It’s late but I thought I would do a mini-thread on how I chose my pronouns in different languages for #NationalComingOutDay ! I speak English, French (slowly), and am learning Arabic. 1/7
In English, I chose they/them because it is the gender neutral option that feels the most natural on my tongue. I am genderfluid but my gender hovers vaguely around agender half the time so I feel most comfortable with one gender neutral set of pronouns. 2/7
In French, I chose iel and il. Iel is the gender neutral neo-pronoun, which I love, but it does not have very widespread usage among non-trans people as far as I know. There is also the problem that you still have to chose m/f adj+verb agreement to go along with iel. 3/7
In an ideal world, people would switch gender agreement for me randomly from sentence to sentence but explaining to people that you want them to do that is hard and kind of really weird. But like...ideally just choose which gendered form you find prettier and I’ll roll with it. 4
I chose a second pronoun, il, because I do not pass as male but I would like my genderqueerness to be recognized, so if they can’t wrap their heads around iel, then I will make them use il. Is this kind of aggressive? Yes. But sometimes you just want to break things. 5/7
Finally in Arabic, I have so far been sticking with the feminine هي, mostly because that’s how people read me and I lack confidence in the language. I’m very new to it and I don’t yet know what trans Arabic speakers have come up with. (If you know, I’d love to learn!) 6/7
In Arabic, I’d again love for people to switch up gender agreement, but grammatical gender in Arabic is somehow even more complicated than in French (at least for me) so I’ll hold off on that request 😂 7/7
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