neopronouns seem to be the flavour of the month lgbt discourse and i just wanted to share my opinion on it all (disclaimer: i do not go by neopronouns personally) but yeah this is gonna be a thread

i think this discussion is just trending on tiktok atm idk if it’s made its way to twitter yet but basically people are fairly divided on the topic of neopronouns (when people go by xe/xim, etc) and the main argument i’ve seen against it is “it makes the lgbt community look bad!”

what people seem to forget is that to homophobic and transphobic people..... the lgbt community will always look bad. a transphobe isn’t going to hate you any less if you’re a trans person going by he/him than they would if you were going be xe/xir

and the whole notion of needing the community to “look good” is ridiculous. our community shouldn’t have to “look good” in order to be respected by cishet people. it will never “look good” to those who hate us and trying to appease those people is our sisyphus boulder

by trimming away a whole demographic within our community in an attempt to “look good” we lose authenticity. the respect that we earn from cishets as a result is meaningless because it is dependent upon excluding our own people

again! i don’t go by neopronouns and i don’t think i even know anybody who does, but i know that my existence within the lgbt community is not impacted by people who do use those pronouns. i am no more or less respected by outsiders because or their presence in the community

there’s so much pressure on lgbt people to prove ourselves to cishets and to be “one of the good gays” and that pressure incites so much unnecessary hatred among us. we are not our own enemies and we need to remember that

at the end of the day, fighting for cishet approval is a battle we will never win. when we start belittling genuine parts of our community to appease outsiders, where do we draw the line? what parts of our community don’t look bad to those who hate us?

it’s not people who use neopronouns that make the lgbt community “look bad”, it’s cishet people who don’t respect what they don’t understand that make the lgbt community look bad. we need to stop blaming our own community for other people hating us