… wait, this started over someone demanding incorrect capitalization? That’s not what pronouns are. That’s not what gender is!

I have misgivings about LinkOpensChest.wav, but only because they run a no-disagreement-permitted propaganda megaphone community with negative self-awareness. This? This is a non-issue. This is the opposite of an issue. Grail is just wrong about how anything works.

There is the concept of gender, as a spectrum, and you can be anywhere on it, and you can be off it entirely. Getting mad that people don’t address you as “her” is a serious fucking issue. Getting mad that people don’t address you as “Her Royal Majesty” is a joke. I could even see people getting miffed about a catch-all “they” instead of using their username, even though that’s like taking offense to being addressed as “you.” But I don’t get to demand people exclusively refer to me as “the person who is always right about everything.”

At its core:

Nobody gets their own pronouns.

Those are called… nouns.

Pronouns are generic indirect stand-ins. English happens to have several gendered sets. Some languages don’t. Because gender is a big deal (at present) people can specify which set feels appropriate for them. But it’s a selection. You pick from the ones that exist. There was some chance of a tumblr-ish xe/xer emerging, if only to maintain conjugated tense better than they/them… but that was never going to coexist with ze/zer and whatever else. Those are not distinct enough to bother making them additional unique exceptions to the English language. A minority of millions had a specific need. That’s not an invitation for every last rando to demand respect for whatever they make up.

Could someone demand we speak of them exclusively in French?

Could someone demand we speak of them in first-person, like that SCP about a haunted toaster?

Could someone demand we… never speak of them? That any effort to address them as an individual is a slur?

These demands are not much sillier than clutching pearls over grammatical English. When we refer to that user, we cannot be expected to capitalize That User, as if that’s the same fucking problem as misgendering. This whole debacle is an insult to the severity of misgendering. So far as I can see, LinkOpensChest.wav correctly gendered Grail, they just didn’t bother playing by any additional made-up rules.

This is especially dumb when those rules are explicitly rooted in a claim to divinity. I’d break that shit on principle. There cannot be bigotry in treating someone as human.

Anyone who wants to disagree with me must use Old English thee/thou/thine for the second-person. My username has capitalized vowels during local business hours. Anyone who agrees with me can do whatever they want.