#shi/hir

[magidoggie]

A LOOK INTO SHI/HIR PRONOUNS AND THEIR ORIGINS

So I’ve seen people claim that shi/hir pronouns are intersex exclusive (mostly intersex people), and others say they aren’t (mostly non-intersex people)

As an intersex person, I've been confused about this for a while, so I decided to look into it

THIS POST WILL CONTAIN NSFW TOPICS, FURRIES, TALKS OF FETISHIZATION OF INTERSEX BODIES, AND INTERSEX SLURS!

Most of the users of these pronouns seem to be non-intersex people, but there are also intersex people who use them.

I've seen a decent amount of intersex people say that shi/hir pronouns are only ours to use, as they were used against us (like a shortened version of he-she). This would make them basically slurs that only we can reclaim.

I've even seen some claims that Geoffrey Chaucer himself coined these words?? (The chaucer thing, I haven't been able to find a source for. Even so, it is most likely just an old spelling of "she/her")

I’ve seen people say it originated on 4chan. It'd be hard to verify, as 4chan is known for not keeping threads up for long. There are 4chan archives, but I've tried my hardest to look for any combinations of things like "shi" and different terms that could work with it like "intersex" "freak" or "hermaphrodite" . I don't doubt it's been used on 4chan, but I can't find much, and archival sites don't go back far enough.

Regardless, the pronouns seem quite old. One thing I did find under the search of ""4chan" shi hir" on Google, was a.. descriptive post on a furry porn website called e621.net

Okay, 13 years ago, that's a start. It certainly contains the word "herm" (short for hermaphrodite), and the word intersex used with this pronoun.

Godspeed TheShadowfox42 I hope you found the image.

Using Google's "Before:(date)" feature, I searched "shi herm before:2010", and unsurprisingly, I found a lot of furry porn.

Stories on sofurry.com, a furry website that looks to be from at least 2007, if not older. I'll spare you the details, but indeed, there, they use shi/hir pronouns for their "herm" characters. Did these pronouns originate from.. furries?? I put that though aside for now, to look further into other uses.

As it turns out, the journey does not end at 2007. Urban dictionary has an entry from 2003

No slurs here, it looks like a neutral usage. Again, going back to Google. Now, search terms "hir "gender neutral" before:2004"

Many results show up now, now articles rather than furries. American.edu (seems to be a university), Swarthmore.edu (this is a college), both from 2001. jstor.org with a journal article from 1999. Unfortunately I can't read that one, as I have to pay a whole $63 to purchase it. I even found a PDF file from 1994 by core.ac.uk

But, what I've realized now is this is not usage of shi/hir pronouns. All of these use Ze/hir pronouns. I don't know if there is any link, but the last pronoun looking the same must've obscured the results.

From the american.edu article on these pronouns. You can see the usage of "hir" alongside "ze", and below it, the usage of ze/zir pronouns, which seem to be used more today.

Shit.. Doing the search all over again with the pronoun "shi" yields.. very few results apart from people talking about Chinese words.

Wait what about those furries from earlier? The tvtropes.org article does include this:

Chakona space? Chakats? Pronouns he came up with? Admittedly I kept seeing these centaur feline hybrid characters come up quite consistently during this dive, but I had to look into it further.

Oh buddy what did I get myself into. This is from 2001 best I can tell, so we're getting quite old here. I scroll down on the page.

And lower down.

Now this is all very interesting speculative biology, but what I'm focusing on is again, the usage of "hermaphrodite" together with the pronouns "shi/hir". Did a furry artist named Bernard Doove come up with these pronouns.

It gets yet older.. New search, "chakats "shi" before:2001"

Again, Bernard Doove's art from 2000, 1999, 1998,

I find a website called yerf.metafur.org It has furry art, dating all the way back to the mid 1990's, but here, on December 23 1998, is the first appearance of these pronouns on that site.

This Bernard Doove person has been at this project, with these pronouns for a while.

From what I can tell, many of his art pieces, they seem to be quite sexual beings. Quite fetishistic of hermaphroditism at times. (or intersexuality, take your pick)

The other thing I found with my search was a website, furry.org.au/bosshoss/

My search says it's from September 14 1998.

That's certainly some information, but it might come in handy. So Chakat Goldfur provided this website? Who is that? Looking into it, that seems to be a character created by Bernard Doove, that acts as an alter ego. Further down, the person running this website lists some other websites they enjoy. One being "Proxima Centauri", which seems to be another furry artist.

"I met this one at ConFURence 8. Very interesting. (Did I mention shi is a hermaphrodite uni-centaur?)"

(For context, ConFURence is a furry convention held in 1997)

Again, the usage of hermaphrodite, and the pronoun shi. At this point, the website being linked to is long gone, but the wayback machine provides help. The website, http://www.spots.ab.ca/~unicorn/main.htm has been captured all the way back to October 8th 1997.

At this time, the website was under construction. No images are willing to load and haven't been archived, but the description is intact.

So this person uses shi/hir pronouns for their hermaphroditic character all the way back in 1997. There are links to other places where this person used to host their works, but they are all down and haven't been archived. The thread is running thin..

Back to Bernard Doove, the Chakat creator. There must be something more to this. Turns out, there was. On the "yerf" website, I actually found several art pieces that were not picked up by Google.

Febuary 22 1997. Getting yet older. In some art pieces, Bernard references "Forest Tale" and "forest tales", so I went looking for whatever that was.

1995?? you've got to be kidding. It's an adult story involving these "chakat" beings, and sure enough, down the page

Shi/hir pronouns used over and over again.

With the use of hermaphrodite.

But.. This is kind of where it ends. I couldn't seem to find anything older, and I'm not going to contact Bernard Doove over this. Even something as old as 29 years is impressive to me. Bernard Doove states his characters were inspired by other furry artists' creatures of the time, but since it's 1995, there isn't much left for me to find here. Anything before that time is probably lost.

With all the information I have been able to gather, it looks to shi/hir pronouns were created by Bernard Doove who is a furry author and artist. Shi/hir were made to be a midway between "she" and "him" in some way, to be a gender neutral word for hermaphroditic genetically modified beings called "chakats" in his stories. As an intersex person myself, I don't enjoy the use of "hermaphrodite" in such a way, as it's a slur for us. But these types of characters also seem to be very old, and we, and our struggles, were completely unknown to the vast majority of people, even moreso than nowadays.

If you use those pronouns for an intersex person who doesn't use them, it is indeed intersexist, as you are implying we are hermaphrodites.

But as for whether only intersex people can use them? I'm not sure. The original intent doesn't seem be directly linked to intersex people. You could argue that these hermaphroditic characters are fetishized versions of how many people see us, and have seen us for a long time. Afterall, hermaphrodite was, and still is, a common slur for us.

I don't doubt some people have used these pronouns as slurs against us as well, but I also haven't found anything specifically that supports that. It always seemed to be for specific fictional characters that COULD be based off specific intersex attributes

I'm not going to argue one way or the other. This was just me trying to find what I could about these pronouns and their history. Just be mindful of how you use these pronouns, and the connections they have to fetishes revolving around the common misinterpretation of intersex bodies (as in, "having both parts")

Thank you for reading.

I hope you learned something. I know I did, and I now have a headache.

[sirenium]

If you're against perisex people using labels like AFAB transfem and AMAB transmasc, please kindly shut the fuck up. If you're against perisex people using pronoun sets such as shi/hir please kindly shut the fuck up.

I, myself, am intersex. I do not *care* if Sally sees her womanhood through a trans lens while being perisex AFAB. I am an avid believer that enforcing the notion that such labels are 'exclusive' to intersex people is harmful. 'Oh but shi/hir has been used against us!!!' That is not the fault of Billy, who just vibes with the pronoun set.

The sooner we as a community can realize that these 'progressive' boxes aren't much better than the ones made by our oppressors, the better.

[mogai-flaggot]

SHI / HIR ; an intersex-exclusive pronoun set that sounds identical to "she" and "her". originally coined as a way to oppress us by combining she and him, the pronouns were reclaimed in the modern day by an anonymous 4chan user.

[pawette]

shi ﾉ hir

❝ shi/hir/hirself pronouns pride flag. ❞ — ♡

credit : @pawette !

[pronoun-checks]

hi, how are ya?

i would like a pronoun check for the name Arson-Snow with it/it/it/its/itself, shi/hir/hir/hirs/hirself, and vamp/vamp/vamp/vamps/vampself pronouns please!

No problem!

Oh, hey! There’s Arson-Snow! Do you see it over there? It’s the one sitting by itself with its headphones on. I wonder what it’s listening to? I hope hir day has been going well. You remember hir, right? I said I thought hir name was neat! Arson-Snow. Have you met hir before? I’ve only spoken with hir a few times, but shi seems like a nice person. I think shi comes here fairly often. I think you would get along with vamp. Do you think that bag by Arson-Snow’s feet belong to vamp? Oh, I hope not, because vamp’s leaving without it! We should go let vamp know, just in case it is vamps bag. Hey! Arson-Snow!

[rottedgardens]

LIGHT ACADEMIA INTERSEX

& SHI/HIR PRONOUNS FLAG

[image id; 3 identical looking flags, the only difference being the middle has "Shi/Hir" in dark pink writing in the middle of it. each flag has 7 vertical stripes in order of: light beige, tan, off-white, muted orange-red and repeat. they have a grey circle in the middle as well as a thin muted purple horizontal line on the top and bottom.]

Only for intersex people!!

♡ ◡◡ ❀ ◡◡ ♡

Made by: Me

[worldlydesiretemple]

now guys hear me out: transfem forzen.

[konapony]

hi sorry but if ur 13-16 on the internet posting queer discourse about what pronouns people get 2 use and what identities people can label themselves & ur only sources are carrds & tumblr posts … i beg u PLZ get off the internet and enjoy ur childhood… i promise that shit does NOT matter

[synthcryptid]

one of our bigger pet peeves: "shi/hir pronouns are intersex exclusive!"

they are not. not only are the commonly-stated claims of "it was coined by intersex people" outright false (and any attempts to back these claims usually just link to old tumblr posts from known bad-faith users), but this completely ignores that these pronouns date back to the usenet days, and directly originate from sie/hir, a set of pronouns that we frequently see people propose as an alternative to shi/hir.

sie/hir pronouns in particular are quite notable, as their use was semi-common as an all-gender-encompassing set of pronouns on usenet prior to september 1993 (that date carrying significance due to being when usenet hit the mainstream as a result of internet providers opting to offer free usenet access). sie/hir pronouns also have a bit of historic basis prior to usenet, with the sacramento bee having coined it in the 1920's as a gender-neutral set of pronouns.

shi/hir pronouns were only regularly seen in one general circle of usenet: furry and furry-adjacent groups (such what drew a lot of furries to usenet to begin with, alt.fan.furry, or one of the first major otherkin communities, alt.fan.dragons). prior to the creation of alt.fan.furry, "shi" pronouns were generally only used accidentally, as an attempt to extrapolate "hir" to a nominative form (with the logic usually being "well, 'hir' sounds a lot like 'her', so that probably means the equivalent of 'she' is 'shi'"). given the general rarity of nominative use of gender-neutral pronouns, it was incredibly common for users to simply not know what the nominative form of "hir" was supposed to be. and thus, quite a few openly non-binary users ended up identifying with shi/hir as their preferred pronouns (all the way back in the 1990's, mind you!). and since the population of alt.fan.furry and adjacent groups were largely users new to usenet as a whole, shi/hir ended up taking off as the nonbinary pronoun set within the furry community.

so the thing about the early furry community is that the demographics of the nonbinary population at the time were, by and large, bigender (by today's definitions, at least). however, "bigender" simply wasn't a term in the community's collective vocabulary at the time, and thus self-identifying users usually opted to self-identify as hermaphrodites. however, the point of confusion stems from communities outside of alt.fan.furry, in which it was common for the concept of a bigender person to instead be labelled intersex regardless of whether or not they actually are intersex, with the term being falsely believed to be politically correct. it was quite common for self-identifying herms to (rightfully) take offense to being called intersex, and for intersex users to (also rightfully) be vocal that hermaphroditism and intersex are separate concepts. but as the eternal september began, and the number of users who were neither intersex nor hermaphrodites skyrocketed, the voices of both demographics were quickly drowned out outside of the most obscure groups. this ended up extending past usenet, with sites like furaffinity ending up opting for "intersex" as the primary way to describe the concept of bigender, and both intersex folks and self-identifying herms being met with immediate hostility for merely suggesting that these terms describe completely different concepts. however, despite "herm" being pushed out of the community's vocabulary, shi/hir remained, and ended up staying the primary way to describe """intersex""" characters in the furry community well into the late 2010's, even as self-identifying herms and actual intersex folks were pushed into the shadows of the furry community. it wasn't until nonbinary identities started experiencing a resurgence that shi/hir pronouns began dropping in use.

given that usenet rarely shows up in searches (search engines deliberately deprioritize results marked with old dates), and google's usenet archive's search feature is barely functional (searching in a group won't show you results before 2000, and searching all groups disables most advanced search features), it's much easier said than done to actually find these discussions and discourse in any way other than sitting down and trawling the archive yourself, thread by thread. it also doesn't help at all that linking tends to be incredibly unreliable, with google groups being quite unreliable at showing posts if you didn't navigate to a thread naturally (this is especially egregious with searches; it's quite common to end up clicking a search result only to not find the post that put the thread in the results). as such, this has lead to the wider public being genuinely unaware of any part of the LGBTQIA+ community's and furry community's history on usenet, as a result of usenet's sheer obscurity, and the only actual archive being immensely headache-inducing to browse. this has made it incredibly easy for bad-faith actors to simply ignore usenet's existence, allowing for ahistoric claims like "shi/hir pronouns are intersex exclusive" and "shi/hir was coined by intersex people" to end up spreading way beyond what's reasonable, as most folks genuinely don't know that the story of those pronouns starts decades before furaffinity (which quite a few folks cite as the pronoun set's origins) even existed.

the main takeaway of this monolith of text? if someone is exhibiting cop behavior when it comes to other people's identities, please be skeptical of that, as it's quite common for identity-policing to rely heavily on ignoring history, deliberately or not, as shi/hir pronouns are an excellent example of

[ranpd]

hold on i have to share sometiing embarrassing

[mostautisticsinner]

Steve Carlsberg losing that monsterfucking poll greatly... Abby Palmer not being in the ultimate tentacle showdown... This is literally the greatest travesty that nobody even considers her a beast or a creature of some sort even though she is directly related to Cecil "Tentacles" Gershwin Palmer. We have to flood the WTNV fanart market with Abby Palmer monster. You agree. Reblog.

[ohkaypoh]

AYYY POINT SETTAHH MY SILLY GREMLIN GIRLIE!!

shi runs so fast you'd never know shi stole your coins and silverware

[Tahini Poinsettia design by me]

[neekrobite]

Bro your OCs are around 30???? 21 is YOUNG to you? You’re OLD!

ite so canon ages for my characters

trix is 36, she can shift between being a zoroark and zorau at will, she seems pretty average age tbh

puzzles is 34, shes friends with trix

sap and necco are both 21, despite me being 18, and them both being fursonas and yea they are young i think personally

swift is 24, also pretty young tbh

cals is my second youngest character who is 20

honeydew is freaking 64, they are also, in fact, a parent

neekrobite is 18, he's just my age lmao i just up it everytime its my birthday, probably gonna do the same with the plus 3 years too for necco and sap tbh

and litchG is fucking 223 shes an old ass bitch

oh yea also blanks like 2 years old canonically because it is just a living drawing lmao

[lunarvs]

Shi/hir pronouns

as an intersex person, why the fuck do people gatekeep shi/hir pronouns ?

“they’re for intersex people only!” nnno? Pronouns are for anyone to use freely. If some random person wants to use shi/hir, let them. Stop gate keeping the most pointless bullshit ever.

[mutepain]

idc if you act like ur special interest is better than someone else's i'll explode. people really compete over who likes what more and its exhausting. hot bitches dont gatekeep

[cimmerian-chaos]

Kitsoran's so horny for Jasper that shi just moaned and licked a motherboard because it has the same name