Note: unless you’re deliberately obscuring someone’s gender and know their preferred pronouns, use their preferred pronouns.
Note: unless you’re deliberately obscuring someone’s gender and know their preferred pronouns, use their preferred pronouns.
I also use “they/them” until someone shares their pronouns.
Officially, I do this to avoid misgendering people.
Really, I do it because some snowflakes are too fragile to share their pronouns, and I enjoy annoying them until they do.
I mean if someone doesn’t want to share their pronouns what do they really expect, they should share them or accept they/them without complaining. Can’t expect other people to read minds.
hello from a snowflake who is stuck in the closet, and too fragile to share my pronouns because it forces me to misgender myself and reminds me of how far i am from a life that feels like mine
i don’t disagree with the they/them-by-default policy (principle of least harm etc), but if you ever find people being less than enthusiastic about it or reluctant to state their pronouns, please consider that there could be other reasons
That’s totally fair, and I’ll keep it in mind.
I hope my habit makes your life a little easier by normalizing they/them (or just avoiding gendered terms) as an un-interesting default.
I hope for a world where they/them becomes accepted as “I’m not trusted enough by this person to be told their pronouns yet, and that’s okay.”
I think asking people to identify their gender, early in a (non-intimate) relationship, is a particularly unhealthy cultural habit. I hope I’m helping push back on that, a bit.
In the meantime, I’m trying to learn speech habits that don’t force you to gender yourself, or to be noticed in not doing so. I hope to help make these kinds of situations easier for you.
You shouldn’t have to decide at a random moment whether to share your gender identity with me. I’m committed to keep trying to learn communication patterns that make it natural for you not to have to.