Pronouns

This page lists pronouns I’m cool with in the languages I speak. As a general rule of thumb for languages not listed here:

• If there’s widely used gender neutral pronouns, use those.
• Otherwise female pronous are cool too.
• If your language doesn’t have gendered pronouns, you’ve won in life.
• Neopronouns might also be cool but I wanna understand them in the context of a language before approving of them being used for myself.

English

Preferred: singular “they/them”, so they/them/their/theirs/themself. The plural reflexive “themselves” is also okay.

I’m also cool with “she/her” though. 😊

German

I haaaate this language. I hate it so muuuuch.

(I’m allowed to say this, I’m a native speaker.)

Not only is there no good way to address enby and otherwise gender non-conforming folks in German, efforts to make the language more gender-neutral also make conservatives lose their minds for some reason.

It would be great if gender just wasn’t as pervasive as it is in this language.

The German language has no widely-used gender neutral pronouns, so I pretty much just use “sie/ihr”.

There are movements to establish gender neutral pronouns in this language, the (seemingly?) most widely covered one being the “sier” and “xier” pronouns by Illi Anna Heger. Out of those, I’m cool with “xier”.

I also randomly found “xie/ihr” to be a nice pronoun in German. It’s basically “sie” but starting with an “x”. It’s more or less something I came up with myself but I feel like it’s such a simple idea that I can’t be the only one who’s thought of it.

Because I like being exact and also making fun of how complicated German grammar is, here are some tables relating all of the pronouns I accept in German in their various grammatical cases.

Personal pronouns

Relative pronouns

Possesive pronouns

Possesive pronouns relate two nouns. They can occur together with a noun or as a stand-in for a noun which are two distict variants. Possesive pronouns also vary based on the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to and the grammatical gender of the noun they relate to (and of course the grammatical case). This would be a four-dimensional cube, so I’ve ommitted spelling those out here. In general:

• xie (how I’ve defined it at least) uses the same ending as sie but the base (Stamm) is “xihr”.
  • Sie hat ihre Tasche vergessen. (Reference example only using “sie” pronouns.)
  • Xie hat xihre Tasche vergessen.
  • Xie hat xihrer Freundin geholfen. (“Freundin” is referred to with “sie” pronouns.)
  • Sie hat das ihrer Freundin zu verdanken. (“Freundin” is referred to with “xie” pronouns.)
• xier uses “xies” as the base form and suggests “-a” as the ending.
  • Xier hat xieser Freundin geholfen. (“Freundin” is referred to with “sie” pronouns.)
  • Sie hat das ihra Freundin zu verdanken. (“Freundin” is referred to wie “xier” pronouns.)