I’ve seen a few posts recently calling people out for using “they” when referring to someone with gendered or neo pronouns.
As a long time dumb guy I was under the impression that gender neutral pronouns were basically always acceptable and I’m now concerned that I have been unintentionally making people uncomfortable.
My current understanding based on context is that once someone has made their pronouns known, unless specifically included, ‘they’ is no longer acceptable. Thank you in advance for taking the time to help me out
right, if i don’t know your pronouns then i’ll use “they/them” as a non-gendered option. but if i continued to refer to you, acute_engles, using they/them pronouns when you’ve already made it perfectly clear that you prefer he/him pronouns, then i would be deliberately misgendering you.
I figured this was the answer. Thanks
I think pronouns are fucking weird (imagine using different pronouns for ethnicity) but
Anyway it can cause dysphoria for some so if you’re responding to a post and their pronouns are right there… not much effort to avoid some potential negative feelings.
Meanwhile in an alternate timeline, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia imposing a language reform to go with his intermarriage law:
Cis privilege here but when I see this happen to hexbear users I give the benefit of the doubt until they blow their chance to apologize. I have no argument against what you’re saying, and I think there’s almost zero chance I could make this mistake in real life, but I feel like I’m bound to mess that up on here at some point because I’m still really awful with only reading post content and basically ignoring the usernames. I’m here a bit, but I don’t spend anywhere near as much time posting online as I did 10-20 years ago and I can easily see myself slipping back to the habit where everyone is ungendered until their post content makes it clear.
yeah if someone makes a mistake, the right move is to apologize, try to do better, and move on. people make mistakes, it’s okay. my brother in christ, we’re all sinners.