Rejected Pronoun Display

[Iguana]

Hello, all!

I'd like to recommend an option for people to be able to display which pronoun they prefer people use when referring to them. Recently, a couple of my friends have come out on Showdown, which is so awesome, and it dawned on me how often people use incorrect pronouns when referring to others--either because they are unaware of their gender or because of a change in preferred pronouns. I'm not exactly sure how this could happen, but I'm hoping this can start a conversation. There is obviously /status now for displaying a short status by your username, but something more permanent would be cool if possible.

This is a Suggestions thread for Pokémon Showdown! obviously, but I feel like this sort of idea would be even more easily applicable on Smogon. There is an option to select your gender, but that doesn't always correlate with the pronouns you prefer. Just as some people display their age on their Smogon profiles, I assume it would be easy to make pronouns able to be displayed as well?

 

[The Official Glyx]

I like this idea!
As far as display options, the two things that come to mind would be having it display as either something like a /status, or alternatively be bolded like an auth position would be.

I'm partial towards bolded, personally. I'm curious if someone has an option I hadn't considered, though!

As for setting it, you could perhaps have that be something you assign when first registering an account and change later in the same way you would change a password to an account (with password verification).

 

[Annika]

I'm not opposed to this or anything but I personally wouldn't use it as I get a lot of gender-based harassment on PS that I then have to report, so I personally don't feel the desire to advertise my gender. I know that a lot of people feel strongly about pronouns and I understand and respect that, but I just want to provide another view on how I'd use (or rather not use!) the proposed feature.

 

[Yung Dramps]

I'm not opposed to this or anything but I personally wouldn't use it as I get a lot of gender-based harassment on PS that I then have to report, so I personally don't feel the desire to advertise my gender. I know that a lot of people feel strongly about pronouns and I understand and respect that, but I just want to provide another view on how I'd use (or rather not use!) the proposed feature.

Ouch, that's pretty sucky. That said, seems like it'd be pretty trivial to add a toggle on whether you wanna show your pronouns or not, idk I'm not a programmer but yeah.

 

[drampa's grandpa]

Seems to me the ideal solution is exactly what the OP proposed: have every person be able to enter their pronouns if desired. Given that not everyone uses Male / Female it really shouldn't be a switch you toggle on or off (did someone imply this? I thought they did but now I can't find it. Oh well, it's still true).

If you don't want to fill out the field you don't have to (which addresses annika's point) and we already have stuff like 'display my birthdate' settings on Smogon, so those could be used in a similar way here.

I realized towards the end of this post I was entirely focused on Smogon rather than PS! but I think it mostly still works, other than the settings being already there.
FTR I think this does work better on Smogon than PS because you wouldn't have to reset them on different devices or whatever, it's just linked to the account.

 

[Nalei]

Having a pronoun display makes sense even if users who especially want it can already use statuses to indicate their pronouns and it might be something I'd utilize myself but I have some significant reservations.

An issue which I think would be 100% inevitable is people using pronouns to mock trans people, especially nonbinary people. An example of this might be a man using she/her to harass trans women in the most indirect form possible or if it's implemented so that you can add your own pronouns or gender, people creating ridiculous neopronouns or genders to """criticise""" nonbinary identity.

Transphobes will be transphobes so I don't see this as a huge problem in and of itself but the issue is that moderating the use of pronoun markers requires gatekeeping and failing to moderate it lets transphobia go under the rug. If we can find a way to gatekeep objectively I'd be okay with this but creating a system which is bound to be abused by transphobes without means of moderating it sounds like we're setting up for failure.

A different idea would be to make setting pronouns something which a staff member has to do for you. While this doesn't stop transphobes from mocking trans people, it forces them to go through a staff member to get there which I imagine would significantly reduce the number of them who choose to do so and also eliminates the potential for explicit mocking as a staff member could deny such requests. This does come with the caveat of placing the same, albeit very soft, barrier for people who would legitimately like their pronouns displayed, however.

Overall, I'm not sure if the positives or negatives of allowing a pronoun display would outweigh the other but if it's decided that this should be implemented, I strongly encourage this potential for mocking to be taken into account in implementation.

 

[Asheviere]

My 2 cents here are that I see this leading to way more harassment than the good it'd do. I feel like pronouns in status are "good enough" without the situation Nalei tries to sketch.

 

[Yung Dramps]

Once again, I get the harassment issue, I really do. But again, I feel like this can be solved without having to reject the whole thing entirely, perhaps with a menu like this:

Choose your Pronoun
He
She
They
not the biggest LGBTQ nerd ever but options for all the major identities could maybe be slotted in?
Other
Decline to State

All the comments here just seem really saddeningly defeatist when this can be problem-solved.

 

[Zarel]

I don't want to pressure people to out themselves by having a specific box asking for pronouns. I would recommend using the status line for pronouns if you want to put them somewhere easily visible.

I plan to work on making it easier to store the status message somewhere, so you don't have to re-enter it every time.

 

[Iguana]

Hey, I really appreciate the conversation this started! :) I wanted to suggest this idea because as I mentioned, it just dawned on me how often people use the incorrect pronouns when referring to other users, and I figured at least some users would really appreciate the ability to readily display their pronouns. But, a number of you mentioned very important points, especially in regards to gender-based harassment, and I'm so glad to hear from people whom this would most affect.

I'm not sure that providing people with the means to select and display pronouns they prefer would pressure them into outing themselves, since it is of course completely optional. At least, any more than enabling users to link personal info like Facebook accounts on here would pressure them into being at risk of being doxxed. But, in any case, that sounds great about a means to store status messages!