Pronouns are important. I get it. I just have a massive issue with them.
When I think of myself, I think of myself in first person. I do not assign gender. That actually only ever comes into play when I am deliberately posing or trying to imagine myself. Otherwise, it is just “I”. Am I bothered by feminine pronouns? Not really… or rather, not by the words themselves, more by the reality they define.
Even if I plucked up all my courage and came out to the world tomorrow, it’d feel silly asking everyone to change to male pronouns, when my body still so obviously screams something else. I know, I know, gender is a social construct, you are what you feel, your body does not define you. But it is so deeply anchored to take visual and auditory cues for assigning a gender in the binary, that even I am having trouble shaking that and I feel it would be really low nitpicking on my side to expect it from anyone else. And as long as my body looks the way it does and I have taken no action to change that, I do not feel that I have “earned” those masculine pronouns.
Life is different online. For years, maybe over a decade, my screen names used in forums, emails and for game avatars have been decidedly gender neutral (like ‘shadowdancer’, the elite class of dungeons&dragons) or masculine (like Agrael or Asfaloth which I used in games before – one being the male main demon character in a Heroes of Might and Magic game, and the other being a horse in the Lord of the Rings books). Nowadays in games I am known as Arashi, which means ‘storm’ in Japanese.
The default online assumption is almost always geared towards the masculine. In TribalWars, a game I had played for years in my mid twenties, I carefully maintained a neutral persona for months, careful never to refer to me as either male or female (a feat, given that my native language is very gendered, e.g. for adjectives that you use to refer to yourself you’d use different endings based on gender, similar to French). When I finally let slip a female form, it caused a stir, because everyone had assumed male. Similar suprises, though to less extent, were had by some folks in 9Dragons, this time a massive multiplayer game (where my main and to some extent known character was male).
Due to this gearing towards males, being assumed male made me feel more secure and more included. We were “among the guys”, just a bunch of people having fun. Experience as a female is different. People either censor themselves (cause ladies do not like reading swear words or something), or there is might flirting or sexual allusions going on, which I do not enjoy. What is definitely NOT going on, is the feeling of camaraderie that I have felt build up when people assumed I was male. What came easy as a male is something that needs a long time to build as a female. The downside was that I was always also feeling that I was somehow deceiving people. Not sure why, as in theory gender does not really matter when controlling an avatar and killing ogres, but somehow I felt that I was deliberetaly withholding a piece of vital information that would have changed the relationship. And when faced with a direct question, I always gave the answer “female”, because, see above.
I am still facing this pronoun conundrum in Guild Wars 2, the game I have played for the past 7 years. I knew the first group of people with whom I started playing from other media, and we played as a group of friends who had met in real life before or several years after the game started. Those people however scattered to the four winds. Mostly, life happened. Marriages, children, grown-up people stuff. I am still Peter-Pan-ing my way through life and I doubt that will ever change. I simply do not envision myself in a stable relationship. Children are out of the question. While not a hermit, there is also nothing really to keep me away from enjoying the online world – alongside a new group of three or four people, two of whom I’d call friends.
Except… friends trust each other and confide stuff and… well, my friends know me as Arashi. There were some gender neutral addressings going on in the beginning, some hinted at questions that were never answered, and slowly the male default set in. I am constantly being referred to as “he”. In the beginning, it took some getting used to. I refrained from corrections, because that was a direct thing. But no longer. In conversations, when they talk about “him”, I no longer need the two seconds to figure they mean me. In that world, I am male. And once again, I have a nagging feeling of guilt that I am leading people on. That it is currently not so, that I have no right to claim maleness, that I should correct their pronouns. It feels like a thickly webbed lie around me that would lead to much disappointed if I called it out now… and all the while, there is this little voice in my head that contradicts that poisonous guilt. That reminds me that, in fact, if I do pluck my courage and go through with a gender change (though the thought of facing the world and the questions is still as mortifying as ever), they are the first group of people whom I would NOT have to ask to change pronouns… because they got it right all along.
