neoprulenouns

I usually refrain from weighing in on this shit, but okay, I'll bite.

Pronouns are something that it's hard to get people in every day offline situations to adhere to. As a trans woman in a public-facing job who constantly deals with people of all different levels of political outlooks, it's hard enough to communicate that feminine pronouns are appropriate for me sometimes. I typically manage to avoid expressing offense outside of situations where someone is being repeatedly and willfully shitty about it. I correct them gently and move on. If this were not my approach, I would likely find it completely intolerable to work with the public.

I'd like to think I'm a decent representative of trans folks in general, and I try to help move the ball forward on general acceptance rather than spending my time enthusiastically scoring own goals. Whether I pass either visually or with my voice is pretty up in the air, so there are situations where people literally have no idea I'm trans but gender me correctly, times when they do clearly know and it could go either way, and times when they somehow fully miss the numerous feminine visual and vocal cues I present and just clueless misgender me.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to try to insist that people adhere to conventions that they're completely unfamiliar with that might even be fully unique to me. A lot of these people will see me once ever for 20 minutes or so and that's it. Some may see me regularly, but probably aren't going to be more than acquaintances. Others I would consider friends.

It's hard enough at times to get people to use actual feminine pronouns rather than habitually dodging them with neutral pronouns or just straight up going masc. I don't think it would be constructive to the actual real life process of securing support and actual legal rights to push the envelope.

Frankly, in the case of some of these folks who push extremely uncommon neopronouns on the Internet, I would be absolutely stunned if they even attempted to get anyone outside of those close to them to use them in real life, let alone had success at it. With some of them? I suspect they're disingenuous trolls trying to roll back progress for the rest of us.

Results do actually matter. Whether or not someone genuinely feels that it would be more just to refer to them by completely unique neopronouns, I feel like they should care enough about the rest of us to actually make a genuine effort to move the overton window rather than serving as an example bigoted shit-heels can point at to claim we're all unreasonable.