"What are your pronouns?"

[Thermodolia]

I find it dehumanizing Iffy. I can’t do it. Sorry. It’s a feeling I have and I refuse to be part of it. Such dehumanizing language was used against my of my relatives and others I knew just for the beliefs they practiced. I refuse to go along with using it.

Seems to me that if that's what someone wants, then it isn't dehumanising.

I strongly disagree.

Just like I refuse to use “queer” that’s a slur and I don’t use slurs

Words change, man.

Yes they can, however when you grow up with it as an insult, one that was thrown at you, ya have a very different opinion of it.

It’s still a slur to me and I refuse to be called a slur. I am gay not queer. Im not an other.

[Vistulange]

I don't really feel the need to know the preferred third-person pronoun of a person whose name I know. I'll just use the name. Eventually, the demonstrative "this/that person".
In a professional setting, I'll just go by the preferred title (like Mister, Sir, Professor, Miss, Doctor, whatever...) and the name. And I expect my interlocutor to have written it on the business card.

This is why I like being in academia. I can just throw a "Dr" and reasonably expect it applies, and if it doesn't, it's not offensive in the least. Elitist? Maybe. I don't give a fuck.

[Senkaku]

Words change, man.

Yes they can, however when you grow up with it as an insult, one that was thrown at you, ya have a very different opinion of it.

It’s still a slur to me and I refuse to be called a slur. I am gay not queer. Im not an other.

I mean, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to feel this way, but if someone younger than you explicitly identifies as queer not gay, would you make a huge fuss about it? Obviously it just means something different to them, what’s wrong with humoring them? No one (or no one decent) is going to insist you accept the moniker.

[Ifreann]

Personally I am a lazy old ***er and just want to avoid any hassle, so I'll even call someone an attack-helicopter if they ask for that. That's where the problem is though, the person from this article seems to skirt the edge of awareness for that problem itself.

There are many hilarious things in that article, but here is one that stuck out to me:

“I go to work. I’m wearing a miniskirt. Everyone asks me for my pronouns. To me, what that means is ‘I see that you’re a man. And I see that you’re dressed in a woman’s costume. And I would like to know whether or not you want me to participate in the fantasy you’re having,’ 

More among the line of "Shit, it's one of those. Ima get reported to HR if I don't walk on eggshells here." Would you be showing up in the classic triggering-costume (you know, tumblr-glasses, fake-red hair, outraged fishmouth) reactions would be pretty much the same.

I can’t help but think that the walking-on-eggshells battle for pronouns is turning my gender into a human-resources-approved corporate product, more neutered than neutral, and, maybe above all else, profoundly unromantic. Next time, just call me by my name.

Self-awareness, hooray! So what now, do I ask anyone I suspect of having [ionsert correct term for the bazillion-genders-symptom here] for their preferred pronouns? And I can't even call you by your name in a polite fashion anymore, what's nonbinary for Mister/Miss? Do I just flip a coin here?

It's like LGBWTFBBQC3P0 thing - everybody uses one, nobody agrees on a version. Which one can I safely use in any semi-official written communication without offending anyone? You know, in those instances when I actually have to give a *** about not offending anyone? Yes, I know, every idea has its extremists. Conservatives have the Q-Anon-MAGA-crowd, the nazis and the 4chan-boys with their tendie-stories-turned-politics. The leftists have uncle joe and Mao with Ze big Dong, and some people that would actually tell us that the absence of organized power structures would not lead to our world turning into fallout-4. (is there anything even remotely so absurd as an anarchist?) Then there's the apolitical people, those who would rather stuff their fingers in their ears and sing LALALALALA instead of acknowledging any problems. You have your own kind of crazy people, the loud minority. I bet most pronoun-proponents are perfectly reasonable people that do their jobs everyday. I don't share the opinions of the late General Evren either, or want to go and bomb Kürt villages to rubble for my kemalist giggles.

Find a way to make this whole thing practical and then get back to me, will you? Put in the engineering hours. The moment a feasible and practical solution comes forth most people will just quietly adopt it and the problems will go away, for the most part anyway.

Very amusing that you'll censor certain words, but are also clearly going out of your way to be edgy and insulting. Makes you seem like you're 12.

[Hamidiye]

Very amusing that you'll censor certain words, but are also clearly going out of your way to be edgy and insulting. Makes you seem like you're 12.

Wow, an insult instead of an answer, who could have expected that result... well, time to bug out, it never pays to try and speak rationally to the pronoun-people...goodbye, my esteemed womxn and wombats.

[Thermodolia]

Yes they can, however when you grow up with it as an insult, one that was thrown at you, ya have a very different opinion of it.

It’s still a slur to me and I refuse to be called a slur. I am gay not queer. Im not an other.

I mean, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to feel this way, but if someone younger than you explicitly identifies as queer not gay, would you make a huge fuss about it? Obviously it just means something different to them, what’s wrong with humoring them? No one (or no one decent) is going to insist you accept the moniker.

Im not going to make a fuss about it I just won’t participate. Im not going to claim they are evil or using a slur or whatever but I’m also not going to indulging them to say they are “queer” because I myself can’t do that.

[Ifreann]

Seems to me that if that's what someone wants, then it isn't dehumanising.

I strongly disagree.

Words change, man.

Yes they can, however when you grow up with it as an insult, one that was thrown at you, ya have a very different opinion of it.

It’s still a slur to me and I refuse to be called a slur. I am gay not queer. Im not an other.

And obviously it would, at the very least, be rude of someone to refuse to respect your wishes with regard to how you want them referring to you. Rather worse than just rude in that specific case.

[Sarzonia]

Mine are he, him, his.

It might be easier to introduce yourself with your name and pronouns rather than put yourself in what might be an awkward position of asking someone what their pronouns are.

[Hukhalia]

I mean, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to feel this way, but if someone younger than you explicitly identifies as queer not gay, would you make a huge fuss about it? Obviously it just means something different to them, what’s wrong with humoring them? No one (or no one decent) is going to insist you accept the moniker.

Im not going to make a fuss about it I just won’t participate. Im not going to claim they are evil or using a slur or whatever but I’m also not going to indulging them to say they are “queer” because I myself can’t do that.

i remember in year 7 there was a very fucking stupid kid with a rattish face who'd throw homophobic epithets at me all the time and physically attack me when he could get away with it; and that's just the start tbh. man used "queer" at one point despite that being a few decades out of date and the fact that not even i knew i was gay yet. you aren't special therm, stop trying to get a high ground when multiple people who self-ID as queer lived through pretty much the same shit you did.

[Czardas]

it feels as if pronoun culture has contributed to nonbinary becoming just the third gender after male and female, more static and concrete than its original fluid intentions. The same nonbinary person who complained about nonbinary stereotypes lamented to me, “I don’t want to be a homogeneous normcore mashing of the two genders.” Ben hoped, “If man or woman can mean so many things, then so can nonbinary.” We all became nonbinary to escape gendered expectations, and now we’re stuck again.

Highlighted the most relevant part of the article (at least imo). I think this ties into one of Senkaku's points in the OP:

This is where I'll branch back out from this piece into the general discourse: failing to examine capitalism's role in creating a form of queer politics that makes lots of people unhappy but doesn't substantively advance liberation is a terminal problem in our conversations around pronouns and a host of other queer issues.

I would go further; it seems pretty clear that capitalism cannot exist as currently constituted without the discursive ideal of gender/sex. Every person must be possible to categorise into one of a very limited number of heuristics (two, three) in order to fulfil a particular role in the reproduction of labour. Attempts to escape the binary heuristic thus inevitably end up either categorised back into it ("non-men", "women and femmes", etc) or, in the most progressive of spaces, into a third heuristic. Since all of these gender/sex heuristics are discursive rather than material, based on an image and a perception rather than reality—one could, I suppose, call them noumena—every person finds themself just as alienated from the category they have been assigned as they were before seeking to escape the binary.

Because non-capitalist societies would necessarily entail a different relationship to the reproduction of labour, there's no reason this discursive ideal should be perpetuated within them. Biological differences among human beings do not need to be classified into archetypes in the way we've been doing. Doing so only promotes a) continued alienation and b) the existing, deeply flawed, capitalist reproduction of labour. Therefore, yes, it is relevant to continue to insist on the importance of both the degendering of the public sphere and the access to means of changing one's physical sex characteristics even in the face of all the more immediate issues that also need to be focused on.

---

On a more basic level, I do put a lot of effort into making sure that people assume a particular set of pronouns for me, and therefore feel uncomfortable when people ask me for my pronouns, due to the sense that if they're not "obvious" it's a sign of failure on my part to assimilate into the societal gender/sex binary. That said, this is also partly because no set of pronouns "feels" "correct", which is in part because of this sense of alienation I mentioned brought on by the fact that every theoretical gender identity represents an ideal from which any real person is a deviation. I use pronouns on this site for several reasons: as a form of exposure therapy, a notification to the small number of people who remember me from back in the day, and an easy way to figure out which of those people belong on my block list.

[Caitlinia]

Seems to me that if that's what someone wants, then it isn't dehumanising.

I strongly disagree.

Words change, man.

Yes they can, however when you grow up with it as an insult, one that was thrown at you, ya have a very different opinion of it.

It’s still a slur to me and I refuse to be called a slur. I am gay not queer. Im not an other.

I feel the exact same way. When someone has grown up being called "queer" as an insult, I can't see why it's reasonable to turn around and ask that person to then call someone else "queer" in good faith.

I'm not queer, I'm gay. If someone wants to describe themselves as queer that's fine, but I don't want to be party to that. Or "it", especially considering that's how my entire town basically would refer to someone in a derogatory way whose gender couldn't be determined on first glance.

[Thomasi]

He his him though I only ever say this on dating apps along with straight because apparently some people don't get the message... outside of dating its a joke I will use the pronouns you present your self as. Dress/look female and thats what I'll call you dress/look male thats what I'll call you.

It's not my job to keep notes.

[Big Jim P]

I only have one pronoun: Lord.

What about King?

That would be conceited.

[The Imperium man]

How? Well , they have no reason to change languages like zhe xer or whatever. Just absurdity

But how are you affected?

How am i affected? Well , LGBTQ community has negative reputations for several reasons like pride month. Pride month is seriously problem in the modern realm , especially mega-corporations. They sell you for profit motive. Why are they doing this? Because of marketing techniques and economic greed. Many mega-corporations use rainbow logos for the expression of sexuality. In actuality, it's a empty slogan.

But , i cannot fighting against corporations because they are omnipotent and omnipresent. A quintessential form of the dystopian society

I'm not saying LGBTQ people should punished, but rather acknowledging issues. https://imgur.com/vK4TJng https://i.redd.it/cy9oo0ll0m271.png

I know it has nothing to do with Neopronouns.

Plot twist: my English is not native

[Big Jim P]

Not likely for me. I VERY rarely am in that situation. Last time might have been 20 years ago.

Still, someone else doesn't get to define how I speak or what I say.

You haven't been in a group of three or more people in 20 years?

Not while referring to one of the people by pronouns.

[Big Jim P]

Not likely for me. I VERY rarely am in that situation. Last time might have been 20 years ago.

Still, someone else doesn't get to define how I speak or what I say.

But you just said in that post that they do. "If I am talking to YOU, I will use your name or title." How do you imagine coming by the knowledge of a stranger's name or title in conversation, except by that stranger telling you?

Usually people will introduce me to the stranger. If not, I introduce myself and they return the favor.

[Reploid Productions]

For someone who doesn't want to get "a shiny new banhammer to the face", your conduct certainly says otherwise.

LGBTWTFBBQ-people

<snip>

homophobes are assh***s, I aggree! But the dude who refuses pronouns and identifies as an attack-helicopter on twitter with his pepe-avatar isn't such a big deal after all.

<snip>

rightoids will be very butthurt

<snip>

especially in traditionalist (or retarded as in the amurrican case) societies

so I'll even call someone an attack-helicopter if they ask for that.

<snip>

It's like LGBWTFBBQC3P0 thing

it never pays to try and speak rationally to the pronoun-people...goodbye, my esteemed womxn and wombats.

Given your extensive history across puppets and the rate at which you've been wracking up warnings and bans on this one, you win a shiny new banhammer to the face AND a bonus Sword of DEAT to the neck. *** Hamidiye, DEAT + 7 day ban for trolling. ***

~Evil Forum Empress Rep Prod the Ninja Mod
~She who wields the Banhammer; master of the mighty moderation no-dachi Kiritateru Teikoku

[Senkaku]

Here's my issue with chosen pronouns: If I am using them, I am not talking to you, I am talking about you to another. That means your choice is irrelevant. If I am talking to YOU, I will use your name or title.

All this says is that you’re comfortable disrespecting your friends behind their backs but not to their faces, tbh.

[Senkaku]

it feels as if pronoun culture has contributed to nonbinary becoming just the third gender after male and female, more static and concrete than its original fluid intentions. The same nonbinary person who complained about nonbinary stereotypes lamented to me, “I don’t want to be a homogeneous normcore mashing of the two genders.” Ben hoped, “If man or woman can mean so many things, then so can nonbinary.” We all became nonbinary to escape gendered expectations, and now we’re stuck again.

Highlighted the most relevant part of the article (at least imo). I think this ties into one of Senkaku's points in the OP:

This is where I'll branch back out from this piece into the general discourse: failing to examine capitalism's role in creating a form of queer politics that makes lots of people unhappy but doesn't substantively advance liberation is a terminal problem in our conversations around pronouns and a host of other queer issues.

I would go further; it seems pretty clear that capitalism cannot exist as currently constituted without the discursive ideal of gender/sex. Every person must be possible to categorise into one of a very limited number of heuristics (two, three) in order to fulfil a particular role in the reproduction of labour. Attempts to escape the binary heuristic thus inevitably end up either categorised back into it ("non-men", "women and femmes", etc) or, in the most progressive of spaces, into a third heuristic. Since all of these gender/sex heuristics are discursive rather than material, based on an image and a perception rather than reality—one could, I suppose, call them noumena—every person finds themself just as alienated from the category they have been assigned as they were before seeking to escape the binary.

Because non-capitalist societies would necessarily entail a different relationship to the reproduction of labour, there's no reason this discursive ideal should be perpetuated within them. Biological differences among human beings do not need to be classified into archetypes in the way we've been doing. Doing so only promotes a) continued alienation and b) the existing, deeply flawed, capitalist reproduction of labour. Therefore, yes, it is relevant to continue to insist on the importance of both the degendering of the public sphere and the access to means of changing one's physical sex characteristics even in the face of all the more immediate issues that also need to be focused on.

I think this is a good advancement/building-upon of my criticism of the article— capitalist gender categorization will necessarily constrain enby people’s identities and expression just as it constrains the rest of us while also using those constrained categorizations as marketing tools. The takeaway here I think would be again that Colyar’s pessimism is misdirected at other queer people rather than at the capitalist structures that create such constraints— the Gen Z Gender Police aren’t the problem here, it’s a sort of Goldman/Boomer Gender Police who’ve flattened non-binary identity into a more static and easily marketable third gender, so the answer is definitely not to simply dismiss they/them or non-binary identities as “failed queer experiments.”

[Big Jim P]

Here's my issue with chosen pronouns: If I am using them, I am not talking to you, I am talking about you to another. That means your choice is irrelevant. If I am talking to YOU, I will use your name or title.

All this says is that you’re comfortable disrespecting your friends behind their backs but not to their faces, tbh.

My friends don't use odd pronouns.

[Czardas]

I think this is a good advancement/building-upon of my criticism of the article— capitalist gender categorization will necessarily constrain enby people’s identities and expression just as it constrains the rest of us while also using those constrained categorizations as marketing tools. The takeaway here I think would be again that Colyar’s pessimism is misdirected at other queer people rather than at the capitalist structures that create such constraints— the Gen Z Gender Police aren’t the problem here, it’s a sort of Goldman/Boomer Gender Police who’ve flattened non-binary identity into a more static and easily marketable third gender, so the answer is definitely not to simply dismiss they/them or non-binary identities as “failed queer experiments.”

Yes, totally agree with this (if that wasn't clear). It's easy to blame the flattening of nonbinary identities into a gender trinary on LGBT+ people themselves when one doesn't have a structural analysis of gender (for which I obviously prefer social reproduction theory) and is only exposed to this heuristic in a form filtered through corporate policy, social media consent manufacturing, and the layers of ironic detachment LGBT+ people themselves use to mitigate the effects of alienation (e.g. every twitter post that's like "she/theys be naming themselves Frog" or whatever). The "marketing" of nonbinary identity is largely a consequence of the necessity to assign that identity to providers of particular forms of reproductive labour, again, at least imv. There have to be particular things that the nonbinary identity is "for" (in this case, a reserve army of prostitutes, caregivers, educators, etc, who unlike cis women—who have to be kept around so they can have babies—are disposable, and who can therefore also be used as a reserve of conventional workers that can be easily pacified through tying their access to healthcare and gender affirmation to their labour (some may disagree with me on this particular interpretation, of course, and I'm probably missing some obvious additions)).

[Betoni]

Highlighted the most relevant part of the article (at least imo). I think this ties into one of Senkaku's points in the OP:


I would go further; it seems pretty clear that capitalism cannot exist as currently constituted without the discursive ideal of gender/sex. Every person must be possible to categorise into one of a very limited number of heuristics (two, three) in order to fulfil a particular role in the reproduction of labour. Attempts to escape the binary heuristic thus inevitably end up either categorised back into it ("non-men", "women and femmes", etc) or, in the most progressive of spaces, into a third heuristic. Since all of these gender/sex heuristics are discursive rather than material, based on an image and a perception rather than reality—one could, I suppose, call them noumena—every person finds themself just as alienated from the category they have been assigned as they were before seeking to escape the binary.

Because non-capitalist societies would necessarily entail a different relationship to the reproduction of labour, there's no reason this discursive ideal should be perpetuated within them. Biological differences among human beings do not need to be classified into archetypes in the way we've been doing. Doing so only promotes a) continued alienation and b) the existing, deeply flawed, capitalist reproduction of labour. Therefore, yes, it is relevant to continue to insist on the importance of both the degendering of the public sphere and the access to means of changing one's physical sex characteristics even in the face of all the more immediate issues that also need to be focused on.

I think this is a good advancement/building-upon of my criticism of the article— capitalist gender categorization will necessarily constrain enby people’s identities and expression just as it constrains the rest of us while also using those constrained categorizations as marketing tools. The takeaway here I think would be again that Colyar’s pessimism is misdirected at other queer people rather than at the capitalist structures that create such constraints— the Gen Z Gender Police aren’t the problem here, it’s a sort of Goldman/Boomer Gender Police who’ve flattened non-binary identity into a more static and easily marketable third gender, so the answer is definitely not to simply dismiss they/them or non-binary identities as “failed queer experiments.”

If you want to get a limited view of things look at everything from the same perspective. An Marxist, or a feminist, theory of whatever will limit your perspective to the point of sounding absurd. You think that the problem of having categories that don't perfectly encompass everything is a product of capitalism because reasons. Never mind that it is a feature of our language and the way we understand the world. Can you seriously come up with a category that doesn't have a maybe instance or and instance that is a bit of two different categories. There's always an outlier. The fact that there is something outside of said categories does not in anyway imply that said categories should be wholly scrapped or that something is wrong with those categories. That's absurd.

[HISPIDA]

just gonna put this here:

Being queer is a living political statement. It is embodying and expressing in a resolute sense that you do not conform to the standards thrust upon society by fundamentalist compulsions; that you are more than an archetype, an incubator for a child, or a work-horse for a family. That's a political statement by the fact that the political status quo which currently exists is anathema to it. We can only cease being political statements by embracing a solidly political crusade against the politics which shield the current sexual normativities.

anyways to answer the question in the OP: i think they/them pronouns are fine, obviously. i think a post-gender future would be fucking rad but at the moment i'm not... entirely opposed to the idea of gender? i mean, hear me out. i know it's just a bunch of shit we decided to make up and even varies from culture to culture, but i think gender identity is something that should remain a thing for those who want it, which is the vast majority of people. of course, some people are going to be agender and that's fine, but for the vast majority of people who want gender pronouns (like myself) i don't think that accelerating to a post-gender future as fast as possible is a good idea.

i like identifying myself as "he/they". some days i lean more into the "he," some days i lean more into the "they," some days i even venture a little bit into femininity without being outright "he/they/she". but "they" pronouns are important to a bunch of people, including myself.

i'm generally not a fan of neopronouns, especially since a lot* of them tend to be jokes/delusions**/actual scams around DID and similar disorders, but if they genuinely make someone happier and are a vital part of their identity then i'll refer to them by whatever neopronouns they want. obviously there's a line to draw at stuff like "dreamself" and shit like that, but if someone wants me to refer to them as "xim" or "zer" then i'll call zer whatever xim want to be referred to as.

*of course this could be wrong but it's just a trend i've noticed
**not that neopronoun users are delusional, more people that go like "amongusself"

[Great Heathen Air Force]

So it's not really a problem anymore, but there was an issue in Sweden a few decades ago where everyone was afraid to use pronouns. Not for LGBT+ reasons, but because they were trying to be more mindful of class divisions. Swedish has both a formal and informal way of speaking. Like many languages. But the formal speech was considered a little haughty and aristocratic. So nobody wanted to use the formal pronouns anymore But also people were uncomfortable using informal pronouns, because that presumed a degree of familiarity.

So they just would just work around it. Saying things like, "How are you doing today is Mr. Karlsson doing today?"


So yeah, it is totally possible to avoid using pronouns at all if you really want to. A little bit awkward. But you can do it.

[Czardas]

You think that the problem of having categories that don't perfectly encompass everything is a product of capitalism because reasons. Never mind that it is a feature of our language and the way we understand the world.

Our language and the way we understand the world are a result of the material conditions of social, political and economic governance. They do not exist a priori, they are imposed systemically: by class relations, by the division of labour, by forms of government, by force or the threat of it. Some evidence for this can be found in the fact that humans do not all speak the same language, or understand the world in the same ways.

The fact that there is something outside of said categories does not in anyway imply that said categories should be wholly scrapped or that something is wrong with those categories. That's absurd.

What's wrong with the categories is more fundamental than the presence of exceptions: they are essential components of a political and socioeconomic system that I regard as inherently unjust and immoral (and most people will agree to be inherently unequal), requiring as it does the domination of certain classes of people over others. The existence of exceptions is, of course, also a compelling reason for distress on an individual level due to the resulting social exclusion and ostracism. That sort of exclusion is also something that shouldn't exist, regardless of the heuristic in question, but is a more manageable problem.