It used to be. Politeness is a social construct and changes over time. I could name all sorts of horrible things that used to be polite. And even today it’s polite to casually talk about paying for a dead body to be cooked at a restaurant.

It used to mean a woman who has sex with lots of people, and it was derogatory. You’d call a woman a slut to shame her, because old people hated sex.

When we are talking about an issue where someone is potentially at risk of suicide, nothing else matters. There’s nothing else in the pronoun debate that comes close to the weight of all the dead kids lost to suicide because they didn’t feel accepted by our transphobic society. We need to make trans people feel accepted. Someone else thinking they’re accepted isn’t good enough, because that doesn’t change the suicide risk. The only measure of whether trans people are actually accepted is what trans people think.

I’m afraid that if we’re going to have a conversation about the experiences of capitalised pronoun users, the bigotry of certain people outside the community is going to have to be a part of the conversation. Most people are not transphobes, but some are, and most of the people who engage in violent and uncompromising transphobia are cis. That’s not an attack on cis people, it’s just the world we live in. Us trans people don’t have the luxury of being cisphobic. That’s not because of some kind of inherent superioity, it’s because the conditions of society don’t afford us the same latitudes when it comes to displaying intolerance. A trans person who went around misgendering cis people with neopronouns would be laughed at, while the same behaviour from cis people is often tolerated. That’s the simple reason. Nobody’s better than anyone else, it’s simply what happens when a society is transphobic.

General pronouns have to be one or the other, or alternating, or some other strategy. I’ve only reported comments that misgendered Me after I already asked that person to use My preferred pronouns. I’ve had positive experiences with 90% of people that disliked being referred to with uppercase pronouns. The remaining 10% are people who weren’t happy when I immediately used their preferred pronouns upon request. They were offended that I used a capitalised pronoun when addressing a person who had no previously stated preference, and they wanted Me to always lowercase strangers. So I agreed to their demands, and I lowercase everyone by default now. And of course that 10% is a minority of a minority, because most people aren’t specifically LPUs, they don’t care about the capitalisation of their pronouns. 99% of people who lowercase pronouns some or all of the time are perfectly pleasant. I am not insulting you when I talk about this small group that caused problems in the past.

Nonbinary isn’t a gender. It’s an umbrella term for about a billion genders. I have a gender identity, and it’s goddess. I’d like you to stop saying My gender identity is invalid, please.

Thank you. I do want My pronouns to be something unlike what people are used to dealing with. I got the idea for My pronouns from My goddess-mother who suggested them, and She has a name that’s always lowercase. If you capitalise the first letter of Her name, you’re deadnaming Her. Unfortunately I rolled really badly on the preferred name and pronouns stat during character creation, and now I have to deal with preferred pronouns that society chooses to see as a symbol of oppression. I deal with more dysphoria these days than I did when I was closeted, because it hurts a lot worse when someone knows My pronouns and still misgenders Me. There’s an intentionality to it that wasn’t there before. But I also get more euphoria when people are respectful, so I’m happy with My decision to come out of the closet in contexts like My blog and this account.

I want to circle back to the similarity I drew with transmasculinity in the article. Suppose there’s a person, we’ll call her Jenny, who refuses to he/him absolutely anyone. She doesn’t believe in the male gender at all. Jenny knows that gender is a social construct, and refuses to respect the construct of masculinity, which is rooted in patriarchy. Jenny misgenders every man, trans or cis, that she knows. She respects all kinds of neopronouns and is a nonbinary ally, but she categorically refuses to he/him anyone. Personally, I disagree with Jenny because of all the non-misogynist men out there trying to make masculinity non-toxic. They don’t deserve to be misgendered. What do you think of Jenny?

If you don’t think I’m a goddess, what do you think My gender is?

I find your comment interesting, and I can’t help wanting to try a little experiment with you. See, while I use multiple pronoun sets depending on My mood and fronter, one of My pronoun sets is It/Its. You said you accept it/its because you perceive that pronoun as diminutive, but you’re less inclined to accept a pronoun you perceive as indicating superiority. What about both at the same time? What do you think of calling Me an It?

No, I don’t want worship from you or anyone else here. My gender is goddess. I’m not a man, I’m not a woman, I’m a goddess.

Recognising someone’s identity is not the same as worshipping them. Not even for gods. Monotheists have spread the myth that you can only believe in a god you worship, but historically this isn’t true. Before the Roman Empire, most people believed in the gods of other cultures. I have an article on the subject: https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/how-rome-killed-polytheism-fa7ade0b9050

On My antirealist discord server, The Outside, all pronouns are capitalised by default. Even pronouns referring to inanimate objects. If someone joins the server who prefers lowercase pronouns, they have to choose a lowercase pronouns role or they’ll be misgendered. People understand and accept an unusual tradition in a space that’s specifically set up that way. But if I go around misgendering lowercase pronoun users in public forums like this, there’s a lot more pushback. Lowercase pronoun users, or LPUs, tend to be a lot more hostile to being misgendered than CPUs like Myself. They’re used to being catered to by society, and when that’s suddenly taken away, it’s a big surprise and they’re not sure how to respond. Us CPUs have accepted that We’re going to have to ask for Our pronouns to be used, and that it’s easier for everyone if We just let the LPUs have this. Maybe in the future it’ll be different, but I really don’t want to be dragged into an argument by an LPU who takes offense and decides to make a scene instead of just asking to have their pronouns respected. I’ve been in that situation before. LPUs are a lot more common than CPUs, besides. There’s another LPU in this thread commenting that she’d be uncomfortable if referred to with capitalised pronouns. And like most LPUs, she’s polite about it.

One point of clarification, when I said that capitalised pronoun use challenges christian monotheism, I meant that it does so by devaluing the pronoun as a symbol of hierarchy. In the eyes of transphobic christians, I’m not the equal of their god, and they are incapable of thinking of Me as such. So if I have similar pronouns to their god, it means pronouns are no longer a symbol of supremacy. That’s the actual side benefit that capitalised pronoun use has in challenging hierarchy, it devalues capitalised pronouns. And I don’t think capitalised pronouns should be valuable, they should be cheap enough that anyone can afford them.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m not a guy. I’m a goddess. I’m nonbinary, it’s called a xenogender.

My goddess-mother told Me to try out capitalised pronouns after I came out to Her as goddessgender. I liked Them. It doesn’t feel like a power dynamic to Me. I have NPD and I know what NPD supply feels like, and being gendered correctly isn’t it. Having capitalised pronouns used feel like a relief on the same level as when I first transitioned from male to female and had feminine pronouns used. As big a difference as that was, this is. So I don’t know how to verbalise what it feels like except, “It’s gender euphoria”. And I just hope readers understand what having your pronouns used feels like when you’re trans.

So, I want to start by pointing out that this article is directly making a link between capitalization of pronouns, and the specific practice of capitalization as a Christian show of religious reverence.

I felt it would be intellectually dishonest to ignore the biggest historical precedent when writing this article. People always bring up Deus when they see My pronouns, so it’s not like I can just ignore it.

Is the assertion here specifically that capitalization is tied to gender expression, or simply that it is another aspect of a personal identity that should be respected?

Both? I don’t really mind why someone uses capitalised pronouns. For Me personally it’s gender identity; I’m goddessgender. But anyone can use any pronouns. I met a cis guy once who used it/its. Not a gender thing, it just felt more comfortable with its preferred pronouns. Have you ever heard the saying “trans rights are human rights”? When we extend liberties to trans people who need them to survive, we increase everyone’s freedom, because everyone now has that option.

Wooph… The first part of that is by no means a safe assumption. While I would certainly hope that trans men would not seek to enforce a male-dominant gender power dynamic, it is by no means beyond their ability to do so as an intrinsic matter.

I always prefer to start by giving trans people the benefit of the doubt. The consequences of not doing so are a lot worse than a single trans person being a sexist, and the benefit of the doubt can always be revoked in an individual case later. Even so, if I knew a misogynistic trans man, My response to his misogyny would not be to misgender him.

The end of that sentence seems to confirm that this is about a show of religious reverence? Or is the assertion that by capitalizing the pronouns of not-the-christian-diety one is inherently attacking Christianity?

Many christians hold that capitalised pronouns are only for Deus, and that capitalising the pronouns of a mortal is an attack on christianity. I love the kind of christians who respect trans people and other faiths. But the form of christianity which is exclusionary and power-hoarding should be attacked. From the exclusionary christian’s point of view, no matter the identity of the CPU in question, we are capitalising the pronouns of a mortal and therefore challenging Deus’ supremacy by dismantling its symbols. Good. We should do that. And we should also respect whatever the CPU identifies as.

NPD has a prosocial effect on society. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/anarcho-narcissism-b647c8062173

Finally, a positive comment! Thank you so much, you made me believe posting this was worth it

If you were to come up with a word for an insulting noun based on the name of a marginalised identity, what would that word be?

I’ll provide a few other words which are insulting nouns based on the name of a marginalised identity: sp*rg, r*tard, tr*nny, h*mo, aut*st

Can you think of a word that succinctly categorises all of these words?

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Of course he isn’t an average joe. He’s a rapist, a felon, a fascist, a traitor, and a world-be-dictator. Why do you think someone has to be neurodivergent in order to be extradordinarily evil?

And please stop nisgendering Me. My pronouns are in My bio.

It’s not faux. I’m a person living with NPD. I suffer the abuse every day of people who heard that my disability was what we call evil people. You can say that slurs don’t harm disabled people when you’re disabled like I am. When you have lived experience of the struggles of people with NPD. Otherwise, it’s just a neurotypical talking down to a disabled person about how wanting to exist free of harassment and abuse is “performative”.