Stuff like neopronouns don’t exist in a vacuum. Someone that prefers xyr/xyrself has a bunch of other weird shit they expect out of everyone else and no one has time or energy for it
My personal theory about neopronouns is that it's all one big misunderstanding. There were multiple attempts to come up with a gender neutral pronoun over the years specifically as a push to avoid using generic he ("when a customer arrives, greet him") and be more inclusive of women. This included ey/em, zie/hir, singular they etc., some of which were coined in the 19th century and had nothing to do with the transgender community.
The notion of there being a "non binary" identity basically seems to emerge in the 80s. To be clear, the history of the gender movement seems to involve a lot of people attempting to exist in a "neither" category although how exactly they viewed themselves is a bit more ambiguous - there's "faeries", "queens", "he-shes", "transvestites" and so on. Marsha P Johnson is a good example of this - he did not view himself as a "transsexual". As the 20th century began trying to develop a medical framework it created an idea that a person wants to go man -> woman or woman -> man, and Queer Theory began questioning the notion of gender itself. So you then get some of these people kicking off;
The essence of transsexualism is the act of passing. A transsexual who passes is obeying the Derridean imperative: "Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres." [51] I could not ask a transsexual for anything more inconceivable than to forgo passing, to be consciously "read", to read oneself aloud--and by this troubling and productive reading, to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written--in effect, then, to become a [look out-- dare I say it again?] posttranssexual
"The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" published 1987 (mostly in response to "The Transsexual Empire" by Janice Raymond). The first time a specific term for this phenomenon seems to emerge is early 1995, in the Zine In Your Face: Political Activism Against Gender Oppression, that was circulated in the San Francisco area
But the thing that really kicked it off was the internet. In the early 90s there was an online community called LambdaMOO, which was basically like a text based Second Life.
One of the truly wonderful things about cyberspace is that it hasn't been around long enough to fall utter prey to the two-gender system; the lack of physical cues available in cyberspace makes falling into that system actually difficult to do online. Since there aren't any true physical cues, one would have to go to an awful lot of trouble to put them there virtually. For almost a year and a half now, I've lived in Virtual Reality (Text-based, on the Internet--- LambdaMOO and other MOOs) as an Irving, which is another choice in gender. There are several choices in gender available on the MOO, but I chose Irving because it was a new one... my gender pronouns are "e" (subjective), "em" (objective) and "eir" (possessive). It was a hard fight, I admit, to get established-even in such a flexible, virtual reality, there's still resistance among the populace against others' genders not being at all obvious. Recently, I've begun living in real life (among friends and family) as lrving-1 ask them to use the pronouns; language, I know, enforces reality to a measurable extent. Perhaps some time in the future, I will fight for a right to use Irving as a legal gender, though I realize that my odds will be very poor, given the present legal state of gender in the United States. My question is: Why bother?
- My Gender Workbook, 1997. Here's an example chat;
TomCat: Hi! Are you m or f?
Kachoo: laughing delightedly Well, what would you be looking for?
TomCat: Female! I'm a real guy.
Kachoo: purring I like to think any of us can be anything in this space.
TomCat: Well, sure, but I'm a real guy and I like women.
Kachoo: Have you ever surfed in another gender?
TomCat: What do you mean?
Kachoo: laughing lightly I can tell from your pause that you have. Were you being a lesbian?
TomCat: Well, yeah.
Kachoo: softly And were you beautiful? All soft and curvy? Maybe hot and horny?
TomCat: breathless Uh huh
Kachoo: leaning over, whispering in your ear, leaving just a trace of lipstick Wanna be a lesbian with me just for tonite, sweet thing?
TomCat: Oh yes!
This is sort of typical of the weird way tech nerds felt about "cyberspace" and "cybersurfing" in the 90s. Interestingly, LambdaMOO is also the source of the first ever
"rape in cyberspace" where a user created a program that let him make other characters do sexual things against their will, which about sums it up.
In March 1992, a character calling himself Mr. Bungle, "an oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore the inscription 'KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH!'" appeared in the LambdaMOO living room. Creating aphantom that masquerades as another player's character is a MUD programming trick often referred to as creating a voodoo doll. The "doll" is said to possess the character, so that the character must do whatever the doll does. Bungle used such a voodoo doll to force one and then another of the room's occupants to perform sexual acts on him. Bungle's first victim in cyberspace was legba, a character described as "a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses." Even when ejected from the room, Bungle was able to continue his sexual assaults. He forced various players to have sex with each other and then forced legba to swallow his (or her?) own pubic hair and made a character called Starsinger attack herself sexually with a knife. Finally, Bungle was immobilized by a MOO wizard who "toaded" the perpetrator (erased the character from the system).
LambdaMOO appears to have been very influential, and was using Spivak pronouns and "splat" pronouns;
LambdaMOO supports ten different genders: neuter, male, female, either, Spivak, splat, plural, egotistical, royal, and 2nd. Most users choose either neuter, male, or female, but their choices do not necessarily reflect their true gender. There is a considerable amount of cross over as there are far fewer female users as there are female characters. Some men choose to cross over because females receive more attention from other users. Others may choose to be a member of the opposite sex to see what it would be like. Many females may choose to have a male character so as to avoid harassment from male characters.
I learned about ey, eir, and em from the "Spivak" gender on LambdaMOO. Last time I was there, the genders included Male (he/his), Female (she/hers), Neuter (it/its), Spivak (ey/eirs), Egotistical (I/mine), Second-Person (you/yours), Plural (they/theirs), Royal (we/ours), and I think I left out one. I don't recall whether I actually spent any time as a Spivak, but it was nice to know the option was there.
| Subject Pronoun | *e |
| Object Pronoun | h* |
| Possessive Determiner | h*s |
| Possessive Pronoun | h*s |
| Reflexive Pronoun | h*self |
but there were also
UseNet groups that had started using different gender neutral pronouns;
3.4. Which GNPs are in active use on the net? Is there a standard?
Depending on how one counts, there are between three and five active groups. The most popular seem to be "sie, hir, hir, hirs, hirself", (especially "hir"). Second, derivative forms of the above have found wide use: "zie, zir, zir, zirs, zirself". These apparently came into being after a German-speaking netizen objected to "sie" (a German word for "she" or "they"). Third and fourth, differing only in the first and maybe last word, are "e or ey, em, eir, eirs, eirself or emself". Fifth, some people use "per", from "person", which i assume has the set "per, per, pers, pers, persself", although i've never seen it developed that far. I've not actually seen this in use on the net, but i've seen people on the net who claimed to use it all the time in their own lives. These will all be discussed in detail later in the FAQ. Before this FAQ, i don't believe there were any standards agreed upon in any formal way; people have just used whatever felt right, or whatever they were first exposed to. Neologism has waxed and waned, and wheels get reinvented over and over. As mentioned, one goal of this FAQ is to standardize the forms and pronunciation of these different sets, and hopefully to get a lot of people to standardize on just one set.
That's from "Aether Lumina" circa 2000, and represents an attempt to standardise the gender neutral pronoun that gets used on the internet, specifically because some people were now considering themselves to be "genderqueer" and so only wanted to be referred to by a gender neutral pronoun. The tables on these pages would end up getting used to build out the Wikipedia page on gender neutral pronouns in around 2002, and some of these tables crop up repeatedly on "how to be inclusive" resources from the early 2000s; they have a very distinctive blue and yellow colour scheme that I personally remember seeing on printouts without attribution.
The author's intent on listing them was pretty clear - they understood there to be a group of people who wanted to be referred to by gender neutral pronouns but couldn't agree on which ones to use. So these resources would list various personal pronouns with the disclaimer that different people might relate to different pronoun sets. I'd include more pictures but the Farms is throwing errors.
This appears to have ended up getting mixed up with Otherkin communities on Tumblr, and
according to this paper in 2013 the first nounself pronoun was coined. Essentially the tumblr kids had learned that lots of people use different pronouns because they "relate" to them, and therefore these pronouns represent a description of multiple different genders rather than being a catchall gender neutral term. So they started making up their own special pronouns that referred to their gender, which they were basically taking to mean their personality - this definition from 2014:
xenogender: a gender that cannot be contained by human understandings of gender; more concerned with crafting other methods of gender categorization and hierarchy such as those relating to animals, plants, or other creatures/things
Supposedly the first neopronoun/noun-pronoun coined was faeself in reference to someone who considered themselves "
genderfae" although quite rapidly it became associated with random people picking it up as an
alternative gender neutral pronoun, divorced from the Otherkin aspects.
I actually do think that neopronouns seem to have mostly died out but it's interesting to see how it went from attempts to make one all encompassing gender neutral pronoun to becoming a way for kids to come up with a super special unique set of pronouns.
