If you have no preferred pronouns, just say (none) or something
This will help make people feel more comfortable in this comm and has a side effect of showing you support trans people when making comments in other communities. It will also make reactionaries seethe and make it easier for mods to purge them, and make trans people feel safer all over the fediverse.
Suggestions for when it becomes too long? Would ♂ work? I have 4 extra characters to work with.
With the standard length being 24 characters " [he/him]" would reduce it to 15 characters, " [she/her]" to 14 and " [they/them]" to 12 characters, which is really short for a username imo.
Lemm.ee apparently has it further reduced to 20.
I didn’t even notice you could alter your display name like this. Almost a year here and somehow missed this feature.
EDIT:
And apparently its only working on my blahaj.zone account (lol how appropriate)
my beehaw account is not letting me update the name
and my fedia account, which uses mbin doesn’t even have it as an option
I just did (might take some time to propagate)
I understand the sentiment and would respect the decision, even if I don’t agree, but there are problems of consistency. You say people should make new accounts if necessary to explore their trans identity, but you’ll allow instance wide exemptions.
It would be nice if proper support for pronouns was added in the first place, but that’s also clearly not going to become a priority unless people openly demand it, so here we are with an inconsistent compromise.
Pretty much every IRL trans space I’ve ever been in has started with name + pronouns, it’s not a big ask and it normalizes being respectful of other people.
Sorry, I didn’t want to make a bad faith argument, but I think it’s necessary to clarify the issue.
The exemption will allow bigots from those instances to still have access and the benefit of doubt. People who might have valid reasons to not disclose openly their position will have to create a new account.
If pronouns are a safety measure, there’s a big flaw in making exemptions. Will the users know the people they are talking are not marked because they can’t be.
Just a thought. Maybe make it a required opener or signature.
(he / him / queer)
I do like the idea of mandating including pronouns in your first post in a thread if your instance doesn’t support them, rather than an exemption
I don’t really consider requiring pronouns to be a safety measure, more of a vibes check.
Frankly considering how normalized being transphobic on main is, I like the idea of pushing people to being supportive of trans people on main.
My username says it already. I wish everyone the best.
