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What the fuck does this even mean? I saw it again not long ago, initially thinking nothing of it. Then something in the grammar nazi part of my brain, mostly vestigial at this point, started yelling at me.
"She/they? That's the same fucking tense!"
Seriously. He/him, she/her, even they/them makes a certain sense. Even she/them would sort of make at least grammatical sense, even if it fails on rational sense. Not like that matters anymore anyways. But what the fuck am I supposed to make of she/they? Flip a coin? Pray to Slaanesh who's time comes closer daily for divine guidance? Just accept that my fate is sealed any time I attempt to address or reference this person, and accept my fate as would a peasant in an avalanche?
I'm just so very, very tired at this point.
He/they user here, it just means either pronoun set is fine. "She/they" is just shorthand for "She/her/hers or they/them/theirs", usually in the sense of "She/her/hers or they/them/theirs, dealer's choice."
If they're anything like me, it's probably because they honestly consider themself nonbinary but they aren't visually readable as gender-nonconforming, have a deferential/non-confrontational habit, don't find absolute pronoun correctness a particularly critical part of life, and/or are averse to policing other peoples' language on principle.
That said, there also do exist a (probably small, but memorable) set of people who will see "She/they" in a bio and do their damnedest to rotate between the two mid-sentence like "She felt their day was going exactly as she hoped it would when they walked out of her door" which is absolutely alien to me and I cannot fathom wanting that or wanting to participate in that. I have to wonder whether that's actually what anyone is truly asking for or if it's just misinterpretation all the way down and nobody in-ranks wants to ask or clarify.
Even when people ask for "any pronouns" (which ... I have a personal and probably irrational aversion to) I always assume what they mean is "pick one set, whichever, and then use that one" not "all text and speech referring to me must be indecipherable".
I do think most people who do it just use "She/they" or "He/they" to mean "Use whichever of these causes the least friction for you, neither one bothers me."
It at least definitely never means "She walked they dog in she front yard."
I have no personal animos in this regard, I generally like and get on with people and try to be polite and accommodating, but I just don't get the pronoun thing, nor non-binary identity for that matter.
No-one has to identify with their sex (it is a mere fact) -your expression is entirely up to you, but getting me to do something to support your identity misses the point of what society is. I disagree entirely with the belief system that undergirds non-binary identity and resent even your compromise position of people not having to use certain words to describe you. I don't want the layer that this sits at to be important in my engagements with people - I don't want any baggage around identity to sit between our person to person engagement. You deciding on a special layer feels like a power-play to me, that you have the upper hand. And it denies the primacy of scientific facts, which don't require social proof. Sex labels are actually more freeing than locking into a particular gender identity. If this is what your non-binary identity means, not being locked into any particular style, presentation, then you still don't need the label. Just be it.
What would the world be like if everyone insisted on being referred to in a certain way, how cumbersome - none of us are deserving of that kind of special treatment.
Now language can change and certain languages have honorifics etc. You can make a case that gendered languages could bake in certain cultural assumptions. But English is not particularly gendered and male/female need not have any assumptions baked into them.
Sorry this has turned into a kind of rant/scold but I never get to say this in the open, which I think is the great bit about anonymous posts. In a workplace I would be forced to accommodate you and you wouldn't know how I felt about it.
I'm sorry in advance that I don't have anything more interesting to respond with here, but I just wanted to say this is a good reply and I'm glad you replied. I actually think most of your intuitions here are basically directionally correct and I share a lot of your frustrations at a lot of the current conventions surrounding gender identity. As you say, much of it is, at best, not useful for human connection, and at worst, detrimental to it. Maybe I'll write more deeply on it here someday.
Great, Id be keen to hear one day- some of my comments probably could be a bit more nuanced. I mean there is a gender layer between sex, culture and psychology - I wouldn't reduce it away entirely from the inter-personal space but the underlying framework around it we have currently I find limiting.
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