alt text: a tweet within a tweet. "coworker asked me my pronouns and I said 'they/them but I'm at work right now so it's whatever' and then she came up to me later and said 'this is you'" (showing a tweet that says) i'm probably nonbinary but i have a job so idrc about that rn
Honestly, at this point in my life, I'm so apathetic that I couldn't care less.
I grew up on the early internet, and I'm kind of part troll because of it. Since that's the case, and I'm surrounded by THE STRAIGHTS all day at work, I like to confuse and concern them by using non-gendered or non-binary terms as often as possible to refer to anyone in my personal life, especially my significant other (aka "partner" ;) )
I try to see how long I can go before I give anything away.
In reality, I'm a plain and "normal" cis dude, with a typical straight relationship.
While I'm trolling a bit with it, seeing if anyone cares enough to question it at all, I'm trying to do my part in normalizing the use of engendered terms with my colleagues, so that non-binary people will be more easily accepted, and those that are living in the rest of the rainbow, who don't want to be "out", have a normalized way to talk about their relationship without judgement, and without needing to "come out" to people.
I'm just one small part of this. I'm trying.
I do this too. I just default to they/them unless the gender is relevant to the story, which it rarely is.
I've found another benefit is that often it removes the gendered biases from the story. Like, if it's a bad customer who's a woman, but I call them they, people aren't immediately thinking of a Karen. Or if it's a man people aren't immediately thinking "oh well, boys will be boys".
This is interesting and maybe reason to say "my partner" instead of "my girlfriend".
Cishet guy here. I use the term "partner" all the time because I prefer nongendered relational terms. Plus, partner sounds a little more serious than saying "my girlfriend". We've been together 8 years but are not interested in marriage, so I feel like it's just the best word to use. It is amusing, though, when my partner isn't present and I'm talking to a stranger, that they often just assume I'm gay when I use it.
100% agree, "girlfriend" or "boyfriend" just sounds childish imo, I prefer the word associations of "partner" too, like you're equals
Yeah, I'm in a similar situation and "girlfriend" doesn't quite capture what we have at this point but "partner" also feels kinda vague and I'm not about to say "my romantic partner"
I live in northern Canada and kinda have to do the opposite to keep my job. When I talk about my wife I call her my wife and I use gendered language mostly. These guys are old school and I once heard them talk about someone who applied to work there, but they went and saw on Facebook that a year ago he had long hair and had it died blue and looked like a girl. They didn't even give him an interview just because of that, and they spent a good minute laughing amongst eachother about how much of a pussy that guy must have been.
That sounds like an internal problem at your company.
I'd say they should fix that, but we both know they won't.
You gotta do what you gotta do, to pay the bills.
That's pretty much it. They run the show and it's because the owner knows he could never replace the crew with cheaper labour than he has now.