I would argue that not only are gender and sexuality too complex to be defined by a mere 1D spectrum, due to there being way too many factors involved (prime example: someone who is into men with vaginas could occupy the same space on the Kinsey scale as someone who's into women with penises or someone who's into enby neuters, yet they're evidently not the same). The kids with their extensive complicated labelling systems breaking the binaries aren't less right, they just haven't taken it far enough yet. None of the labels or their combinations can accurately describe anyone at any point in time let alone the fluctuating states that people travel through. But then I'd argue that identity as a whole is fundamentally illusory.

Pressuring people to use these labels or othering people for not going along with it, whether from an allo-cis bigotry or IdPol calling-you-a-bigotry is arseholery.

I feel like a bit of an odd one out because I never have any conversations about pronouns and I've never had to establish my gender identity online.

Are you sure you're not just hanging about with crackpots? I remember when I used to hang around with a group of slightly unhinged lesbians and their little echo chamber made trivial things into massive deals when nobody outside their little bubble really cared about it.

The thing that strikes me about the modern obsession with "identity", and I mean that specifically in the way pronoun people conceive it, not just a broader sense, is that it's really a fight to make "who you are" into something that you have first hand control over. You can insist that people see and refer to you a certain way; whereas in the past identity has always been about what other people see you as. In order to be a woman in the past (just as a low hanging fruit example) you had to look and act like a woman; but now you can just say you are and everyone plays along.

In many ways that's a good thing, but in many respects it just removes the entire core function of an identity at all, and how the authenticity of an identity mattered. These people often come off as conceited to me. They don't care about who you are, so much as the validation they receive for being different, without having to put any of the hard work into being accepted that people before them did.

The Internet of course has complicated matters. One of the greatest things about the Internet is that it lets people who are misfits and weirdos appear how they want to appear, in a way that you simply can't in real life. It's not without downsides but I overall thinks it's a good thing and a big reason the infringement of social media that relies on real life identity has just been the worst thing ever to happen to the Internet. I think the furry community is fascinating in how they so wholly embrace this-But even so, apart from pratting about in a giant expensive mascot costume at a convention, you don't get to go to work and demand everyone acknowledge that you're a hyena. If you could, would it meaningfully benefit anyone?

I don't know what point I'm eventually coming towards but overall I sympathise with you OP. The push to put identity at the centre of everything is misguided, it doesn't benefit everyone, only the people who are pushing for it, and it doesn't even benefit them as much as they think it does. But I think it will pass.

You just sound like a level-headed person that hasn't succumbed to the idpol brain rot.

Identity is heavily politicised because it's an easy way of separating people into camps (triple entendre, IYKWIM) and thus simpler to attack or rally these artificial groups.

You are who you are: a complex set of attributes that may share a passing resemblance with one or more of many sets but ultimately your own unique self.

That said, you're preaching to the choir a bit here. We're a (largely) well-adjusted bunch with not a lot to prove. You should be taking this to the folks that expect you to conform to their preconceived notions of what a gay man should behave like or how a non-binary trout fisher should dress.

I was at a house party a few months ago with a large number of Those Types, and they were of varying degrees of lunacy but broadly okay. I did actually get asked for my own chosen pronouns, which I felt was very considerate and proved that it's not entirely people just wanting to announce that they're more special than thou. Nevertheless, several women replied that they are she/they, which was new to me but I assume it means these women don't mind being either a she or a they. But of course, being an obvious biological female in each case, that really struck me as an affectation because who would ever refer to them as "they"? Every she/they was clearly just a she. The "they" was purely academic.

My huge complaint about the idea of asking people their pronouns, however, is how few people will ever be affected by it, and how many other minorities are being passively ignored by the promotion of this one community beyond them. In the world, some people don't want to be referred to by the gender pronouns they look like. I can accept this, just about. In such cases, I will usually just avoid using any pronouns at all, because I can accept being asked not to use certain words, but I can't accept being ordered to use other words instead. But anyway, there are also people in this world who have a wooden leg. And I can accept that we, as a society, should not callously ask them to kick us our ball back in the park. It would offend them to have us assume they have two legs. But the correct course of action is to assume people have the default number of legs, and apologise when we are wrong. I consider it absurd to ask everyone I ever meet how many legs they have, out of consideration for the subset of people with nonstandard leg numbers who are also offended at having to correct people all the time. It must be annoying when everyone makes a wrong assumption about you, but that's just part of life.

Sometimes I want to ask pronouns but feel like that might actually be more offensive. Like if I see someone born a bloke, with dyed blue hair and a full face of make up, I would be prone to asking their pronouns, as they seem gender non-conforming. But then, is that worse - at best it means I don't immediately see them for their particular gender identity, at worst it means I see them as a bloke with dyed blue hair and a full face of make up. I lost my virginity to a "genderqueer" person who was born female, dressed in feminine clothes, presented as feminine in every way, had lovely great big tits - at that point are you even genderqueer when you fit into the female box in every way? Also it depends on the setting. When I used to go to my old uni's fisherperson society, everyone would ask people's preferred pronouns due to all the gender non-conformity in that subset of people. Found it odd they'd ask me, a bald man with a beard, what my pronouns were because there's like a 99% chance it's he/him, but I guess there are bald bearded blokes who don't identify as men. My previous job we had to have our pronouns on our identity card, again, working with lots of clients who aren't mostly cishet people.

>>32006

>Sometimes I want to ask pronouns but feel like that might actually be more offensive.

Indeed, but that's the whole point of them trying to make it normal to ask, in the grander scheme of things.

It's quite ironic but the logic is essentially sound. Instead of "Terribly sorry, but I couldn't even tell what the fuck you are, so I had to ask", it's more "It's easier if we all just ask anyway, to avoid the embarrassment of getting it wrong, because we now self-consciously acknowledge that we're such a collective bunch of freakshows you're in with about a 50/50/50 chance of being wrong either way."

That and almost every single one of these people is autistic. I'm not saying that to be mean, there's a massive crossover. Autistic people love clearly defined conventions and etiquette and so on which disposes of any room for ambiguity or faux pas, and I think hat's where a huge amount of it comes from. We're not just talking about the gay or the trans community or whatever here, but a specific neurodivergent (and terminally online) subset of that subculture.

So while I do tend to think it's all a load of shite in a lot of ways, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be at least sympathetic. It's just that perhaps it would be helpful if at some point, people felt more comfortable drawing a line, and saying look, we don't need the entire of human civilisation to revolve around this tiny niche group of people. It's nice to be accommodating, but it's also nice to get on with your life without bending over backwards to meet everyone's increasingly arcane and nonsensical "needs".

I've always been fascinated by how people seem to take neopronouns more seriously than neopronoun people themselves seem to do. You could do a solid materialist analysis of it (and i'm not even marxistlad) as a natural outflow of the near irrelevance of sex or gender when you're online. This is a place where maleness or femaleness pales in importance compared to the fact that you've made a minor punctuation error or said "your" when you meant "you're". In this environment, the default "he", the baggage of "she" and the pedants who crop up for singular "they" can all melt away and for all it matters you can replace those weighty signifiers with something that vaguely implies an affinity for rabbits or cute things.

Nobody wants to look at basic status competition in small social groups without judgement - they'll see someone losing an argument and going "nice of you to ignore my neopronoun and call me 'she' btw" and assume that this must be the same political phenomenon and the same level of perceived social offense as insistently calling a transgender person by their birth gender (something which would still be fucking rude by the norms of 20 years ago) in real life. It isn't. The former is a a social maneuver on a level with going "*you're", and the people involved know this on some level. Nobody is going to drop a friend over it unless they were already looking for an excuse to drop a friend, and even then it'd obviously be a tenuous one. The latter is actually a dick move, the kind of thing that might make you re-evaluate how you see someone. One is internet fun-having, the other is being nasty in real life, and it's only in pretty small friend groups or in otherwise niche circles that you're going to find more than one person using 'bunself' or 'fae' or so on. Doing so is perfectly harmless fun on the one hand, and a fascinating outflow of the material irrelevancies of gendered pronouns in a digital environment on the other. It's the kind of thing that warrants a fascinating essay, not getting mad about how if you've gotta call this person 'her', next thing you know she'll be demanding you call her (sorry, '666') 666self.
The same applies to a lot of progressives too - some will get mad at kids playing with neopronouns because they think it makes it harder to have people use their preferred regular pronouns, as if most people who currently refuse to do so would change their tune overnight if only you'd behave bunself.

I could go on - not all neopronouns are created equal, you can set up a little hierarchy where all the hard to say gender neutral ones created by nerdy adults who can't stomach 'they' in the singular are taken more seriously than the obviously frivolous ones created by teenagers who grew up online - but it's not really worth it and would quickly become a bullet point list of tentative theories. I'm not an expert myself, it's just very obvious to me that people are looking at these things without appreciation for a raft of smaller details, sometimes because it's useful for their own cynical arguments but usually because it would require domain specific knowledge of communities they've no interest in which often peaked in activity 10 years ago. The results often feel like the equivalent of if people were developing hostile opinions about this website's culture by drawing inferences from what they half remember about Futaba Channel and Father Ted.

I don't have any issue with anyone identifying however they like, but I've always thought that they/them covers everything and is already baked into the language. People can specify if they want, but we could all just be "they" and it wouldn't make much of a difference, right?

>>32009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt5qJC1xQ8A

>>32009

In English it works, with other languages it gets more troublesome. We're used to French, German and Spanish where you refer to objects by a gender, but wait until you get to Slavic where changing the grammatical cases and genders means you're more or less just saying entirely different words. In French or Spanish etc you can reasonably substitute "Ted put his letter in the (masculine) postbox", for the equivalent of "Ted put their letter in a (neutral) postbox".

But in Polish or Czech or whatever you have "Tim (masculine subject) letter (masculine verb that Tim is doing in the present tense) postbox (masculine, the object being acted upon by Tim in the present tense)". There's no such word as their or even the, because the grammar tells you it. So just try figure that the fuck out without just ending up saying "Tim is a postbox".