drum rolls for a completely unsurprising conclusion to this conversation 3 years later

6 months after this convo, turns i realised i was non-binary aaand i started using the pronoun “it” (along with she and they). In case anyone is still curious why, in my case, it’s a combination of “‘they’ implies plurality but that’s not quite what i’m looking for, neopronouns just don’t speak to me, i just want nothing, i want to be a void-gendered nonhuman blob”. Also the fact that I’ve always loved the uncomplicated existence of that pronoun in English because my mother tongue only has “she” and “he” and uses those for objects and animals too (which also means i don’t have the mental link between grammatical gender and humanity that English native speakers have — if a chair can be “she” in French, I can be an “it” in English).

Anyway! respect people’s pronouns and also don’t go to people telling them the word they identify with hurts other people

I have a friend who said a while ago that their personal choice was to be called “it”. However, they have a kind of self-hating sense of humour and it probably amused them to think of people dismissing them in this way. I found it a difficult pronoun to use as when I did people looked at me in an open mouthed kind of way as if I was being incredibly rude and hated the person, especially those outside of the queer community who haven’t come across this before. So I, too, avoid that pronoun as much as possible.

Ya, but the n-word also is used by people referring to themselves and other people of color deliberately.

On the other hand… of course, yeah, here it’s kind of more complicated because not only is that person using a word to refer to itself, but by definition asking that OTHERS use it to refer to itself, which… ends up making you sound like the bigots who use that pronoun to insult and dehumanize trans people, yeah. I can understand your unwillingness for this reason…
Like, as a white person, I would never use the n-word; as a queer person, I like using the word for myself and for others, but respect the wish of other people who don’t want it applied to them. But here, the word’s entire purpose hinges on being used BY other people…

Mmm.

Ofc, I’d bet it has thought about that at length already, and if that’s not stopping it from wanting to use that pronoun, then ¯_(ツ)_/¯

One thing I guess to keep in mind from Brendan’s perspective, to him, Sulla was based on a full brain scan of Al, her brain, even when she was in the more robot-like initial body, was still akin to a human child, so seeing her grow and change is still a human process, even if she’s synthetic. Tsade as they mentioned earlier I’d a conglomerate ai…a kind of “bottom up” approach at sentience. They didn’t base Tsade’s programming on a human mind, so by accounts, they shouldn’t be capable of being sentient, yet they are. I think Brendan is still too like, shocked about this realization then anything else, but I’m sure he comes around eventually.

Can’t reply to Dotcom, so replying to myself.

Who gets to decide what’s hurtful/more important/more deserving? It’s a serious question that I have pondered for a long time and cannot answer. Also, there are plenty of other genderless pronouns out there that are substantially less hurtful (“ko”, “ze”, and “they” as quick examples)

I had once hoped to see what would happen if a transwoman friend from high school had met the person who used “it” as a pronoun. Bree, my friend, would be wounded to meet someone like that after all the slurs thrown her way.

I do know how some older gay men feel about “queer” – I have met some survivors of the story detailed in this book, Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s. They are not fans.

This is kind of a grey area, but I agree with Azalee.

I think any time one is not comfortable with a pronoun sometimes neutrally and mindfully asking questions (in a “mind if I ask you something personal” form) helps. Like asking the person why “it” given the term “it” usually is a slur and also is more often used for inanimate objects. Of course, there is google, too. I’m sure there are other people on the internet who do it and explain why, but that may not explain this person’s reason. If it feels strongly enough to ask for that unusual pronoun, it may not mind explaining why it’s important to it. Of course it depends entirely on your relationship with this person. If it is a coworker or someone else you work with professionally then I can see why it’s important to tread lightly. If it is someone you aren’t close to I can also understand why it’d be hard, but it is important to respect pronouns.

The machines in Iain M. Banks Culture novels prefer ‘it’ (or at least ‘it’ is the nearest approximation to the pronouns used in their superlanguage). If they met Sulla they might think she is weird for knowing herself to be female. We have not really found out what Tsade thinks about it.

Person who goes by “it” is a mere acquaintance for other reasons.

I think the pronoun choice is poor because I also know a lot of trans people who consider “it” to still be a slur on the order of the n-word, not a reclamation. Consider “queer, ” which was a slur within my lifetime and causes angst and pain to many elders in the alphabet soup community, but is now claimed by a lot of younger folks as an identity.

No idea what it might be in the case of Tsade, but just my two cents in the case of your friend: if that’s that person’s preferred pronoun, then using its name to avoid using its pronoun is… not super great, and hinting that you don’t actually respect it. It’s exactly like avoiding to use a trans woman’s pronoun after she comes out to you because you don’t want to misgender her… but you’re not actually comfortable with her identity. It implies that you don’t actually “agree with” this person’s identity and choice of how to refer to itself.

Ofc there’s other reasons, like if you just meant the fact that grammatically it causes some confusion (I just ran into that problem while wording my sentence), then forget I said anything, that’s a valid point unrelated to identity x) (though I would guess that it has given much thought to this problem already) There can be “”acceptable”” reasons to do that. I find myself doing the pronoun-avoidance thing too when talking to cis/straight people about people they know who are not out to them (ie a trans girl that they only know as being “”a guy”” — the most important part is to not out that person to other people against her will, but I feel awful deliberately misgendering her even to cover for her, so I try to do neither.)

But “I personally don’t think that is a great choice” is… not a great reason to do that, imo. Just like for binary trans people, how you feel about it is not relevant.

I do know a person who uses “it” as a preferred pronoun. I don’t think that is a great choice for a variety of reasons, but I cache the decision under “you do you.” Also I refer to this individual by name as much as possible to avoid the pronoun situation.

Also, why would a robot necessarily care about or identify with the human gender spectrum? Sulla is a mind map, Tsade is wholly synthesized consciousness who may truly have no strong identity (or may even prefer the distance granted by “it” because Tsade is not human).