I have a few questions on how to best behave to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible without sounding bad. I hope you guys don’t hate me.
I’m just a straight male. Are my pronouns he/him? Is that how I should tell people? Do you actually tell them as you meet them ? Do I have to wait for a certain social cue ?
How about online. Should I tell people or have it on my personal profile somewhere?
And about respecting other people’s pronouns. How do i figure them out ? Is it a big faux pas if I don’t before I know them ? Is it a faux pas if I refer to someone I just met and I assumed to be male as he/him?
I’ve never seen anyone referring to anyone irl by non conventional pronouns. Is it an actual thing or is it currently being pushed to make the world a more inclusive place?
I’d love some help with all of this.
I have been using “they/them” to refer to unknown internet persons, regardless of gender, since years now. It is a strategy I adopted not out of the progressive social culture norms, but as a way to anonymise people when referring to them or anything they say. And what do you know, turns out that ambiguous linguistics work like a charm across a wide range of things in life.
Also it’s literally the way you’re supposed to refer to individuals of unknown gender.
Most people today conform to the standards, either out of fear of getting cancelled or out of respect for humanity (recognising third gender and so on). I adopted the convention long before it was known or “popular” to do so. Each of these 3 cases have a huge difference.
To someone like me, it felt very disorienting for people to be so chimp headed, they could not or refused to understand that gender and sex are not the same thing, just because it used to always be 2 tickboxes on school forms. Even more weird was why people would not use ambiguous pronouns for cultural privacy.
just be careful not to de-gender someone who makes it known they have one and prefer particular pronouns.
I have never done that, and never was asked to. Maybe it is because I already naturally follow the convention before even being asked, and we are quite a bit far away as a global society from needing to take the extra step (rightwingers that purposely degender and all that).