Pronouns are weird

This post was published on 05 Jan 2025

This is mostly a rambly post about pronouns and how I am trying to figure out what pronouns suit me best. All my life I’ve never really thought about pronouns and just accepted whatever I was addressed with – which tended to just be “he” (or the German equivalent of it, “er”). And while I’ve never really minded that per se, I also never thought it really fit me either, if that makes any sense. I don’t really feel like I am either male or female either. There was a point in my life where I thought I was transgender but I honestly don’t feel “drawn” towards either one of the traditional genders. I don’t know if that makes me non-binary or agender (that’s a completely different can of worms I’ll have to look into), but suffice it to say, while I don’t mind being addressed with “he” (or even “she” for that matter), it never sat quite right with me.

Now, the problem is that I’ve never in my life thought much about pronouns. Of course I think about other people’s pronouns, but I’ve never really stopped to think about my own. When speaking or writing in English, I typically refer to people whose gender or preferred pronouns I do not know as “they”; in German (which is my native language), there is no such convenient gender-neutral pronoun (at least no normative one) and I typically try referring to people by simply using their name until they tell me their pronouns. I feel like this is still kind of clunky and way less elegant than the English “they”, but it’s the best solution I’ve found so far.

Anyway, even though I’ve come across people with wildly different pronouns, I’ve never stopped to think about which ones I feel most comfortable with. I asked the nice folks on the Fediverse for their advice and the general consensus was that I should simply try out the pronouns that I think would fit me (preferably with some friends first) and see how that feels and how it goes. As someone who’s never thought much about pronouns, this feels somewhat strange and daunting to do as I don’t want to feel like I am imposing something on someone else, but it does seem like the only way of figuring it out.

My pronouns (and why I chose them)

I don’t think I will ever stop going by “he” simply because that’s just what everyone has always referred to me as. Nevertheless, I figured out two pronouns that I personally feel much more comfortable with, namely “it” and — though to a lesser degree — also “they”. One thing they both have in common is that neither of them has a connotation of my being either “male” or “female”. They’re also both normative (sort of) pronouns and should be relatively simple for an English speaker to use. “It” speaks to me more, however, simply for my also being an animal in addition to all the other things I’ve mentioned already.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the gist of it is that I don’t consider myself human and, instead, consider myself an animal (a bird to be exact). This is, once again, something that would require its own blog post (which I should probably write soon too), but that’s the gist of it. And whilst “it” is often used negatively, I quite like it for the simple fact that it not only acknowledges that I am neither male nor female (just like “they”), but it also (in addition to that) sounds like something you’d say to an animal as well — which is what I am! And, most importantly, it just feels nice being referred to as “it” whereas even though neither “they” nor “he” or “she” feel bad to me, they don’t feel nice either, they’re just… there. I am not sure how much sense any of this makes to anyone else, though, but those are my reasons.

German is a bit more difficult, unfortunately. The normative declension of the German neuter pronouns “es” would be “es/sein/ihm/es” (nom., gen., dat., acc.) where the genitive and dative forms are the same as for the pronoun “er” (he). While I wouldn’t particularly mind that either, I much prefer the other way of doing it, namely “es/deren/denen/es” where the genitive and dative forms are, instead, the relative / demonstrative pronouns “deren” and “denen” respectively. I prefer this as it doesn’t use the “sein“ and “ihm“ that could also be interpreted as referring to someone of male gender. This isn’t quite normative but still easier for a native speaker than neopronouns, I would say.

I have been using these with a couple of friends already now (some of which are trying to refer to me using the third person as much as possible just so that I can see how I feel about being called “it”) and I have, so far, really been liking it!

So to conclude, the pronouns I have decided on for now are “it/its” in English and “es/deren/denen/es” in German. I will continue to not mind being referred to as “he”, but I would much rather folk use “it” with me from now on.