(cont.--Part 3) How can a pronoun address identity beyond gender?

Considering their Tumblr origins, it’s not surprising that many noun-self pronoun user interests’ overlap with fandoms, including anime, K-pop and Minecraft YouTuber stars like Dream. Intense fandoms are rife with neopronoun use.

Neopronouns are also prominent among some communities of young people who identify as neurodivergent, which includes diagnoses or descriptions like Asperger’s syndrome and autism.

Mx. D’Angelo said that one reason people on the autism spectrum may use neopronouns could be “because they feel like their relationship with gender is different than the neurotypical one.”

Neopronouns give people who feel different from the rest of the world a way to avoid all its boxes at once.

But pronouns are permanent and must never change!

In his book “What’s Your Pronoun?” Dennis Baron, an English professor at the University of Illinois, describes a series of attempts to create a nonbinary pronoun. (In 1808, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested “it,” which flopped; it is now beginning to have a small moment in the sun.) In all, Mr. Baron identified more than 200 gender-neutral pronouns proposed between the 19th century and the 1970s.

As nonbinary identities have become more widely accepted in recent decades, so did the requisite pronouns. In 2015, Harvard began allowing students to choose their preferred pronouns from a list that included gender-neutral terms like “ze, hir and hirs,” as did administrators at the University of Tennessee — before that university withdrew a guide to pronouns, amid conservative pushback.

Countries including Australia, Iceland and Argentina have given citizens the option to use nonbinary passports, and several U.S. states have done the same with driver’s licenses, including California and Oregon. What do neopronoun users say about all this?

We wanted people to tell us in their own words about why and how they used neopronouns. Because they are very young, we agreed to let them use only their first names.

“Being neurodivergent, I tend to perceive how a word makes me feel rather than just seeing the word,” the noun-self user Gum, 13, wrote in a direct message on Twitter. “I chose my bink/bonk pronouns because they remind me of clowns. Clowns and harlequin dolls make me very happy.”

“Being neurodivergent, you are more likely to have a complicated relationship with your gender identity and expression, and pronouns are just one part of gender expression,” Elijah, 17, wrote.

“When I first encountered them I actually didn’t agree with them,” wrote one 15-year-old neopronoun user. “Eventually I met a lot of people online who used them and decided to educate myself further and realized that they were perfectly valid and just another way of expressing your gender to others. I chose the ones I use as I feel a connection to them, EG vamp/vamp pronouns — I feel a connection to vampires and that in a way feels connected to my gender.”

What are the limits of neopronouns?

Limits? What are those? Some people even use emojis. A 2018 post on the Tumblr emojiselfpronouns explains how the paw emoji may be used as a pronoun: “Where is 🐾? Did 🐾 bring 🐾 lunch, or buy it?”

And how would you say that anyway?

“They were not meant to be said in the first place,” the post explained. Emoji-self pronouns “are meant to be fun, and are meant to stand against what we see as ‘normal’ and ‘typical’ pronouns.”

(cont.)