this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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General pronouns have to be one or the other, or alternating, or some other strategy. I've only reported comments that misgendered Me after I already asked that person to use My preferred pronouns. I've had positive experiences with 90% of people that disliked being referred to with uppercase pronouns. The remaining 10% are people who weren't happy when I immediately used their preferred pronouns upon request. They were offended that I used a capitalised pronoun when addressing a person who had no previously stated preference, and they wanted Me to always lowercase strangers. So I agreed to their demands, and I lowercase everyone by default now. And of course that 10% is a minority of a minority, because most people aren't specifically LPUs, they don't care about the capitalisation of their pronouns. 99% of people who lowercase pronouns some or all of the time are perfectly pleasant. I am not insulting you when I talk about this small group that caused problems in the past.
I think You missed my point entirely. The language You used in the paragraph I quoted is condescending. You may not have meant to do that, but the result makes it seem like You are talking down to people that use lower case pronouns (or have not thought about/care about capitalization). Even if it is only a small part of Your experience, the language used makes it seem like folks that use lower case are more prone to outburst.
I'm afraid that if we're going to have a conversation about the experiences of capitalised pronoun users, the bigotry of certain people outside the community is going to have to be a part of the conversation. Most people are not transphobes, but some are, and most of the people who engage in violent and uncompromising transphobia are cis. That's not an attack on cis people, it's just the world we live in. Us trans people don't have the luxury of being cisphobic. That's not because of some kind of inherent superioity, it's because the conditions of society don't afford us the same latitudes when it comes to displaying intolerance. A trans person who went around misgendering cis people with neopronouns would be laughed at, while the same behaviour from cis people is often tolerated. That's the simple reason. Nobody's better than anyone else, it's simply what happens when a society is transphobic.
I did not say anything about cis people though? In the paragraph I quoted above, You made a distinction between people that use lower case and upper case pronouns. The distinction You made is that because people that use lower case pronouns are "used to being catered to by society" (which is very untrue in the case of trans people, us nonbinary folks in particular) we have tend to get more upset when misgendered. My point is that this is very condescending, and seems to be saying that people that use uppercase are more reasonable about it. You have been kind of dancing around that point in the last couple responses without actually addressing the condescension.