#yeah I see some of y'all out there like 'ok boomer' and if you bring that shit into the notes I will block you.

[otatma]

okay, so neopronouns.

lemme get my bona fides in the open first. your neopronouns are valid, likely to have more historical precedent than you think, and you have every right to be called with the words that feel good to you.

that said.

what I want to talk about is the regressive / conservative hostility to neopronouns.

even that is too much for me to cover exhaustively, but there's one particular aspect of it that I want to dig into a little bit.

the aspect in question is a problem I'll call the Regal Couch problem. Stay with me for a bit.

there's a game children play. It has no name that I know of, so I call it Regal Couch. Regal Couch is a game about phonics. The goal of this game is to ambush a child and get them to utter curses as fast as possible, with large bonuses for making this goal within earshot of an overbearing adult. The speed is important, because if you get slowed down in any way then the intended victim's thoughts catch up and they begin to figure out that they're being pranked.

Yeah, this is the game people were playing when they tried to get you to unwittingly say "so fucking" or "I see you pee" or whatever low-hanging profanity felt the most fun on that day.

(This was a very frustrating thing to encounter as a neurodivergent fun-hating kid, but I digress.)

So, there's a lot going on here. It's almost a template. The important thing about Regal Couch for the neurodivergent person is the particularities - the phonics, the speed of the hustle, the proximity to gullible authority figures, the viscerality of the desired curses, etc.

It's important to outline these particularities because it's important not to be distracted by them. The important thing about Regal Couch for the perpetrator is that if your hustle is good enough, you get a pull on a slot machine. The prize you get when those reels line up is someone else feels bad, ragefits, gets in trouble, or all of the above. Which is to say, some agency and control over another human. (Kindly remember how these can be potent rewards when you're eight and every adult thinks they have to train you like some kind of dumb animal.)

Despite being neurodivergent, I'm not (just) bringing this up to fulminate about how kids can be monsters sometimes. It's relevant to the neopronouns thing. It's relevant because it captures an important aspect of regressive praxis, and that is the relation it establishes between hustling and speech and power.

When we ask people to use pronouns unfamiliar to them, it shouldn't be too surprising when the more regressive ones react as if we're playing Regal Couch. And they often do. Many of the same elements are there. They don't know what these sounds mean. Etymology doesn't get as much traction on neopronouns. They're already in a tenuous situation (learning about a new person living in a category that they feel is a threat). For the same reasons they're much more likely to be preoccupied with the precedent and power relations that Regal Couch is actually about. (And of course there's a massive raft of regressive preoccupations that don't relate to Regal Couch in any way, which I still refuse to treat with exhaustively today — but they're there and I do see them.)

The difference of course is that neopronouns are not about establishing who can play dirtiest for stakes, they are about courtesy and comfort and acceptance. If I was going to compare neopronouns to a game that it's actually similar to, I'd probably say it's got more in common with a trust fall.

Q: So what? Why make this comparison in this kind of detail?

A: There's one grain of truth here. The meaning of these words - the neopronouns themselves - is often unclear.

We therefore shouldn't have any trouble asking "Okay, and what does that mean?" This does a few useful things - it seizes on an opportunity to learn, it creates more detailed patterns to remember the neopronouns with, it proves we're not regressives*, and it models the right behavior for the situation.

It isn't without risk though, because of tone. If someone asks you in sincerity to practice a trust fall and your reaction is suspicious and hostile in tone, you probably don't ever get to know that person. Also asking people to do any extra work at a time like this will never be ideal.

That question "What does that mean?", then, should be as soft as the circumstances allow for. Make it a real and vulnerable request for information, not a micro-aggressive riposte on the entire project of neopronouns. Listen hard to the answer, even if it was nothing like you expected. Ignorance is curable, if you want.

* — for various reasons which I don't have time to list, regressives consider this kind of earnest vulnerability in any social situation to be literal suicide.