And I can’t help but see someone who wants to cosplay as a dragon-fucker. What with that literally being in their profile. And then give people shit about it for saying “you” instead of “drag.”

I will respect a lot of pronouns. I draw the line at pronouns involving pretending to fuck things that do not exist. If you want to call me a transphobe because of that, I guess I’m a transphobe.

While this is the first time I’ve run into someone replacing the primary pronouns, I don’t see any reason to undermine drag just because of what language conventions allow for. Language is more defined by practical usage rather than explicit rules.

I think that that no where is that made anymore clear than the sentences they have written, many of which are borderline incomprehensible some even using “drag” to refer to other people in the situation. It reminds me of a situation with someone from a long time ago who went by me/my pronouns. I asked them how I do that, and they flipped out at me and called me a transphobe and cissie. I couldn’t use Me/my pronouns because I didn’t know how I’d do that because it doesn’t make much sense. I learned that this person was trolling and ultimately just trying to make me feel bad. Very similar to another user I met later DroneRights who was also trolling in similar methods. They ended up getting themselves banned on 196, blahaj.zone as a whole, and lemmy.world as a whole, probably many other places. Anyway I thought I’d mention that, while dragonfucker may not be exactly the same situations in that they aren’t flipping out or requesting impossible syntax, they are still requesting very difficult language syntax which is hard to understand and read, let alone type out. And given the history of this type of trolling it’s understandable why some people, including mods are skeptical at best.

Let me give you my perspective. They/them pronouns are de-gendering rather than gender-affirming, because in English “they” refers to anyone, including men or women. In practical terms, “they” is often used as a cop-out by people who want to avoid calling trans women “she” or trans men “he”.

Intent is extremely important here, after all they/them is indeed used for non-specific scenarios or when you don’t know a singular person’s gender, it ls also very commonly used as a non-binary pronoun for non-binary people. I will not accept the idea that they/them is dehumanizing as that is dismissive towards all the people who use or even prefer they/them for themselves. In cases where a person has shared their pronouns let’s say she/her and another person decides to use they/them to avoid it intentionally that is indeed wrong, not simply because they did it but also because they had malicious intent.

In this case and ones similar to it they/them would be used as a fallback for when language’s practical usage fails, let’s show how this fails here: “Drag went to the store and bought dragself some pudding, drag handed some pudding to drag and drag thanked drag and ate the pudding.” This is very similar to a sentence dragonfucker would’ve written and it is very hard to understand, if you read carefully you can see there are two people here but it’s often not even clear of that. It also seems like third person usage but this was very much intended as first person usage which is what kills the practicality of it.

Compare that to

Sentence with more typical first person pronouns

“I went to the store and bought myself some pudding, I handed zir some pudding and zir thanked me and ate the pudding.”

Of course it’s very possible I wrote the above sentence wrong and that dragonfucker would’ve written it differently. I can’t be sure, I can barely even read it (read and understand). But these are situations where it is less than practical so some people might revert to they/them to be safe, as in, to not make it worse by using pronouns they don’t know how to use or understand well wrong.

I think in my experience with DroneRights and the Me/My person that getting mad at someone for this intention is not really reasonable, as they do not have malicious intent. In the case of DroneRights and the Me/My person they were getting mad at people for this reason, and many believed that was the entire point. Also I should mention, I do have a friend who uses demon/demonself pronouns but they also use they/them and ze/zir, since noun pronouns aren’t always practical in language and can be clunky sometimes. They still prefer demon/demonself pronouns I’m not saying they don’t but they use others for practicality reasons.

I can’t help but see drags use of drag/dragself as just another part of pushing back on de-gendering in the same way as any nonbinary trans person listing binary pronouns and asking people to stick to using those.

Practicality reasons are why it is different, it doesn’t cause issues with understanding to use binary pronouns, it does cause structure and syntax issues when asking people to use the same word as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns, or to use first person pronouns as third person pronouns. As well as disregarding the intent which is the most important factor.

I already anticipate being accused of being a transphobe and getting called a cissy, so I want to preface all of this by saying I am Agender, I am not cis, I have years of experience and knowledge in the trans community both that I’ve learned myself from participating and from others I’ve followed or am friends with. I admit there are things I don’t know, and indeed things I struggle with due to being Agender but with all due respect I know more about this stuff than most “cis people” do, doesn’t mean I know everything but I now a lot, and I do indeed know about how bad misgendering can be, even have a few first hand experiences myself, so I’m not speaking about this blind.