i just discharged from month long hospital stay & would like to purchase a mobility device before being hired for work so, you know, if you would like to support a black disabled trans person please rb or donate

ko-fi

If you started a headline with 4 names no one has ever heard before, most people won’t even read all the way to the pertinent information in the headline, let alone be intrigued enough to click on the article itself. And more people know where Africa is than where Nigeria is. I’m not making a value judgment there, it’s just the truth. It’s a funnel approach: you start by appealing to the broadest or most culturally relevant possible demographic in the headline so people will click on it for more information, and then you start going into detail:

In less than 2 sentences we have names and a location. 

I checked another article about the same thing, with a similarly catchy and vague title: 

And again: names (and this time even ages and pictures) and a location within the first 2-3 sentences of the article, immediately following an eye-and-attention grabbing, snappy and easy-to-digest headline.

When indigenous ppl complain that their sacred sites are being destroyed and they say stuff like "we have a cultural connection to this place" "if we can't come here it's like ripping off our roots" "we need this place to communicate with our ancestor spirits" etc., white australians are conditioned to handwave statements like that away with shit like "oh well they're just saying that, it's just a random tree, they'll get over it, obviously ancestor spirits aren't real, sacredness of trees isn't real", and that is total bullshit.

Aboriginal sacred sites are integral parts of highly sophisticated mnemonic techniques that have been proven to preserve information for (i know this sounds hard to believe but) at least ten thousand years (they accurately describe coastlines that are now underwater, or dry areas that have since been rainforests for 7000 years, or extinct megafauna etc.)

Neopronouns are just making you think about rules you’ve never actually thought about before.

It’s not that neopronouns are especially difficult to use, it’s that your understanding of grammar has been limited to the pronouns “she/her” “he/him” and “they/them” for so long that you don’t even think about how to use them.

You already know them.

You don’t have to think about the different rules that applies to each of these pronoun sets–and yes! She/her, he/him, and they/them all have different rules! They aren’t interchangeable! You can’t just CTRL+F and replace them and have the sentence still work normally!–so now that neopronouns are forcing you to actually think about the way the rules work for pronouns, it seems a lot more complicated than it really is.

Neopronouns aren’t really going to violate any of the rules that already exist, it’s just that you’ve never consciously thought about the rules, so it seems confusing and new when it’s actually not.

Like, here is an example sentence to show off the rules that already exist, that you use every day without thinking about them:

She is standing in line, that’s her over there, she’s looking for her favorite color, she’s going to paint her new room by herself!

Now if we just open a word processing program and literally find and replace the she/her pronouns with he/him and they/them, here’s what you get:

He is standing in line, that’s him over there, he’s looking for him favorite color, he’s going to paint him new room by himself!

and

They is standing in line, that’s them over there, they’s looking for them favorite color, they’s going to paint them new room by themself!

 Yeah, doesn’t look or sound right, does it? That’s because she/her pronouns follow different rules than he/him pronouns do, and they both follow different rules from they/them.

“Her” is used for saying both “That’s her over there” and “That’s her room” 

For he/him pronouns, though, you should say, “That’s him over there” and “That’s his room”

For they/them, it would be “That’s them over there” and “That’s their room”.

As complicated as you might think neopronouns are just because they’re new to you, they aren’t going to be any more complicated than the rules that already exist.

If you write a sentence, and then later decide to change the pronouns you used, you can’t just find and replace them. You have to rewrite the entire sentence.

Neopronouns aren’t going to be any more complicated than using she/her, he/him, or they/them. You just have to get used to the new sounds and figure out which rules they follow. Practice makes perfect.

That’s why I created the blog @choose-your-own-pronouns. It has templates where you can swap out the “archaeopronouns” with the neopronouns you want to test or practice. There’s also a “how to use the templates” guide on the blog, linked in the pinned post, if you need more help! 

And if someone in particular has asked you to use neopronouns for them, you can always ask them which rules they follow, or even ask them to give you a few examples! Most people will be happy that you’re trying to learn!

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Might I add: You didn’t think I would fucking notice?

I have contributed!

Sorry for the long post.