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.
If we have to have gender-specific pronouns, sure. While well-intentioned, that approach will never be perfect, it’s STILL categorising people into smaller and smaller groupings in contexts where categorisation is unnecessary. We’re jumping through linguistic loops so complicated that we need cue-cards for, when we could just use gender-neutral pronouns universally.
Bespoke pronouns are also only a “solution” in English, which (mostly) has no gender-specific suffixes for nouns. In the spirit of inclusivity German has recently misguidedly settled on just repeating the noun with male and female suffixes, “I have to go to the hairdresser or hairdresseress”. Unarguably more quantitatively inclusive, this grammatical monstrosity is also more severely excluding people that fit in neither category. The answer isn’t “everyone should additionally specify their own suffixes so we can list off more variations” but rather to stop caring what gender cuts your hair altogether. Hairdresser can be a gender-neutral word. Here’s to them.
The reason this pronounce thing doesn't get any support and isn't going anywhere, is cuz the folks so insistent on it completely miss the point of pronouns and genders. They're boxes and mental shortcuts. You want me to acknowledge that those things are wrong? I'm with you. You want me to replace them with a more bizzare and a complicated system? Nah, sorry pal, couldn't care less. Come back when you have figured out that boxes and special names are bad and we all can start using some gender-agnostic language.
Additionally all this nonsense also often comes from a bunch of 20y olds essentially defying their parents. I don't care about your generational drama, I'm sorry.
Good luck with your pronouns. Now give me my ban, thanks.
This coming from someone who always felt like they can't be whatever the society expects them to be based on their very clearly visible biological sex.
I would just say most people like boxes, it's a very human thing to want to fit in and be seen as a certain thing. If it helps them out, I'm willing to accommodate that up to a point, so I'll ask someone what they want me to call them. If it's something that will severely hinder my ability to communicate with them I'll let them know, and if it's that important to them we can try to work out what to do from there.