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.
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.