What are your pronouns?

Maybe you have seen them in someone’s social media profile. Or on a ribbon someone had attached to their badge at a recent convention. Displaying one’s pronouns is getting rather common and for good reason, it subtly reinforces that we might not want to always assume that we know a person’s gender just from what we (think we) perceive.

Why are so many folks doing it? Part of it is that if only trans folks make their pronouns clear, it subtly (or not so subtly) signals that they are different, because they are being asked to do something that cis folks don’t generally need to do. It also reinforces a general lack of care about pronouns and may even reinforce a belief that folks will always be able to tell gender by appearances.

And so folks of all genders (or no gender at all) began publishing their pronouns in their bios and wearing them proudly with ribbons.

This general acceptance (although by no means universal) got me thinking recently, however, as I was reading through an adventure. I was struck by how odd it felt to read "female human commoner" in regard to an NPC. Clearly this is not the first time I had come across such a phrase because it is a very common way to denote NPCs. But it made a thought start to scratch at the back of my brain and a few different thoughts started to form.

I can understand why the term female is used there, but it seems sort of clinical and makes my skin crawl. On one hand, pointing out gender is super important, especially for folks used to a society a defaults to men in many cases. On the other, it reminds me of TERFs and discussions of gender versus sex and other things that can have harmful implications, especially for folks who aren’t cis.

And this super reminds me of a time during the development of 5e when they were trying to figure out how to make it clear that the D&D world isn’t just full of white folks, without making it similarly clinical and about skin tones. What they decided to do was to make cultures of the D&D world have different skin tones and suggest through the cultural name what people looked like. This lead to the development of a world bible that demonstrated the differences between groups, including skin tone.

Which leads me to wonder if it wouldn’t help to put in pronouns, either in addition to or instead of gender. So human commoner (she/her). Or halfling rogue (they/them). Granted, pronouns aren’t the same as gender. For instance, some folks who are non-binary may still prefer pronouns that are often coded as gendered. But using a range of pronouns would reinforce the diversity of the world (which I would contend is the main use for using male/female). It would further normalize stating one’s pronouns. And it would also allow for a greater range of genders since we wouldn’t be limited to just female/male.

Also, if this post got you thinking about pronouns and, in particular, pronoun ribbons and you want to know more, I highly suggest visiting http://www.pronounribbons.org/.