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.
Pronouns are a way of helping us find our identity and sharing it with the world. They tell other people who we are, and our relationship with our identity. Some people use them as an act of empowerment and reclamation. Some people use them to actively break down the normalisation of the gender binary as the default/only way of thinking about gender. Other people use them because it’s just the best way they have of describing their internal experience.
Which is a lot of words to say that you don’t know why someone is using neopronouns or what their intent is. All you can use is their actions. And if what they do is troll and stir up trouble with their actions, report that, because that’s the bit that matters, not the fact that they’re using pronouns you find challenging, which may be the very point.
You’ve got work to do on your understanding of how hatred works. No one hates us because we used a weird pronoun. They hate us because they’ve been taught to hate us, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter what we do or how perfect we are, they will find an excuse to manifest that hate.
There is no such thing as a person who would have supported us, but choses not to, because they don’t like unusual pronouns. There are people who support us and are uncomfortable with unusual pronouns, but someone who drops their support over that, was going to drop their support anyway over something, once they found an excuse that let them tell themselves that they’re not the bad guy in their story.
You can not win over hate by being on your best behaviour and existing on the terms of people who hate us. It has never worked and never will.