me: I’m not really ready to face being nonbinary and publicly out irl. instead, I’m going to put all my gender feelings on this character I love who doesn’t use he or she pronouns, so that I can explore my identity without confronting the personal pain of being misgendered.
people who can’t read are very cisgender: *call that character he or she*
cisgender readers: *aggressively ignore the character’s canon pronouns*
cisgender readers: *offensively defensive about having pronoun use corrected*
me:
me: oh I don’t like this actually
My first thought was “hey, this is about Murderbot” but frankly, it’s about common courtesy. If someone tells you their pronouns, it costs you exactly $0.00 to use them.
Even for fictional characters.
PS:
Some people, when they read, imagine what happens as they’re reading (like a movie playing in their heads). And some of those people are also cis, and some of thosepeople probably imagine certain gender-indeterminate characters as either male or female.
At least partly, this has to do with how human brains like to put everything into neat, easy-to-understand buckets. And this includes other people. Pattern-matching is great except when it’s not.
In which case, it will cost more than $0.00 to remember that your brain is imperfect and sometimes, it gets things wrong. Like pronouns. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get things right, but it does mean that sometimes, it’s notgoing to be super easy (barely an inconvenience).
