In the annals of things no one cares about but which are vaguely interesting to me: how my brain parses pronouns.
I got into a fight a while back with someone because I insisted that I don't have pronouns. That's not how pronouns work for me. My pronouns are preferred.
I use pronouns, but I don't "own" them.
(You can own your pronouns, they can be yours and you can "have" them, this is about me)
The analogy I use is that they are a pointer to the thing, not the thing itself
There are some pronouns I strongly prefer (xe, she), some I appreciate (they), some I'm kind of eh on with conflicted feelings (fae), some I really dislike but they don't feel misgendering (peh, vi), and some that are actively misgendering (he, it).
When I describe what pronouns to use for me in more depth than a single line summary I provide a directed acyclic graph.
Note that I'm not fluid. My gender doesn't really change, so the pronouns aren't really reflecting some inner sense.
In the annals of "everything is math to Hrefna" I basically think of it for me like a typed pointer.
"They" is like… (void *). I can fit anything in it, but should I really be doing that? Well some objects that's all you can say about them!
Some objects have multiple different types. You can reference my gender with a "they" pointer, but you have to do a little casting, you can reference it with a "she" pointer or a "xe" pointer (but you still may need to cast it to access all fields).
No. The underlying gender is the underlying gender, this is a pointer to the underlying gender. The same way saying (void *) doesn't refer to a "void typed object."
Some things like "peh" are not technically wrong, you can still get useful information out of it, but it's like thinking of a string as an array of integers.
Then there's things like "it" and "he" which are like trying to use a pointer for an integer to reference a string.
@hrefna yesss. I have gotten a lot of mileage framing pronoun sets like MIME types, for a similar sense of 'they' will do for basic parsing but a lot of usable detail will be missed. And sometimes I like it that way.
@hrefna mine is "everything is music." Pronouns are genres to me. They are useful(-ish) descriptors but not a full accounting of reality. Rock/rap/country/metal/punk are all extremely nebulous, and you can add more descriptors (death metal, horrorcore rap, alt rock, third/fourth/fifth wave emo lol) but they are Zeno's paradox of getting infinitely closer but never quite fully describing the thing they are meant to.
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