Neopronouns

If you look at our list of headmates or see our PluralKit proxies, it will become apparent that most members of the system use neopronouns in some way, including nounself, emojiself, or unicodeself pronouns.

This can be for a variety of reasons, including for self-expression, but the main reason for neopronoun use in the system, particularly non-nounself neopronouns used by people who don't actively identify as genderqueer, is for what we see as convenience and clarity.

Due to some elements of the collective identity, we default to a lot of headmates whose default pronouns would be some combination of he/him, they/them, or it/its. The thing is, we have so many headmates, including ones with similar genders dating each other, that it can sometimes get hard to follow a conversation about our system when it's not clear what person is being referred to by which use of a pronoun like "he" or "they".

Therefore, a lot of us choose to use neopronouns like ey/em, ae/aer, or zi/zir in addition to "traditional" pronouns like he/him, she/her, or even they/them and it/its (to some extent of the word "traditional").

When talking about similar-gender friend groups or gay couples within the system, we find it genuinely helpful for clarity to be able to use a very specific pronoun for everyone involved in the situation. It also keeps some sentences from sounding repetitive or confusing due to repeatedly using "he" or potential unclear uses of "they" or "it".

Some neopronouns have certain connotations to us that we don't place on other people but that do affect our use of the pronouns.

For example, we see ae/aer as "alien pronouns" because they were invented for a fictional alien species in a book from 1923, and we see vi/vir as "non-binary male pronouns" because "vir" is Latin for "man".

Likewise, we see ey/em as neutrois pronouns (because they're like they/them), x/xs as agender/gendervoid pronouns (like crossing something out), and sie/hir as non-binary feminine/female pronouns (because of German "sie" for "she").

Therefore, headmates who use those pronouns for themselves likely do so with those connotations.

Where it comes to nounself pronouns, we don't tend to expect people to actually use them for us, and it's less likely we're using those for clarity, but rather for self-expression.

We consider pronoun use as a form of self-expression of something other than gender to be like when goth men wear makeup as part of their presentation, without identifying as anything other than a man.

If some elements of alternative fashion constitute the use of gendered elements to express yourself in a way not directly related to gender (other than maybe to imply you're personally friendly to gender non-conformity and queer people, which is a good thing to imply), then we see neopronoun use, including nounself and symbolself pronouns, as being the same. Even if no one really uses those pronouns for us, we don't care, as long as we have them in our proxies or on our pages.

Where it comes to the use of symbolself pronouns, we especially don't really expect people to use those for us, but rather it's for use of self-expression in a way that isn't represented by a nounself pronoun. It can also represent identification with concepts or aesthetics in a gendered way.

However, we tend to prefer unicode over emojis for such pronouns when possible, because we feel more attached to the old web and to unicode than to emojis.

Many of our headmates who personally remember being on the older internet prefer to use older neopronouns as well as unicodeself pronouns, because they like signaling that they have more modern concepts of gender and expression, but they are still tied to an older time.

We also find unicode a helpful way of symbolizing certain queer identities. Both the double male symbol and the lambda symbol (gay male and lesbian symbols respectively) have unicode, so some of our headmates in those demographics use those unicodeself pronouns.