Just curious what others’ experience is regarding people offering their preferred gender terms. Do you see this practice growing or not? Will they be used by everyone, or primarily by persons using pronouns different from those implied by their name/appearance?
I don’t think I have ever identified my preference for he/him. I cannot recall how I responded on the rare occasions that I was asked. As a general rule, I am willing to check boxes identifying my gender and race/ethnicity. I don’t know if I have checked “he/him”. To some extent, I feel “nontraditional” terms need only be specified by the relative minority who prefer them. I do make considerable effort to use whatever terms an individual expresses a preference for.
I could see a future in which such designations are specified primarily from people preferring non-binary pronouns or that are different from their appearance/name. Will binary people think it a useful exercise, or will they think it “so 2020s”?
Part of the reason I use them is to normalize it so non-binary folk don’t get singled out. That’s kind of the whole purpose; allow people to inform without being ostracized.
I suspect that as transgender and non-binary identities become more widely accepted the importance of proper pronoun usage will recede. I think that right now transgenders are in the raising awareness/empowerment phase of their civil rights struggle (e.g. “Black Power”, “We’re here we’re queer get used to it”), when it is important to push for the conspicuousness of the movement. Over time as they hopefully gain more acceptance, pushing back against misgendering will be less necessary since it would most likely due to an honest mistake rather than a veiled attack.
It’s also possible that pronoun specification will go away for another reason, namely, that “they” takes over in common speech. It’s what I’d like to see happen. Yes, it seems quite unlikely, but who knows – at one time, “Ms.” was so radical that a magazine chose it as their provocative name, and now I think it’s pretty much the default over “Mrs.” and “Miss”.
By the way, I use “he/him” or “they/them”.
Imagine if pronouns conveyed race instead of gender. Imagine the additionally obnoxious burden of managing your pronouns if you had mixed race ancestry. Or imagine if pronouns conveyed social class, and what a big deal it would be to change them as your circumstances varied over time.
I believe we’ve already past the high-water mark and the wave is rolling back. Real gains will have been made but, at least in my lifetime, it always seems to ebb and flow. Two steps forward one step back.
ETA: One step back sounds too pessimistic. More like a period of high energy and then a lull.