People seem to get this wrong a lot. The job of a linguist is not, as people often think, to say that this is how you're supposed to do this, but rather to say this is how people do this. Not prescription, but description; what people do, not what people should do. A real linguist would be quite likely to agree with nikon there.

And singular they has been used for centuries. The wikipedia article has citations from well-respected texts as old as the fifteenth century. It was only in the nineteenth century that people started to insist that the word is plural. The only part of the usage that's new is having it refer to a specific person, where before singular they was only used with a nonspecific referent.

Look at the word you for comparison. It also has no separate singular and plural forms, and no one gets mad about that.

In short, language changes. What defines a word's meaning is how people use it, not how people say it should be used.

"They is always plural". I'm sorry, what do you refer to someone as if you don't know their gender?

Singular they in English dates at least as far back as Chaucer. A linguist would tell you "people are using this word this way, so this is how this word is used."

Also this: http://www.americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-singular-they

The fight over "they" should be over. :P

The people who throw that style guide at me, would also be the jerks who call me it, when I don't like that pronoun. They are also the ones that get snoodish if I correct them. (I know a few folks that use it, and that's fine for them, not for me. I use elverson myself, is singular they without the TH, makes sense to me.)

Awh. Nothin' wrong with a chat! My Skype's on my profile if you ever wanna ramble at each other :> No pressure though!

I'm demisexual, and I get 'DOES THAT MEAN YOU ONLY LIKE DEMI MOORE'

Or I mention being panromantic and get asked if I only date cookware.

I am of the firm belief that, for trans folk, you should always use the current pronoun to describe their past selves, even if they did not use that pronoun at that time. Referring to a trans woman as having been a little boy delegitimizes her gender identity, especially when one starts to consider potential biological components to transgender concepts, such as research showing that rostrums (a part of the brain) are shaped differently in men and women, and transgender women exhibit 'woman' rostrums. Gender is fluid but there is a lot of debate around whether or not the 'end game' gender identity may be predetermined by biological or environmental factors. I consider it most respectful to simply use 'she' for a trans woman, regardless of what point in her timeline I am discussing.

I would say either 'Farore's preferred pronoun [a term which is rather widely accepted, as in 'what are your PGPs?] is 'it'' or 'Farore is an it'.

Wording can be finicky. I understand!

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when I realized I was transgender, specifically. As a small thing I had frequent bouts of not wanting to be a girl, of wanting to be sexless or even a boy (or even just have a penis for a week - that was a frequent idea). I hated pink (due to associating it with the feminine) and I hated being thought of as 'girly', and I got very frustrated over color/toy/clothing/etc associations with one gender or another - for example, it made me angry that girls got pink, while boys, according to my local playmates, got both red AND blue. Despite the fact that pink is a derivative of red. Being left out of things for being a girl sent me to tears more than once - less for being left out, but more the reason why. Being made to always play the female character in whatever TV show or video game we were currently emulating irritated me to no end, especially if this was used as a way to make me 'have to' kiss the boy playing the main character. I didn't mind the kissing, but I minded the heteronormativity of it - if I had known that word at the time.

As I got older I became more okay with the hallmarks of femininity. I was a late bloomer and desperately wanted to fit in with the other girls, and be seen as an object of desire. I got teased about being flat-chested and, while I liked the look of my pre-pubescent body, longed for breasts so that I could no longer be teased, and be seen as attractive. Once I got them, I got them in spades, and was both upset by them and by how they made people treat me, and also reveled in the free drink or extra attention that a low-cut top could get me. But I still didn't feel feminine. I was only vaguely aware of the concept of transgender-dom, and so I resolved that I would be a girl my whole life - never a woman. The term woman, and the idea of having it applied to myself, upset me deeply, and felt horribly wrong and damaging. I corrected people whenever they referred to me with the term.

After a flurry of trauma and abusive relationships, including multiple rapes and sexual harassment in general, I became even less enthused about having a feminine body. My gender dysphoria, previously manageable, skyrocketed. I still enjoyed the attention that flaunting it got me, but more and more I began to cover up in baggy, masculine/unisex clothing. My dress style went from 'graver punk' as a teenager, to 'ren faire slut' as a young adult, to 'metrosexual' as an adult - and now is a random combination of 'gendered' clothing, leaning more towards the masculine, but sprinkled with tutus, sparkly dresses, fabulous scarves, one-of-a-kind jewelry, tight leggings, fairy kei accessories, and a wide array of colors from neon to pastel. I began to identify as gender-neutral, agender, but did not talk about it as I did not know anyone else that identified that way and felt I would be laughed at, ignored, or harassed for talking about my gender feelings. Identifying as a robot happened around this time as well. I met another agender person eventually and was introduced to the concept of neutrois, and the wider world of transgender beyond 'male to female' and 'female to male' - and so began to identify as transgender as well, now that I realized that was an option, and one that described me well. A while after this I got into a relationship with another agender person, and was delighted by the idea of being able to identify as gay, at least in the context of that relationship - finding a kindred soul meant piles and piles for my self-confidence and feelings of being 'real'. I was in a living situation and in other relationships at the time where I was pressured to present and behave in a feminine manner, so I suppressed the true extent of my identification for quite some time, at least outside the interactions I had with my agender partner. When I got out of that place and those bad relationships, I kind of rubber-banded the other way, and began to identify more masculinely, adding 'masculine' to the front of my 'agender' identification, going by 'he' pronouns, and trying to banish femininity from my appearance, my identity, and my life. Over time I eased off on this need to 'rebel' against people who were no longer in my life, and experimented with pronouns, including 'it' and 'bot'. I got frustrated with getting people to use them, and went back to 'he'. And then we come to now, and this writing I've posted. I'm sure I've missed some things here, but that's the general life story of my gender. :>

Also, it's worth noting that I don't really believe in the idea of a biological gender or sex. Both sex and gender are social constructs. I consider 'female' to be the gender I was assigned at birth, and nothing more. My self-identified gender is agender, and therefore my sex is also agender, or sexless, regardless of what body parts I may have. A good illustration for this concept would be an intersex person with a vulva who grows breasts at puberty, but who has testes instead of ovaries. A doctor at their birth may have declared their sex to be 'female', but they do not actually have all of the body parts typically associated with 'female', medically. Their sex is a social construct based on societal ideas of what makes someone 'female' or 'male' - their body is a specific arrangement of parts that has no actual biological assignment - the same goes for an XY person with androgen insensitivity syndrome designated female, or an XX person with progestin-induced virilisation designated male. They are designated such due to stereotypes as to what a male or female person looks like externally, but it may have nothing to do with their self-identified sex or gender. I hope that makes sense.

This version makes a bit more sense. I thought I specified, but apparently didn't, that, if in the company of people who may be upset or hurt by hearing a person called 'it', or even just in a situation where you don't have the time/energy to explain why it's being used, 'they' or 'zie' or ' thon' or 'ey' or 'hu' or 'per' or 'ne' or 've' or any of those other genderless pronouns are just fine.

In terms of referring to someone and their creations as a whole - some people are plural, in different ways, and some of those 'character' may be headmates or second, third, fourth, etc, personalities that express themselves distinctly. When referring to plural people I /always/ start with 'they' unless the system asks me to use a 'body pronoun' or other overarching pronoun for their system, or if they want me to use the pronouns for whoever is fronting while I am speaking directly to them, if I have the information.

If someone raised noise about the pronoun 'it', I should think you would be willing to explain things. Refusing to validate your friend's gender because you don't want to have to explain it now and then seems rather.. callous, to me.

Gender is a social aspect of our lives. Some may prefer to live without it, but most people will be trying to express one at all times as a function of being around others. Some may prefer to keep their trans status secret, and that MUST be respected, but in that cause you call the trans woman - who is presenting as just 'woman' or 'cis woman' - with female pronouns (or the ones she requests). I'm not sure what you mean by 'actual gender'.

I ask people what their gender pronouns are fairly quickly on while getting to know them, as I do not want to disrespect them by guessing wrong or dismissing them with 'they' when that is not their pronoun.

Starting from the bottom up - I was the one who coined altersex, Spotty took it and ran and popularized it, which is awesome. His original journal used a different term that he was having some problems with and he preferred my suggestion. I also suggested 'phantasex' for bodies that could not exist IRL, ie tentacle genitals, six cocks, etc, but it hasn't caught on nearly the same way. (Forgive me if I've already explained this, I wasn't sure if by 'I got you confused with SpottyJaguar' you meant 'it turns out it was Spotty' or 'I remembered/learned it was you', so I figured I'd explain anyway.)

I understand, sometimes you're with people where you can't explain, either for time/energy reasons, or because it might be (emotionally or physically or mentally) dangerous to you to do so, or because they honestly would just refuse to understand. In that case any genderless pronoun is fine for me - I have issues with 'they' but I know when talking to someone who doesn't want to, y'know, learn, using 'zie' or 'bot' might be just as pointless as trying to use 'it'.

I'm glad you have family support, even if it isn't always wholehearted. My family is... odd on the acceptance thing. My mom is particular makes it VERY CLEAR that she thinks it's weird for me to be trans at all, and borderline unbelievable for me to be nonbinary (I think she's not convinced NB actually exists, as a thing). They use my name, Kit, except for the occasional slip-up, and tend to be all over the place for what pronouns they're using for me. My sister calls me her 'sibling thing' which I quite like. My dad's very accepting but he tends to follow my mom's lead so once she starts misgendering me, everyone else does too. And she in particular gets offended, or seems it, when I correct her on my pronouns/gender. In some ways it almost seems like she feels I'm somehow stealing her daughter from her, and replacing that child with this new, bizarre one that she's expected to be just as caring and accepting about. She tries, but seems lost sometimes, or sad. I like being around my family but it can be frustrating. I wish I could just sit down and have a long talk with them about it so they could understand better but they seem uncomfortable with talking about it at all (though my sister has shown interest in learning more, at least). I haven't lived with them in 10 years, and before that for about 6 months (3 of which were down the road, not in their house), and then not for about 1.5 years before that... it's been a long time since we've been in regular close contact. I'm hoping to get to go visit them soon, and bring CassioBunny, and have some bonding time, but we'll see how it goes. They're accepting of her at least and very careful to use the right name and pronouns. Sometimes it seems like they care more about appearances than acceptance, but it's hard to say. Familial support can be great but there's a big spectrum of it from great to meh. Sounds like you and I both have families somewhere in the middle, overall.

I can totally understand wanting to be 'not female' more than a specific gender, as I floundered there for many years before coming to terms with being agender.. and some days it's still just 'not female', in some ways. Also wanting a beard, yes (though I want a sinister goatee, not a bara beard). And yeah, I do think sometimes, especially where employment is involved, it can be good to just start subtly taking hormones and wait until things start to become obvious to come out. Either way good luck with that!!