If I come out as nonbinary, will it go well?
I'm generally against gendered pronouns for the reasons given here, and I don't have a strong internal gender identity as I described in @/IsaacKing/if-i-start-identifying-as-a-woman-w. As such, I've been thinking about asking people to use gender neutral pronouns for me. Unfortunately, my social environment is extremely toxic about any sort of culture war issues. As an example, I once got involved in an argument with a co-worker about the circustances under which misgendering should be considered harrassment. Despite being on the "more situations are harrassment" side of the argument, the same side as all the angry social justice people, I was accused of being transphobic (no evidence provided of course, just a vague claim that I had been transphobic somewhere in the thread), and reported to my employer over this. As another example, I once attempted to discuss the foundational left-wing belief that black people are poorer and fall prey to drug abuse more often as a result of this systemic disadvantage. Despite being one of the core tennents of social justice ideology, apparently me believing those exact same things and linking to studies backing them up made me a Nazi. The group of people within my social circle with whom I find myself in conflict with most often are trans people and others in that culture. I'm not sure why this is, since I'm strongly trans-supportive and often find myself correcting the misgendering of people around me, deleting transmisic comments on my social media pages, etc. My best guess is that there's a pro-trans bias among people making hiring decisions in my profession, leading incompetent trans people (and vocally trans-supportive cis people) to have a much easier time getting promoted, and therefore my criticisms of incompetent coworkers end up disproportionally falling on them. And they're used to everyone else walking on eggshells around them, which means that they never learned emotional maturity and react poorly to critisicm. Also, I tend to be alone in any resulting drama-storms since no one else wants to speak out publically in support of me, so I'm seen as an easy target to pick on. If you want a more concrete example of what I tend to experience, you can see some representitive drama here. As a result of this background, I suspect that if I come out within my social circle, I'll be accused of "trying to participate in the literal genocide of trans people by invalidating their experience", or some other nonsense excuse to attack me. I'll resolve this market subjectivly to some percentage from 0 to 100, based on things like: Do several people who don't like me make angry Facebook/Twitter posts about it? Do most people start using my new pronouns in discussions about me? Does my coming out result in decreased hiring prospects for me? Do I get added to the Discord server that's ostensibly for trans and gender nonconfirming people in my community? Do people from the "silent majority" of reasonable people in my community privately reach out to tell me that this was a bad move and I should have kept it hidden? Since this is so subjective, I won't bet. Obviously, I'm taking a bit of a risk mentioning this on a non-anonymous Manifold account that links to my other social media profile pages. Few enough of my community members use Manifold that I think it'll probably be fine, but I'd appreciate people here not sharing this anywhere else. I don't care what pronouns people use for me on Manifold for the time being.
