Pronouns are an act of hospitality
It is one of the great tenets of gender critical belief that pronouns are a weapon used against gender critics, and thus they will only respect pronouns assigned at birth. Yet, they forget that the whole point of pronouns is an act of hospitality between two people, to invite the other person into your identity on your own terms, not there’s. He/him, she/her, they/them, and every other variation freights social meaning, flags that each of us read the moment someone states their preferred pronouns. What gender critics complain about is the social construction of pronouns, that they have to accept a request for hospitality from someone instead of imposing their own values onto whoever they are talking to. They are rude for the sake of their own ego, and then seek to impose that rudeness on the rest of society.
Pronouns are a small part of who we are, often the first things thrust upon us at birth when parents are forced to choose male/female on our birth certificates. To be a pronouned person is to be a person in society, there is no escaping it. Non-binary people cannot escape pronouns even if they seek to opt out of all other forms of gendering within society, as everyone else will impose pronouns onto them. To be pronouned is to be human within a human context, as even the neutral they/them has become politicised. Respecting pronouns is separate from enforcing pronouns, as…
