If you have no preferred pronouns, just say (none) or something

This will help make people feel more comfortable in this comm and has a side effect of showing you support trans people when making comments in other communities. It will also make reactionaries seethe and make it easier for mods to purge them, and make trans people feel safer all over the fediverse.

  • Hexagons [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    I understand your point of view more than most of the arguments I’ve seen against mandatory pronouns. So please take my comment as friendly, I’ll do my best not to be a rude asshole.

    How would you feel about (any) for your pronoun choice? That’s functionally the same as not listing them, people can still choose which ones they want to use for you, but it still shows you’re supportive of people prominently displaying their pronouns. That or you could consider maybe a neopronoun. I personally really like e/em/eir. They’re nice and genderless, easy to use, and, bonus, a mathematician came up with them in like the '70s (I could have the year wrong and I refuse to look it up), not because he was trying to be trans inclusive, but because he hated that math books assumed their readers were all men and he wanted to include women in his writing. (Singular they was considered ungrammatical at that point.)

    • jsomae
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      4 months ago

      I would not have assumed you’re a rude asshole based on the rest of your comment – but either way, thank you for being friendly.

      I don’t like (any) as that means I acquiesce to the years of being assumed male by default on the Internet. I feel spite about that not because I feel euphoric when she/her’d but rather at a more base level of feminism – that male-by-default is a patriarchal practice and so I object to it. If I were ok with (any) then I’d be OK with he/him. As a cis woman, he/him doesn’t cause me dysphoria, it just causes me to roll my eyes at the state of the world. Making my pronouns visible isn’t a fix for this, it’s just a band-aid as it doesn’t magically cause the world to be less sexist. Honestly, getting he/him’d by default is basically a useful litmus test for the state of sexism in a community I guess.

      I’m not interested in changing my pronouns to a neopronoun or to any other pronoun really, but it’s a nice suggestion and the aside about the mathematician is really interesting. As a mathematician myself I approve of the etymology. :)