I’ve seen a few posts recently calling people out for using “they” when referring to someone with gendered or neo pronouns.
As a long time dumb guy I was under the impression that gender neutral pronouns were basically always acceptable and I’m now concerned that I have been unintentionally making people uncomfortable.
My current understanding based on context is that once someone has made their pronouns known, unless specifically included, ‘they’ is no longer acceptable. Thank you in advance for taking the time to help me out
I generally default to they/them for anyone until they explicitly tell me their pronouns or somebody else who knows them uses specific pronouns for them. I personally think people shouldn’t instantly jump to accusations of transphobia when another person defaults to gender neutral pronouns – the whole point is to not assume anyone’s gender until informed otherwise.
Who is saying that, tho? From my experience, the issue is always brought up when people use they / them in a context where they know it’s misgendering somebody. And when i see that or when i’m bringing this up myself, the initial complaint is never “you’re being a transphobe here”, the complaint is always just “this person is using she / her and not they / them, can you please correct your post?” Unintentional misgendering is still misgendering and should always be corrected, even if you know the misgendered person is never going to see it. And if the misgendering was a perfectly understandable accident or not doesn’t matter, either. When i know somebody’s pronouns and see that they’re not being used, i will bring that up. But why would i call people transphobes at that point, like who even does that?
Accusations of transphobia only enter the picture when people are being dicks about this. Which, unfortunately, happens a lot. Some people just prefer to enter full debate dingdong mode until they get banned instead of just hitting the edit button, correcting a mistake that can and does happen to everyody and saying sorry. Unfortunately, i’ve been part of such discussions on a fairly regular basis. And honestly, when people place their insistence that they cannot make a mistake towards a trans person over treating that person with respect, yeah, that reeks of transphobia to me, there’s no way around that. That’s just a cis person telling us when we’re allowed to be offended and when we’re supposed to stay quiet and remember where our place is.
That’s all there is to this and i’ve literally not once seen somebody say that they / them for unspecified people, for groups, for people you can’t know the pronouns of would be transphobic. And i’m saying this as somebody who is a hardliner on this question and thinks it’s reasonable to either avoid pronouns entirely or to have people look up pronouns before writing about somebody. But that’s just my highly subjective opinion about which ways to adress somebody we perceive to be the most inclusive. Gender neutral language by necessity is a part of that, but so is gender affirming language.
I’ve literally seen both Hexbear and Blåhaj Lemmy users go straight to calling someone a transphobe because they didn’t see a user’s pronouns due to their Lemmy app or instance not showing pronouns by default (I actually only found one Lemmy app on iOS that even had a toggle for showing pronouns awhile back when I was picking a client, which is a shame).
Back when I was on reddit, I also saw a decent number of trans people complaining there about being referred to with they/them by somebody irl when their gendered pronouns had not been expressed in any way. Like I understand that degendering is a problem, and it’s harmful asf, but I don’t think it’s right to assume that anybody using a gender-neutral default pronoun set is degendering a person.
Fair enough, but in the first example, it’s perfectly understandable why people would be under the assumption that their pronouns would be visibly on display and somebody not using them would purposefully misgender the user. I still remember how in the first days of federation, some guy would accuse us of being Russian bots because his replies had people with he /him, she / her, they / them and comrade / them as pronouns and that amount of “gender diversity” already was so overwhelming to him that his assumption was that we had randomly assigned pronouns for our bot army. The early days of federation weren’t exactly a relaxed time for trans people on this site, we had dunk threads about somebody accusing us all of being fake trans on a fairly regular basis. When your experience with the rest of lemmy are things like that, it’s 100% reasonable to think that somebody using they / them instead of she / her is doing that on purpose and not due to simple technical difficulties. How much benefit of the doubt are you demanding from people in a situation like that? I’m not saying that this isn’t something that causes avoidable confrontations and can be a bad look, but i am definitely arguing that it’s unfair to blame trans people in that situation for lashing out. Hurt people act mean, it is how it is. When you want our community to act more agreeable, you first need to provide an environment that doesn’t constantly shit on them, simple as.
And don’t even get me started on the cesspool that’s reddit. Being thin-skinned and prone to jump to conclusions is a state of mind that site just gets you into as a trans person, i doubt i have to tell you that. It’s part of why i do not use it anymore, reddit had actual “i have to talk to my therapist about this” consequences on my mental health and i didn’t even wade that far outside of the trans boards after coming out. I’m not kidding, back then i was forced to attend gender counceling as part of the medical gatekeeping for gender affirming care in my country and talking about reddit-induced detorioration of my mental health was one of the few actual uses i got out of that. Turns out i also wasn’t alone with these problems, either (although my therapist had the most problem with trans 4chan users in her practice for fairly obvious reasons). Being too online in a chronically lowkey invalidating environment really, really fucks with people even before we account for the outright hostility, the targeted harassment, the chasers creeping into our DMs or the people falsely reporting us for suicide risks. And logging off is something a lot of us have to actively work on due to these sites being literally designed to habituate you and keep you permanently online. It’s honestly kinda mean to call it “ridiculous” when trans people in an environment like that overreact to something that, while unintended, is still objectively very hurtful from that person’s perspective. I mean, yes, i agree, it’s an overreaction, it is uncalled for from the other person’s perspective, but come on. We both know how people get into such a headspace, and honestly, it’s not the trans person’s fault.
This is fair, I forget how… not good it was back then. But I think at this point it’s reasonable to expect Hexbear users commenting outside Hexbear to realize pronoun display isn’t a given.
I’m so, so glad I’m not there on the regular anymore – it’s strictly for periodic research lookups nowadays, and I try to not even use it for that except when absolutely necessary.
I think I’m just too compartmentalized to understand this. I don’t really take psychic damage from people mis-assuming my gender, so long as they change tracks when I correct them. But will edit my phrasing to be less potentially-hurtful, my bad there.