in honour of pride month, i'd like to remind everyone that yes, it is important to gender nonbinary characters correctly. (well its important to gender everyone correctly in general, but this post is about fandom exorsexism)
i dont give a fuck if you think it's okay because 'theyre just pixels' and youre supposedly not hurting anyone's feelings. maybe the character cant be hurt by you misgendering them or saying their gender is 'up to interpretation', but real nonbinary people can see your words. and everytime they see someone put down their own rep, they get just a little more disheartened.
"but it's just fiction! just because i misgender nonbinary characters doesn't mean i don't support real nonbinary people!" yea, i dont believe that. if you truly supported nonbinary people, then you would support normalising transgender identities in media instead of implying that referring to nonbinary characters correctly is 'too difficult'.
and yes, gendering fictional nonbinary people correctly is just as important as doing the same for real ones. media, fictional or otherwise, does have a real impact on how the general public perceives minorities (you'd know that if you actually paid attention in history class). so what that means is that normalising nonbinary people in media would subsequently normalise nonbinary people's presence in real life society. which loops back to the original point of this post:
it is important to gender nonbinary characters correctly. it does, in fact, genuinely affect us. everytime you say a nonbinary character's gender is 'up to interpretation', you slowly influence one more misguided kid into becoming more exorsexist. everytime you tell real allies that theyre snowflakes for caring about this issue, you dishearten one more nonbinary person.
anyways, if youre going to ignore/disagree everything i've just said, then as a nonbinary person: if youre going to treat our representation this way, at least have the decency to admit youre transphobic instead of claiming to be our ally.
