OP didn't say that choosing your own pronouns was a fad, but rather that displaying them on your profile was a fad.

Personally, I'm not sure it's a fad, and I still see it plenty in the wild.

I still see people with simpsons avatars. Fads follow a steep bell curve.

At the risk of sounding transphobic: non-trans/gender conforming people including their pronouns to signal legitimacy or support for trans people choosing their pronouns does feel like a fad. It reminds me of Blackout Tuesday, equally faddish but perhaps casually racist to suggest.

Normalising pronouns in bios is a way of protecting trans/NB people, not signalling legitimacy. It's like the easiest way anyone could possibly make lots of unwelcome-feeling people feel a bit more welcome in society.

This goal of "protecting trans/NB people" is accomplished by signalling your support for normalizing trans people indicating their pronouns. If you think that describing it as "signalling" sounds weak or trivial compared to "protecting", it's because it is.

The real protection factor is almost the opposite of sending a signal. It's about trying to drown out the "I am trans" signal that happens when pronouns are listed, by making it blend in with the background. That way someone who finds pronouns important can list them without becoming a big target because of it.

It’s not casual, it’s intentional vice-signaling. Also an attempt to make sure trans people feel unwelcome on HN and thereby appeal to the VC owners of this place.

Which once again proves my old theory:

Trans people are fucking badass. We’re damned lucky to have trans people.

Are we really damned lucky to have people suffering from an often crippling mental illness?

I'm all for the rights of trans people, but saying we're lucky to have trans people is not very different from saying we're lucky to have depressed or bipolar people. Perhaps we're also lucky to have quadriplegic people?

(And yeah, obviously not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria)

Did you actually just compare being transgendered to suffering from a spinal cord injury??

I’m curious, why do you feel the need to hurt marginalized people? What do you gain?

I'm calling out your celebration of suffering. I'm not hurting marginalised people.

>Did you actually just compare being transgendered to suffering from a spinal cord injury??

Both gender dysphoria and spinal cord injuries tend to be severely debilitating.

We're not lucky to have transgender people. Luck would be nobody suffering from gender dysphoria. The people who end up needing to correct their gender are absolutely not lucky. Why do you think their misfortune makes us lucky?

I'm all for trans rights, consequently I'm also disgusted by you making light of the suffering implied by gender dysphoria.

No, sorry, not gonna fly with me "casual transphobia". The whole declaring your pronouns everywhere is a societal compliance test. It's a way for progressives to assert control over you and force you to adhere to whatever bs of the day they came up with. I spent my entire life without having pronouns next to my name because its obvious I am a man and I'm not to start declaring them now because a bunch of blue checkmark twitterazis say I have to.

How is it obvious you're a man, other than that you just explicitly said so in your comment? It's not mentioned in your HN bio, and it's not obvious from your username.

It seems like you view this as a political partisan issue and it's an important part of your identity. Which is fine, but it's not the logically-obvious thing you are claiming.

>How is it obvious you're a man, other than that you just explicitly said so in your comment? It's not mentioned in your HN bio, and it's not obvious from your username.

I've gone my entire life without be confused for a woman. So I would say that constitutes a good deal of empirical evidence.

>It seems like you view this as a political partisan issue and it's an important part of your identity.

Being a man is part of my identity, but I went my entire life without "being a man" being a political partisan issue. I didn't make this a partisan issue, a fringe group of leftist have. And if any part of this is "part of my identity" is that I have no desire to bend to some fringe activist groups demanding compliance for their latest "current thing".

>but it's not the logically-obvious thing you are claiming.

It's logically obvious to everyone who isn't on the fringe left. Is water wet?

Or it’s a way for people to indicate how they would like to be referred to as :\

If their pronouns aren’t what a person would naturally assume, great. For the rest of us it’s just pure virtue signaling.

If "welcoming" is a virtue, sure. I don't see what's wrong with that, but I do see a problem with using "virtue signaling" in a way that implies there's no such thing as virtue, or that it is always apparent.

For the rest of us, it's trying to make people feel like they're not singling themselves out for expressing their preferences. Me putting "He/Him" on my name tag is an extremely low cost/low effort thing.

I'm not sure about this. For one thing, it's odd to try and pretend that aspects unique to a small group of people are common to everyone. For example, some people with crone's disease might put that in their bio - are you going to start including health information in your bio to make them feel more at home?

Either trans people pass, in which case they, by definition, aren't singled out, or they don't pass in which case regardless of what's in your Twitter bio they will still be singled out. I heard about a situation where five or six women stood up to speak and said their pronouns and then a trans person stood up and shared theirs. The trans person said it felt awkward - like every person began by calling attention to the fact that some pronouns are obvious and others aren't.

To me it seems much more like signalling. In 99+% of instances I can guess the appropriate pronouns. When I can't then it makes sense to state them.

I don’t do it because I think most of the time it’s more about signaling political affiliation than actually solving a problem.

It also tends to then extend to things like pretending there are no sex differences and that everything is socially constructed (which I think is nonsense). I used to think this was a strawman, but the Lia Thomas story shows it isn’t imo: https://overcast.fm/+vpWbPtN0o

This is obviously a third rail internet topic and people can do what they like, but I won’t put pronouns in my bio and I won’t submit to pressure to do so in order to pass some sort of political morality test.

> It also tends to then extend to things like pretending there are no sex differences and that everything is socially constructed (which I think is nonsense)

Only a small minority of people believe that.

> I won’t put pronouns in my bio and I won’t submit to pressure to do so in order to pass some sort of political morality test.

Literally no one is trying to force you to do that.

> Literally no one is trying to force you to do that.

Not OP, but I had to do a conference talk on some or other live-stream platform and pronouns were 100% required for all speakers.

This is societal level, passive or "mild" bullying that the feminists have been complaining as a symptom of patriarchy for many years, yet here we are, reverse perpetuating things that we will most likely be judged on in coming generations.

That small minority seem to have disproportionate power (at least in the case of Lia Thomas).

I’m not sure how small it is and I don’t want to enable it.

There are people forcing/pressuring participation in the public display of pronouns/say your pronouns thing (you may just live somewhere insulated from it).

I’ve had it happen in Silicon Valley interviews and I know some groups at Stanford require it.

Agreed. Super cheap.

Complaining about virtue signaling is perhaps the most tiresome version of virtue signaling.

Complaining about people complaining about virtue signaling is even more tiresome. It's a way to protect the root toxic behavior by projection of that behavior on those trying to put a stop to it.

Yup. I think this idea has done a tremendous amount of harm. It is possible to be actually virtuous but this is apparently now lost as doing any kind thing for anybody is criticized as virtue signaling.

Most of the time people do not know your real identity on the internet so I don’t think natural assumptions have that much to do with it. Even if someone is well known and their gender is well known it doesn’t harm anyone or anything to have their pronouns in their bio. The fact it annoys so many people for “virtue signaling” is baffling to me. Who cares about virtue signaling and why is it seemingly only conservatives that think it’s derogatory when complaining about virtue signaling is far more of a virtue signal than pronouns lol.

Which doesn't make much sense, since pronouns are what you use when talking about someone in the third person, not to someone in the second person.

I display my pronouns to signal that if your pronouns are important to you, tell me and I’ll respect them. If they’re not important to you, don’t tell me. That’s it.

I do it to help make it less uncomfortable for people who have a reason to declare their pronouns.

How much Conservative American Vernacular English can you cram into a single paragraph?

We are daily inundated with woke vernacular all day everyday and I bet you never leave a comment there complaining about terms like "casual transphobia", "harm", "hate", "problematic", all the "-isms", "-ists", "-phobes"... but you drew the line at this one HN comment. Good for you.

I honestly would feel 100% uncomfortable around any sort of non male/female person. Luckily I don't have to interact with anyone of that sort in person.