Neopronouns

Neopronouns are third-person pronouns beyond he, she and they. The common sets are xe/xem, ze/zir, ey/em and fae/faer, and there are many more in smaller circulation.

Neo means new, which is only half accurate. English has been proposing new pronouns since the nineteenth century: thon was coined in 1858, appeared in dictionaries, and was in print for decades before it faded. The current wave is the latest attempt at a very old problem, not a recent invention.

People use them for different reasons. Some find they/them ambiguous in writing or in a crowded room. Some feel that he and she and they all carry associations that do not fit. Some simply prefer a word that was chosen rather than inherited.

The learning cost is real and it is smaller than it looks. Xe/xem follows the same grammatical shape as he/him, so the difficulty is memorising two syllables, not learning a new grammar. Most people who make the effort report it taking about a week.

They attract disproportionate hostility, including from inside the LGBTQ+ community, where they get treated as the thing that makes everyone else look unreasonable. Very few people use them, which makes the volume of argument about them out of all proportion to how often anyone encounters them.

In practice the etiquette is the same as for any pronoun. Use what someone tells you, correct yourself briefly if you slip, and ask if you are unsure. Nobody is required to justify their pronouns to a stranger, and neopronouns are not a special case.

Neopronouns are not new, and they are not a joke

The most common objection is that these were invented recently by people online. English has been trying to fix its missing gender-neutral pronoun for over 150 years, and thon made it into dictionaries in the 1930s. The current sets are the newest attempt at a gap that has been there the whole time.

The second objection is that they are impossible to learn. Xe/xem inflects exactly like he/him. Anyone who has learned a colleague's unfamiliar name has done something harder, and the people who say it cannot be done have usually not tried for a week.

Saying it well