, I'm saying it's about respecting people's wishes about how others should refer to them. identities are a harder thing to ask for respect on and for others to show it (seriously: what would you like people to do differently when replying to your posts when they see that you're a cis man rather than he/him NB?). that doesn't mean they're less important, it just means effort gets prioritized first towards the low-hanging fruit. and from a change management perspective, people revolt when they're asked to change too much too fast so it makes sense to introduce things in stages.
some people liked it, yeah, and I wasn't part of the decision to remove it. I'm just explaining why I'm not going to push for them to get added back (if someone tells me they would in fact like people to refer to them as cat and boy, I will reverse that immediately and start lobbying for it to get added back).
tl;dr - let's get people to refer to each other correctly first -- a steep challenge already -- and add identities in with a system designed for it. trying to use the pronoun system to also deal with identities only makes the pronoun system worse at what it's designed to do by teaching people that it's ok to ignore someone's flaired pronouns.
It makes as much sense as deer or fae.
no, people actually want:
that's a different thing from wanting others to see a part of your identity.
It's not different, it's an extreme case of the same thing -- it's going to a step further, to shoehorn your identity into language by repurposing nouns as pronouns. Perhaps the most extreme declaration of one's identity. Putting the onus on others to refer to you as "deer" is sure to make sure everyone knows you identify as some sort of fawn-person (which still has gendered expression, per a doe vs deer/fawn vs stag/hart pronoun). That's well beyond just wanting to ensure people don't trigger dysphoria by misgendering you with language. It's almost exclusively about wanting people to see a part of your identity and contriving the language around that. Totally different case from the novel neopronouns that nonbinary people want to use because they don't identify with either he/she gender, nor with they/them.
There is no grammatical use of personal pronouns in any language (that I am aware of) that indicates species or demihuman race. Surely, if people could have gotten racialized pronouns to catch on, it would've happened around 17th century America to do racism. Surely racialized pronouns are a thing to be avoided, not a thing to be backdoored in with the cause of transgender acceptance.
If you want to go to such extreme lengths and make up new language constructions, then I posit that cat/boy is equally valid as an inferred pronoun.
The cat is not spoken in the sentence, but is inferred onto every personal pronoun. A more linguistically valid construction than racialized pronouns, since pronoun-dropping is a feature of existing languages.
As to the practical impliciations, I can't really imagine anyone employing "doe/deer" as pronouns the way you used them in that sentence, even if it's in the flair. Most will see it as functionally the same as cat/boy, just some cute or eccentric identity indicator. So the outcome of "training people to ignore pronoun flair" is functionally the same either way, even if there is technically a difference.
No normal person not already eyeballs-deep in the sub-subculture is going to say "doe went to the store to buy deerself dinner" in a real sentence. I am not sure it's reasonable to even expect people to. I think gender identity is inherently valid and something that deeply impacts everyone's life in some way or another. The otherkin identities may be seriously held by a certain subculture, but I don't think there is an expectation everyone has to "accept" them as valid, the same way as universal experiences like gender or sexuality. But if the policy is going to be that we accept them, they should all be accepted equally, and not some privilieged over others -- that's just gatekeeping.
this is deeply uncharitable. I'm not going to speculate on intentions when people ask me to use pronouns.
I and other trans people in this community are and do. we have solidarity for each other.
your whole position here is invalidating and presumptive. I ask you to rethink this from a more empathetic frame of mind.
do you see how this isn't a concrete ask we can make of other people? you're asking for them to change how they perceive you -- but it's not something they can show through action.
i understand that as he/him is the pronoun and cat/boy is the gender expression, made perfect sense to me. just like i have he/him because i am a guy, but any pronoun because idc what pronouns people use. for example, a lot of gay gays end up using feminine pronouns around their gay friends, even though they don't identify as a feminine gender. this pronoun vs gender conversation seems to lose the point some people want to declare a gender and some people want to specify a pronoun. different but related concepts. it's valid to be, for example, he/him nonbinary, but you are suggesting the pronoun use is a more important declaration than the gender itself. but in some cases one is incomplete without the other. i imagine it could be dysphoric for someone nonbinary but who prefers he/him pronouns to be imagined as a cis dude, for example?
no? pronoun use is just one kind of gender expression. there are many others and they all, even taken altogether, say very little about gender identity.
people want to use the pronoun tag as general user flair, yes, but that's not about anything deeper or more significant, it's just a tag that sits next to their username that they want to customize.