I’ve been waiting until after Christmas day to make this post, but some of our communities recently have had a lot of noise and upset over someone that uses neopronouns that most people are unfamiliar with.
So I want to make this clear. A persons pronouns are to be respected. This is true when the user is using neopronouns that you’re unfamiliar with. It’s true even if you think someone is trolling. Pronouns are not rewards for good behaviour. They aren’t only to be respected when you like the person you’re interacting with, or if their pronouns “make sense” to you. Trolls, spammers, twitter users, it doesn’t matter who they are, your options are to respect their pronouns, or to not engage with them.
I really want to re-iterate the importance of this. Gender diverse folk are undermined, invalidated and questioned at every step of our lives. As a community, we need to be working to undo that, not creating more of it, and that means there is no space for treating pronouns (including neopronouns) as a reward for good behaviour.
This isn’t a free reign for trolls and spammers. The rules still apply. Trolling, spamming, etc will continue to be dealt with, but it’s not an excuse to act as if respecting someones pronouns is optional.
Exactly. No forum can ever survive with a zero-tolerance, zero-thought rule like, “respect all neo-pronouns, full stop.”
Because otherwise you just get bullies abusing that rule to silence and mock people. There’s already people running around with “mirror pronouns,” where they want to borrow other people’s pronouns. So if that kind of pronoun-in-relation-to-another is valid, then you can force people to do all sorts of things they would be very uncomfortable with, all in the name of “respecting pronouns.”
For example, let’s say someone says, "my pronouns are two-part mirror pronouns. I demand everyone refer to me be a pronoun that is “their pronoun assigned at birth - their current pronoun.” So a binary identified trans woman would have to refer to me as “he-she.”
In other words, someone could demand that every trans person they meet publicly out themselves, requiring them to disclose their AGAB, all in the name of “respecting pronouns.”
Or someone could decide that their pronouns are racial slurs or slurs against the trans community. Someone could say, “my pronoun is ‘I’m a pdo trnny.’” And any trans person has to say that phrase when addressing them, lest they be accused of “misgendering” them.
Or how about, “my pronouns are being misgendered. It is literally impossible to refer to me without misgendering me.”
It’s fucking ridiculous. I’ll respect pronouns that have something to do with the male/female gender spectrum. Whether you’re somewhere in between, have a fluid relationship with it, exist outside of it, etc. But any pronoun should relate to that male/female gender spectrum.