Ok so i learned about a person coming out as non binary recently and this reminded me of my confusion about (i think they’re called rolling pronouns) she/they and he/they specifically.
I have looked around at some sites speaking to it but none of them have made it clear to me whether use of “her” or “him” instead of “theirs” in the case of someone who wishes for (s)he/they is misgendering.
I had (mis)understood before that (s)he/they meant they were fine with either their gendered pronoun AND the gender free option, but am i way off base? Is the “they” not an option?
Apologies if this is breaking rules or has been answered, i didn’t see anything on the sidebar so here goes nothin…
To my knowledge, it is common for she/they to mean “either she/her/hers or they/them/theirs is fine”.
If a person tells you that they prefer one or the other, want you to use both in a rolling fashion, or some other specific arrangement like “he/them/his” then you should respect it, but in my experience that isn’t normally expected just from saying “she/they” or “he/they”.
It’s also the case that some people use he/they or she/they because they want to go by she or he but aren’t confident in their presentation and so they kind of give people an “out” by having they in there (not saying this is everyone, just that I’ve known a couple people like that). If you get that impression it might color your choice of what pronoun to pick, but its not really on you to suss that out
Ok, thank you for this. I was worried that i was missing something simple that nonetheless was over my head. So it’s not necessarily wrong to use (s)he instead of they unless corrected by the person. and it seems I’m not going to get people hurt by using the prophet gender possesive
I think there’s the inverse too, where some nonbinary people prefer they but aren’t bothered by he or she, and just include he/she because people are more likely to use he or she because of their presentation.