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.
Seriously. I’m fine with neopronouns that relate to the actual gender binary or spectrum. Something that says you’re male, female, somewhere in between, some oscillating state along the spectrum, or even a pronoun saying you don’t exist along the spectrum at all. But the key distinction here is that any neopronoun must relate back to the male/female gender spectrum. Otherwise you’re not describing gender, you are describing personality traits. Every personality trait and characteristic is not a gender.
I don’t quite understand your point, how can a pronoun denote that one is ‘somewhere in between male and female’ or even express more complex state as in your example? The idea looks impossible to implement to me, an example would definitely help
The umbrella term for this is nonbinary, and people often use they, or if they use neopronouns it’s something like xir.
The parent commenter’s point is that nonbinary identities typically relate back to the conventional gender spectrum in some way, whereas dragon does not and seems more like a fursona or character trait thing.
This is not made easier by the fact that “dragon” is a proper noun, and in fiction there are male and female dragons.
Yeah, when we get this specific example it does seem off. But if I were to choose some invented pronoun to show that I identify as ¾ male the pronoun itself will not convey that meaning even if it literally would be th¾y, that’s what my question of what are the examples was about
so we’re back to gender being indistinguishable from biologial sex, and there being only two settings with a option for some mixing of the parts on occasion? every single fucking time gender comes up we end up back here.
This “summary” you have proposed is not an accurate represntation of what the other person in this thread is arguing.