In response to: Ask Box: It’s rude to erase queer identity
Yeah. Hi. I’m the friend being referred to here. And congratulations, anon, you’ve gotten me to out myself AND break a year-long Tumblr hiatus because this is bothering me so much.
Just to give a little background, I started identifying as genderqueer fairly recently (about nine months ago, according to my Twitter archives) after a long process of questioning my gender. For years I’d identified as a masculine-of-center cis girl, despite the increasing feeling that it wasn’t right. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to attend a gender diversity conference and talk with a lot of great people who opened my eyes, I probably still would be. And one of the reasons it took me so long to figure shit out was because I didn’t know any non-binary people who didn’t use gender-neutral pronouns.
So when Molly described his gender as “fabulous” and Taliesin specifically said that his pronouns are he/him, that was a pretty big deal for me. (And yes, Molly is chill about it, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a preference.) I thought maybe for once, I had a character I could identify with on that level. And honestly, I don’t think this would even be bothering me as much if it wasn’t EVERY fic that used they/them when writing Molly as non-binary. Because yeah, that really does give the impression that I can’t really be non-binary without gender-neutral pronouns, whether people intended it that way or not.hippiegeekgirl
As my friend said, people can write what they want. We’re not the fandom police and neither of us are interested in censorship. But if you’re gonna make that choice, the least you can do is be aware of how it’s affecting real people.
Critical Analysis 