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.
100%.
You don’t get to decide if another person’s identity is valid or not. That’s literally just transphobia, and perpetuating that inside our own community is truscum behavior. An individual person has the final word on who they are, what they’re called and how to correctly refer to them.
Thank you. it is mindboggling that supposed trans allies can tell people they aren’t valid without seeing their hypocrisy.
What’s a neo pronoun? Is it the same as pronouns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopronoun
Tldr
Pronouns: he/him/himself
Neo pronouns: zir/zirs/zirself
Noun-self pronouns: Kitten/Kittenself
Is there any good sources for further reading on noun-self pronouns?
This is the article cited in Wikipedia: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/what-s-playful-what-s-deeply-meaningful-and-what-s-being-mean-a-guide-to-neopronouns-1.4539471
I was on Tumblr at the time but I didn’t realize my fellow Tumblrinas invented the noun-self pronouns
It’s a new pronoun.
It’s interesting from an outside ally pov to watch this community bend itself into a pretzel and practice some of the most inane mental gymnastics I’ve ever seen to accommodate individuals who demand unreasonable accomodations.
This is like listening to Christians explain how they know that they know that they know that they know, that their God is real and has dominion over all.
For myself I choose not to interact with those individuals as I find them utterly exhausting to interact with.
Neopronouns may indeed have their place, but so far I have found every single individual claiming one to be someone that I am thankful to never have any interaction with.
inane mental gymnastics
demand unreasonable accomodations
“”“Unreasonable accomodations,”“” here meaning, using people’s preferred pronouns.
How tf do you see yourself as an ally?
This is a very simple concept that you will need to get used to: Obey the rules of the website you are posting to or commenring on, or don’t post/comment on that website. If you do not agree with the rules, you can ignore the website. If you cannot grok this, then I am afraid there is very little hope for you.
Unless someones pronouns are in their username they’re getting a “they” from me. Nothing against xe/xim/xir but i ain’t checking every profile of every person I debate about whether Sonic would be tempted or double tempted by the One Ring.
blahaj.zone is better about it, but much of Lemmy even just defaults to “he”
Hold on, I’m she/they.
Now can we discuss this FASCINATING topic??? Do we think the one ring would hold multiple ring value? Would Sonic turn invisible or just absorb it? How does the ring affect sonic if it is absorbed? What happens if he collects 100 One Rings? I have so many questions.
Is the One Ring even categorically different from power rings?
What about would happen if the rings forged for man, dwarves, and elves (19 in all) were collected by Sonic along with the One Ring? Sonic could be like… a super ring wraith.
Then we put the Chaos Emeralds in the mix, and things get extra spicy.
It really depends on which sonic we are talking about, SEGA Genius Sonic, Sonic Adventures Sonic, one of the western animation Sonics, Anime Sonic, Live Action Sonic? If it’s Archie Comics Sonic then the power scale goes right out the window.
live action Sonic
or
(adorable little Timmy voice) “He would turn into Sonic dot E X E and kill us all!!”
Battle Network intensifies
Holy crap! A
Megamanreference???Yeah… Pretty much my whole childhood Special Interest.
People remember the existence of the battle network megaman games, not just the platformers!?
This is the only reasonable way to handle this situation. I’m all about making sure people are comfortable, but making-up words and then getting offended when people don’t use them properly is bonkers. I truly don’t mean to offend anyone, but this is getting out of hand.
That’s a fair problem, Lemmy and the mobile apps need a feature where you can see peoples pronouns beside their names. Voyager doesn’t even let me see anything besides someones username and instance, even on the profile page so I can’t even look for their pronouns even if I wanted
You could use Voyager’s user tagging feature to tag people with their pronouns
We got names for that. It is hard adjusting to nonbinary people in a language that does not support nongendered pronouns but names and nicknames are sociacialy accepted and carry the same respect as a correct pronoun.
They absolutely do not, lol. This is a problem for less than 1% of society. The incredibly overwhelming majority of people do not care at all about theirs or others pronouns. In fact, the majority probably still haven’t even pieced together what you guys are even talking about when the topic comes up.
As far as I’m aware more than 99% of people have pronouns and most of them would prefer not being called by the wrong ones
Which is why “they” and “them” and “you” exist. If this WAS a big concern for the majority then you would already have pronouns in all the apps instead of not a single one. The fact it’s not there is the proof you need that most people don’t think about this until it’s brought up by you guys.
You might be a cis agender person considering how you talk about gender. Fascinating stuff imo.
Ah yes the great liberator of gender, putting labels on people. You’re such a cretin.
I know suddenly being told your experience isn’t universal might be scary. But cis people do in fact care about their pronouns. If you don’t, well, I’m sorry to say it, but you are part of what you perceive as less than 1%. Which btw, is most likely a lot more than 1%
The latest numbers coming out of the US say 5% of young adults identify as trans. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/
It’s way over 1%, and it’s gonna get even higher.
Thank you for that link. I might have learned something new about myself.
Happy to be of service!
This is a problem for less than 1% of society.
Yes, and? So if a minority is small enough then it’s okay to be an asshole to them?
And there’s 8 billion people on earth, 1% of that is still 80 million people that somehow don’t deserve respect?
The incredibly overwhelming majority of people do not care at all about theirs or others pronouns
Try calling a grown-ass man a ‘she’ and see how quickly he starts caring.
I’m a grown man, I couldn’t care less. I’m also bi, don’t care if you said I was something else because you’re a stranger on the Internet. And, I know you want to be a victim here, but not putting pronouns in apps isn’t “being an asshole to them”. It’s not wasting time and resources for an incredibly niche issue almost no one is concerned with. I’m not here to tell you I’m an attack helicopter and I’m not here to say your pronouns are invalid, but I am definitely going to stand by the fact that most people don’t think about this or care and it’s in no way necessary to add them to any apps.
Bisexual and transphobic, what a goddamn shame.
No they don’t. Don’t pollute my screen space with garbage.
i always just use they/them as a default until i know the correct pronouns because it’s the most universally genetic anyway :3
Personally I use they/them until I get corrected on it. It’s my default.
It being my default of course means that a lot of the time I’ll keep using it even after being corrected. That’s not from a position of intolerance though, it’s from a position of habit.
And also given the amount of people I engage with online I’m not going to remember every person I interact with, especially given how sparsely I actually respond to people and my response time to people.
Basically y’all are a field of ever changing faces I’ll likely never see again let alone IRL, I’m going to stick to they/them for 99% of our interactions.
what about, it? though a issue would be sexism as people could use it to call women objects.
Lots of people in here who don’t get pronouns or trans people, for those I recommend this article:
There’s a very real chance you guys might be agender cis, which is super fascinating because it’s barely looked into, due to how agender cis people usually don’t even know that their experience isn’t universal.
I was interested until I saw the author and it clicked. Must be a broken clock situation.
Just because someone might not have the same opinions as you, or even in some cases opinions you consider dead wrong it doesn’t mean they are always wrong.
Think of political parties, in one case a party you usually align yourself with makes a terrible decision, and in another case a party you hate makes a decision you would wholeheartedly support. Does that mean your prior preferred party is suddenly on the same level as your hated party? Depends, of course, but we can’t deny that we can’t expect everyone to share the exact same values as us. Variety is the spice of life, and sometimes even someone we consider to be right/wrong will surprise us in negative or positive ways.
I’ve only read a handful of Their articles, but all the ones I’ve read seem solid. Can I ask what your problem is with Them?
Aside from Them jumping the gun, causing an unwarranted dog piling on a well loved mod of a small community that was essentially a safe space for some, resulting in that user leaving Lemmy and the community completely dying, I have read at least one article of Theirs that called people who did not volunteer for war murderers, or something to that effect, I just remember it being an excessively nasty and unnuanced take.
In another article They also advocated for being generally unlikeable, which had some good points but ultimately goes in defiance of everything I think is good about being a leftist.
I recall that in general conversation They were often argumentative and quick to anger too, not someone I ever wanted to interact with, though frankly my memory on that aspect is shaky at best.
Thanks for sharing this. As an older person working to sort out their gender identity later on in life it’s nice to have more ideas to consider.
I’ve wondered if gender identity is a bit like our other senses where we can practice and get better at discerning the signals we’ve always been receiving, but haven’t always known what they mean.
How much is trainable and how much is innate.
Anyway thanks again for sharing this.
It sure is trainable to some extent. I didn’t think I suffered from gender dysphoria when I first realised I was trans. I was only able to connect with gender euphoria to realise My identity. But after I experimented with My gender and tried on some new pronouns and self-images, I realised I hated being a male. I was miserable, but I wasn’t able to see My misery, because I thought it was just life. It’s like when someone with tinnitus doesn’t even realise they have it, because they’ve forgotten what silence sounds like. When I started thinking of Myself as trans, I experienced that metaphorical silence, and then I could hear the metaphorical ringing that was My dysphoria.
I never saw that article before but I do like it, I have noticed that a lot of people who I know that identify as cisgender don’t seem to have an internal sense of gender or pay much mind to gender but I didn’t think anyone else thought that too. It’s nice to see my idea isn’t as unpopular as I initially thought.
What a great article
Haha, look who it is. Love the article, a few of my friends have realized they also might be agender from it.
Thank you! I’d love to blow your mind a few more times if you’re interested in reading the rest of My stuff https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/you-already-think-like-a-soulist-fe1723151b85
It really is, I thought I was one of the only people to think that Agender might be really common but just hidden because many people who don’t feel gender can blend in as cis or not even know they’re Agender. Obviously we’ll probably never really know for sure but I do think it’s likely that many of the people out there who don’t feel gender or don’t think about gender are very likely Agender.
I also saw a meme a while back that said animals are Agender because they don’t give so much thought to gender the way humans do.
If you like exploring the unknown reaches of identity, I’ve got some articles I think you’ll like.
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/on-spiritual-genders-b4152c4503cb
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/introduction-to-capitalised-pronouns-f5140e722b48
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-nested-structure-of-gender-identity-75681e3cfa34
Thank you, I’ll definitely give these a read, they look interesting.
I love how this gets posted for community members, in a meta community, talking about how to engage with our space to not get banned, and then every loser from all comes in here like “umm actually you can’t police my speech and umm pronoun bad” and promptly gets banned for being transphobic and breaking the rules that this post said will be enforced.
the mods and admins are doing a good job here, thanks for all your hard work you put in to make one of my favorite spaces on the internet as wonderful as it is.
Won’t somebody think of the transphobic cishet men?
They’re the real oppressed!
pet pet
Ada is legit one of the best moderators I’ve seen in my 25 years on the internet.
The admin’s chosen examples, in this thread, include demanding people use a slur, if that’s what some rando insists you insert, instead of the “they” that should work for any human being.
It’s really fucking difficult to argue ‘that absolutist or-else seems like a poor idea’ without sounding wishy-washy - or catching a boot in the ass.
look the whole point of this thread is that if you didn’t want to respect somebody’s pronouns then just don’t interact with them or report them if you think they are genuinely trolling, not encourage them. if you don’t do that so your giving trolls what they want and hurting trans people who do identify with those pronouns.
Like moths to a light bulb, it would be funny if the banned folks’ behavior wasn’t steeped in hatred
So does this cover the genders/sexualities of people who are attractedto minors? Or just the genders/sexualities of people attracted to animals?
That MAP shit people regurgitate to try and defend or excuse pedophilia isn’t a valid sexuality, pedophilia is a heinous and disgusting crime. Pedophiles aren’t marginalized people, they are dangerous people who need to be locked up for the safety of others.
My only problem is when i use singular they them for someone and they have a problem with it. I speak hungarian natively which has no grammatical gender nor gendered pronouns and it makes so much more sense. The whole thing about gender neutral language doesnt exist. But what makes me mad is that other languages that have genders solved it while english is still messing around and every time i use singular they or dude/guy as gender neutral, someone with neopronouns or a right winger has to point out how im incorrect. This is of course not pointed at those who use neopronouns, just as someone who speaks a language where pronouns dont matter it feels kinda useless.
You’re allowed to make mistakes and find it difficult. You’re not allowed to decide that you’re not even going to try. If you are at that point, your options are to get it right, or to not engage with the person in question.
take note bluesky this is how to build trust and safety 💙
and it’s another reason why i love it here 💞
I don’t care for neopronouns, but it also doesn’t matter what I think. If it’s REALLY a problem for me, like that person who’s gender identity is divinity and the pronouns that person uses are capitalized, I just won’t refer to that person. (Seriously, that does bother me, not that person’s gender in general but referring to anyone, fictional or not, Like This.)
Your last point raises a good question.
Mods, if someone says Their pronouns are supposed to be capitalised, will we be called for it if we don’t capitalise Them?
Me omw to make all of my pronouns the full transcript of the Bee Movie
Actually, would that be covered under this rule? Like I would be trolling if I did that, but under a true all-acceptance policy you couldn’t selectively not use those pronouns
I think at that point one can choose to word sentences to not use pronouns at all
I see that case as an anomalous one because the tension I personally have there is: a person may be a god, but that doesn’t make that person my god, and I shouldn’t be required to behave worshipfully towards a god I don’t follow. I may choose to follow other religions’ conventions around how they refer to their gods and/or prophets in some contexts, but the idea of not having a choice in matters of religion makes me deeply uncomfortable. Respect between equals, which is what using a person’s pronouns generally is, should be automatic, but deference to authority should be earned in my book.
I don’t think using someone’s preferred pronoun capitalisation is a worship thing. On My antirealist discord server, capitalised pronouns are the default. If you want lowercase pronouns, you have to pick a role that says so.
I’ve met people who thought capitalised pronouns were a matter of religion. But I’ve also met people who think “he” and “she” pronouns are a matter of religion. They think their gender identities are handed down to them by Elohim, and refusing to use someone’s god-given pronouns is a form of disrespect against their god. They say “My god doesn’t make mistakes”, and think their religious beliefs are a reason to misgender people. I think that if treating people decently means decoupling pronouns from religion, then everyone should decouple pronouns from religion.
Is it possible to block an instance on Voyager?
Settings. Filters/ blocks. Add instance.
best I can do is they or it.
I respect the chosen gender of whomever chooses their gender, but that’s limited to he/she/they.
The gender spectrum is real and valid, but you will never make me refer to that dragonfucker idiot as “drag/drag”.
I support gender expression, I do not support being made to speak nonsense words for attention seeking adult children.
Nonbinary and trans people deserve support, not the spoilt little shits who demand I refer to them by "glomph/glue’. And I resent the idea that they are equally valid concerns.
So yes, they are fucking trolling. They’re not trolling me, they’re attaching their bullshit to a class of people who deserve our respect and support, following them around wearing clown shoes and undermining their very real concerns.
If you support gender expression, then support the people trying to survive a world hostile to their very existence, not the people playing at it.
ahh yes calling trans people who you think didn’t do it the right way idiots, telling them their concerns aren’t valid, and that their existence undermines the “real” trans people, all classic ways of supporting people trying to express their gender identity.
Your reading comprehension needs work.
and your respect for trans people needs work <3
And you need a window in Russia.
