That being so, and rather than cluttering up their mentions, I'd like to speak a little here about my own recent experience with this.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
In my forthcoming novel, A Tyranny of Queens, one of the minor characters is nonbinary, which is flagged in my pronoun choice. Specifically:
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Replying to @fozmeadows
I've used my own spelling variant, thei/thim/thir, to refer to this character, as well as using it elsewhere to stand as a singular they.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
I did this because, even in my teens - over a decade before I knew I was genderqueer - I felt frustrated by the lack of an enby pronoun.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
I had no objection to the singular they, but the potential for confusion on-page always irked me. And so, teen!me came up with a fix.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
English has lots of words that are pronounced identically but spelled subtly differently in each usage - there/their/they're is one already.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
So, I reasoned, why not just follow the logical trend and make another spelling to indicate the singular they on page, nixing confusion?
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Replying to @fozmeadows
For teen!me, this was a purely intellectual exercise; I never felt I'd be allowed to use it. It just made sense. But as an adult author...
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Replying to @fozmeadows
In writing A Tyranny of Queens, I was super excited to use this pronoun; it's one I plan on making my enby default in all future works.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
Even so, I knew it'd look incongruous without explanation, so I made sure to flag in the text what it was via the POV character's thoughts.
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The POV character is using a language not their own, is aware the enby character uses a pronoun with no direct equivalent in their own -
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Replying to @fozmeadows
- and so tries to find a mental compromise to be as accurate as possible. A textual explanation for an internal & literary choice.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
When my CE came back, the editor had swapped out the pronoun for xir and xe in the first appearance, and left me a comment:
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