pronouns

self

I don’t mind what pronouns you use to refer to me, but thanks for checking!

If you also have no preference, the next priority would be clarity. Presumably, you want your speech or writing to be understood by others with least effort, so I’d go with the option that is least unexpected for your listeners and readers: use he/him for Sean, and they/them for SheepTester.

real name

Recommended:

Sean’s Discord bot is actually powered by him manually responding to messages.

The use of he/him for Sean is to leave the least surprise for the reader. Sean is a common male name in English1, so the reader is likely to expect “he”/”him” to refer to Sean.

Okay, but not recommended:

Sean Yen is an infrequent player of Minecraft, a European voxel sandbox game. Yen has committed many unspeakable horrors to his Minecraft villagers.

In a way, my last name “Yen” serves as a pronoun for my full name. Last names don’t encode gender, so you’d have to establish it by giving my full name first. Therefore, I don’t recommend referring to me by my last name since it adds a second hop to following “he”/”him”’s antecedent.

username

Recommended:

Sheep_tester said they‘re no longer updating the HTMLifier.

Online usernames don’t generally have an associated gender. In some communities, it might be common to assume a community member is male, but I would proscribe this.

Okay, but not recommended:

Sheep_tester (who goes by he/him) said he’s no longer updating the HTMLifier.

Since I have no preference, explaining the pronouns you’ll use for me adds unnecessary verbosity.

As usual, when there are multiple possible antecedents for a pronoun, you can just repeat my username again for clarity.

gamepro5 and sheeptester are building their base on the mushroom island, but sheeptester still has their old base by spawn

other languages

Recommended:

SheepTester的遊戲不好玩,為什麼這麼喜歡用JS

When a convention for gender neutral language hasn’t really caught on among your audience, it is instead recommended to use the masculine for my username. This way, you can avoid unnecessary off-topic debate, which can distract from your message.

But please remember: these recommendations only apply to my name, not others’!

  1. Borrowed from Seán, Irish’s version of John. 

See source and revision history on GitHub.

Write a comment