Okay, so: I used to live in a really lovely household where people were amazing about my gender, and I became very fluid in terms of what name and pronoun I was using on a given day. It reached a point where people could usually tell which name/pronoun to use on the basis of how I was presenting, which was pretty cool. But that's not a level of nuance and understanding I'd expect from most people - it just came from living in close quarters and being really good friends. So I tend to say "they", because it's a totally neutral default, and (unlike constructed pronouns like "zie") tends to slot pretty naturally into people's language patterns, as it's something that gets used within language anyway to indicate a person of unspecified gender. While sometimes I'll feel more like I'd prefer "he" or "she", hearing "they" never makes me feel weird in the same day that "he" or "she" can do, so I ask people to use it as a default. There's kind of an exception about "she" when it comes to women's spaces, though - I identify within the category of "woman" because it's a social class to which I belong (basically: my feelings about my gender/body/sex/etc don't change the fact that I'm treated exactly as a woman under patriarchy - see my blog for more stuff about this, and how it's fitted in with the work I've done with NUSWC).
And on the mutability of language - basically, I find the idea of "my pronouns" being a definite, solid Thing kind of weird? Not in a bad way, just a weird way. I understand the language of "your pronouns" vs "your preferred pronouns" as being a way of expressly treating trans experiences as legitimate - in the same way that one might say "your gender" vs "your gender identity", because the idea that cis people have real "gender" and trans people just have "gender identity" is one of those nasty and insidious linguistic things that feeds in towards undermining trans people's experience of self. But at the same time, I sort of think that all that ANYONE has (specifically when we're talking about language and self-description) is "preferred pronouns" and "gender identity" - whether you're cis or trans - because gender and language are semiotic systems that imperfectly describe the realities we live (and yes, they do also create those realities to an extent - but what I think I'm getting at is that there is never a perfect match between the signifier and the signified, if that makes sense? And this is why I said it should be a blog entry...)
But also, thank you very much for asking me - I realise someone asked on the blog a while ago and I didn't get around to replying because I was a little bit overwhelmed. So here we go, an answer. :)
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