The longer I’ve been using all the pronouns, the more I love it. Because like yeah, sure, it’s easy for people that they can’t accidently misgender me but I’ve also taken away their power to misgender me and I think it’s doing a bit to spread the idea that it’s possible to have a multifacetted identity that spans the whole gender spectrum (or giddily skips across that spectrum giving a middle finger to the people who insist on clear boxes). Also language is a bitch and I hate the kind of classist ableist activism that holds language purity as the highest form of acceptance.
I would be tempted by this, except – do people actually use all the pronouns to refer to you? Or do they lean overwhelmingly towards one based on your appearance vis a vis the gender binary?
I don’t know how much appearance matters because I have a far from consistent gender representation. I may be all dolled up one day and all butch the next and apart fromt strangers who don’t know my preference I don’t really see my friends switching based on my appearance. (And if they would that would be fine. When I’m looking very feminine I am expressing my femininity and responding to that by using ‘she’ today would be fine)
Some of my friends lean heavily towards the one they got used to when I did have a strong preference. Some people lean strongly towards ‘they’, probably because that’s easier for them than mixing it up. And I’ve noticed friends automatically copying whatever pronoun another person in the conversation is using to make it clear that they’re still talking about me.
Interesting. I suppose I’m just going off of, when i ask people to use they, if anyone slips up they always do it in favour of my assigned gender, so I feel like if I said “all pronouns are correct pronouns” I’d just get that one most of the time. Which isn’t hugely traumatic or anything (the whole reason I’ve considered this is I don’t have a strong attachment to any given pronoun) but it feels like it might sort of defeat the purpose.
I totally understand. I used a pronoun other than my assigned pronoun for a long time and physically transitioned before making this switch (not as a plan, it just sort of happened this way), all that probably makes a big difference.
I know quite a few trans people that use ‘anything but he / anything but she’ as their pronoun preference and feel that that is both easier and better represents the complexity and fluidity of their gender than just ‘they’ or something.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend going for ‘all the pronouns’ for everyone. It only works if there isn’t one pronoun that really bothers you. The whole ‘I don’t give people the power to misgender me through pronouns’ part of ‘all the pronouns’ works well for me but only because I am in a situation where I can make it work. It’s not something I could force if a certain pronoun did made me very uncomfortable.
