mocking and quoting bigots I've seen so far
:liberalism: turns to "you know it's hexbear when the tankie pronoun parade shows up to force pictures of pigshit in front of you!"* real quick
[*this is paraphrased, I can't remember the exact original quote]
Or "so suddenly I'm Hitler because i think people calling themselves Fae gender is dumb"
Or "why should i need to learn a new set of different pronouns for every person I meet?" (this followed two comments after "I'm literally not a transphobe, I work with plenty of trans colleagues who feel safe around me" (average lib being scratched in real time by having to acknowledge neopronouns))
.
All of these shitheads claimed to be allies when they started interacting but our brilliant pronoun tags immediately made them out themselves as the bigots they are who only pretend to be allies because it looks bad to be openly and proudly transphobic
TL;DR:
The closest to a joke option is "comrade / them", but even that is something you can use in a normal conversation on here, comrade actually works surprisingly well as a gender-neutral pronoun in a leftist space. We deliberately decided against allowing to enter your own pronouns because we didn't want chud trolls to make their "my pronouns are fuck / you" jokes when they wander in, and as a result, we had to make a very inclusive list of neopronouns to not leave any serious wishes for pronouns out. Back then, we also purged a substantial part of our userbase when the pronoun discussion made them let their mask slip. I think we're better off for it, hexbear was actually the first site where i dared to set my pronouns to she / her when i was still halfway questioning and i love that i immediately know how i can adress anybody i interact with on here. even on trans discord servers, i often have to first click on people's bio to see that.
That's kinda beautiful. Thanks for sharing that and the Hexbear background.
it was kinda wild how long i was on here telling all my trans comrades "wow, somehow what you say reminds me so much of my experiences, even though i'm not trans at all" lol. but still, it helped a lot to have a space were being trans and playing around with your pronoun tags is something that's just normal.
That's really awesome. While I'm cis-(mostly)het, I'm close to several trans people in my life, some of whom have had significant struggles because of their gender. Hearing about such tools for self-exploration and acceptance is wonderful and you Hexbears continue to make my heart happy since federating.
It's such a simple tool and it does so much for people who want to explore their gender or who don't (yet) pass well enough to get gendered correctly or who basically never get gendered correctly because almost nobody just assumes you're enbie. It just instantly creates a space where everybody only knows you as your true self. I hope that other instances reach out to our devs and implement the tag system as well.