I am They
I wish I could be as awesome as rax in announcing this, but I'd feel totally weird copying their schtick and I can't come up with one of my own that is half as clever. So I guess this will be kinda dry.
I have wanted to be referred to be gender-neutral pronouns for, oh, on the order of 18 years now. You may have noted in my gender timeline that I said I started to experience a disconnect with my birth-assigned gender at age 13-14 and that is true. But my first exposure to the idea of any form of recognizable (to me) non-binary gender happened in college and that is when I first encountered the idea of non-gendered personal pronouns. I wanted them and I wanted them badly but I avoided, for a long time, identifying by them for two reasons:
1) There were so fucking many of them and I hated most of them. Ze, Xie, Sie, Che, Co, S/he, They, It, One, Ey, E... Most of them strange constructions only genderheads had ever heard of or borrowed from other langages. I seriously just wanted my culture to fucking PICK ONE SET ALREADY so I could use it. And, as far as I could tell, this was not happening.
2) Ugh, effort. Given how little I preferred any of them to the gendered pronouns I was receiving, it seemed like not worth the cost to ask people to change. And the cost seemed high.
But in the past few years I've been noticing that has changed. I think we're converging on using singular They as the gender-neutral pronoun of choice. I don't think it is fully common knowledge or practice, but I see it as rapidly gaining ground. I personally know multiple people choosing that designation. Though I still encounter people who want different gender-neutral pronouns - just last month I encountered YET ANOTHER SET I had never heard of before in 18 years of paying attention to this shit and I was NOT PLEASED. I really do support the idea of people self-identifying but you do not get to reinvent entire linguistical structures just to have your identity validated - you can have a name and a label and a title and various relational labels as well but at some point I need to be able to feel like I am still speaking in my native language which is designed to have generic structures that refer to broad categories of people (faeries NOT being a broad enough category to justify me learning a whole new set of pronouns. No. Just no.)
Which is all to say that I would really like to be referred to by singular They, Them, and Their. But since I recognize that people want to feel like they are still speaking their native language, I am not going to be all language-policing about it. Please try, I will be really appreciative when you succeed. And if I try to give you a gentle nudge and I fail at gentle please tell me.
Please tell other people or correct other people only if you feel comfortable doing so and can do it in a non-dickish fashion. See #2 above about "Ugh, effort". This is really not worth it to me if it feels like a horrible strained thing. But part of why I want to do this is to be part of a groundswell of little nudges towards making it NOT be so much effort one day. In solidarity with my other friends who reject gendered pronouns for a variety of reasons I choose to do this. Because if you only have that one friend who wants those weird pronouns it is hard. But if you have 3 or 4 or 7 it starts to seem more normative.
I am They. Thankyou.
I have wanted to be referred to be gender-neutral pronouns for, oh, on the order of 18 years now. You may have noted in my gender timeline that I said I started to experience a disconnect with my birth-assigned gender at age 13-14 and that is true. But my first exposure to the idea of any form of recognizable (to me) non-binary gender happened in college and that is when I first encountered the idea of non-gendered personal pronouns. I wanted them and I wanted them badly but I avoided, for a long time, identifying by them for two reasons:
1) There were so fucking many of them and I hated most of them. Ze, Xie, Sie, Che, Co, S/he, They, It, One, Ey, E... Most of them strange constructions only genderheads had ever heard of or borrowed from other langages. I seriously just wanted my culture to fucking PICK ONE SET ALREADY so I could use it. And, as far as I could tell, this was not happening.
2) Ugh, effort. Given how little I preferred any of them to the gendered pronouns I was receiving, it seemed like not worth the cost to ask people to change. And the cost seemed high.
But in the past few years I've been noticing that has changed. I think we're converging on using singular They as the gender-neutral pronoun of choice. I don't think it is fully common knowledge or practice, but I see it as rapidly gaining ground. I personally know multiple people choosing that designation. Though I still encounter people who want different gender-neutral pronouns - just last month I encountered YET ANOTHER SET I had never heard of before in 18 years of paying attention to this shit and I was NOT PLEASED. I really do support the idea of people self-identifying but you do not get to reinvent entire linguistical structures just to have your identity validated - you can have a name and a label and a title and various relational labels as well but at some point I need to be able to feel like I am still speaking in my native language which is designed to have generic structures that refer to broad categories of people (faeries NOT being a broad enough category to justify me learning a whole new set of pronouns. No. Just no.)
Which is all to say that I would really like to be referred to by singular They, Them, and Their. But since I recognize that people want to feel like they are still speaking their native language, I am not going to be all language-policing about it. Please try, I will be really appreciative when you succeed. And if I try to give you a gentle nudge and I fail at gentle please tell me.
Please tell other people or correct other people only if you feel comfortable doing so and can do it in a non-dickish fashion. See #2 above about "Ugh, effort". This is really not worth it to me if it feels like a horrible strained thing. But part of why I want to do this is to be part of a groundswell of little nudges towards making it NOT be so much effort one day. In solidarity with my other friends who reject gendered pronouns for a variety of reasons I choose to do this. Because if you only have that one friend who wants those weird pronouns it is hard. But if you have 3 or 4 or 7 it starts to seem more normative.
I am They. Thankyou.