I’m someone who goes by Ze/Zir pronouns. I’ve done so for years. I originally went by they/them pronouns but I didn’t like them much and they just don’t feel right for me. When I discovered neopronouns they just felt right. Unfortunately I haven’t had much luck getting people to refer to me by my preferred pronouns.
Even here on Lemmy lots of people still refer to me by they/them or worse she/her. It feels really bad. Does anyone else on here struggle with this?
Could someone kindly explain to me how these and other similar pronouns work? Do they have some meanings or is it more about how they sound?
I’m from a non-English speaking country, where pronouns other than classic male/female are almost never used due to our language, so I’ve never encountered them yet.
I don’t think they’ll make their way to many languages any time soon, but I’m still curious.
They are gender neutral pronouns which are intended to replace he/him or she/her pronouns while leaving all other sentence grammar intact. Compared to They/them pronouns which function differently grammatically. They’re also singular in nature. Which they/them can be used singularly, but Ze/Zir, Xe/Xem/Xyr, Vi/Vis, etc. are always singular, just like he/him or she/her. It’s very easy to swap them out because English doesn’t have much gramatical gender in it, unlike other languages like spanish. Although I hear there are strides made to create gender neutral grammar in spanish.
Hmm, okay. I think I get the idea now. Thanks for the explanation.
Just one more thing. You mentioned pronouns Xe/Xem/Xyr. Why are there 3 forms? Is it like he/him/his, with the third one added for clarity, since it may not he obvious?
Yeah that’s how it is. For Ze/Zir Zir takes the position of him and his. Which is why I only included the two forms.
“I borrowed his car” becomes “I borrowed zir car”.
“I asked him for $20” becomes “I asked zir for $20”.
In the case of Xe/Xem/Xyr it goes
“I borrowed xyr car” and “I asked xem for $20” respectively.
It’s worth noting that until quite recently English used gender with words like: actor/actress, waiter/waitress, etc and a little further back there was: doctor/doctrix, navigator/navigatrix. etc
Neo-pronouns are for people who don’t want to linguistically identify as male nor female and dislike the use of the singular “they”.