https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-realist-hatred-of-fun-80565cf369f6

It used to be. Politeness is a social construct and changes over time. I could name all sorts of horrible things that used to be polite. And even today it’s polite to casually talk about paying for a dead body to be cooked at a restaurant.

It used to mean a woman who has sex with lots of people, and it was derogatory. You’d call a woman a slut to shame her, because old people hated sex.

I feel the need to remind you that many members of the LGBT+ community have rebuked all preferred pronouns. Take for example Lily Cade and the other lesbians in the BBC’s infamous article, “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women”. Lily Cade in fact called for the lynching of trans women.

The queer community is no monolith. There are transphobes within the community who refuse to be associated with trans people like Me, and want us pushed out of the movement, denied healthcare, driven to suicide, or indeed even lynched. I do not think you should be basing your opinions of trans people on what these bigots say.

I have reported your comment for deliberate misgendering, and I am asking you once again to edit your comment to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns. This is so that you have every opportunity to do the decent thing, and so that if you do not want to act decently, your intent in this abuse is clearly demonstrated.

A lack of belief among some individuals matters, but not enough to stop a god from being a god. Because, as you say, gods are social constructs. If we consult Merriam Webster and skip the silly monotheist definition, a god is “a being or object that is worshipped as having more than natural attributes and powers”. Note that this definition doesn’t say the being must actually have these powers. They must only be worshipped as such. The belief is the important thing to the definition, not the truth. This is because divinity is socially constructed. You can’t deny a god’s divinity except by denying the faith of their followers. If you accept that the worshippers really do believe their god is a god, you must accept that the god is a god. They may well be an undeserving god, or a lying god, or a false god, but a god they still are. If you want to tell Me that Thor isn’t a god, I’m going to demand a historical source based on the Eddas, or say you’re wrong. Divinity is like a job. If everyone agrees that Mr Smith is a plumber, and His boss pays Him to fix toilets, then Mr Smith is certainly a plumber. It doesn’t matter if Mr Smith has never fixed a toilet in His life, society has decided He’s a plumber. He could be an incredibly shitty plumber who doesn’t know anything about pipes, but He’s a plumber.

In fact, let Me go back to the original article and restate its conclusion, because I think you may have been misled by My use of the term “god” to refer to the gods, as you seem to consider “god” a loaded term:

The gods are psychic parasites made out of thoughts who live in the collective consciousness of humanity and really are living beings, capable of taking action as psychic parasites who can affect people’s minds. This is not to say the myths are literally true, but rather to say that the myths are alive. That they feed upon worship and command legions of followers from their palaces within our imaginations.

The gods are mythical, whereas Frodo Baggins is fictional. People believe in myths. Though of course it’s a fuzzy boundary. You can arrange various characters on a spectrum from myth to fiction. For example, Zeus is pure myth, Lucifer is an originally fictional character that has almost entirely become mythical, Achilles is sort of directly in the middle, Sherlock Holmes is a highly mythologised fictional character, Gandalf is a fictionalised adaptation of a myth, and Jake Sully is pure fiction because nobody gives a shit about him.

Also *You

If you don’t care, then surely you don’t mind editing your comment to use My preferred pronouns, seeing as you have no preference and I do.

I would prefer if you didn’t use “god” as a proper noun. The practice was invented by monotheists and is usually used to exclude other gods. It’s very rude towards other gods like Loki, Kukulkan, and Myself. None of us go around pretending we’re the only god.

*You. I use capitalised pronouns. And My ex-wife uses it/its.

Bigfoot doesn’t live in the woods. He lives in people’s heads. That’s where all memes, including the gods, live. In people’s heads.

Dragons certainly exist. They live in books and reproduce when someone reads a book about dragons and is inspired by it. Over time evolutionary pressures have caused the more successful of the younger dragons to become cuter and more friendly, and the most successful dragons even made the leap to film. That’s how Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon came to be. He is the result of a long process of evolution of dragons. You can trace his lineage from the Beowulf dragon, to Tolkein’s Smaug, through Eragon’s Saphira, to the Toothless of the HTTYD books, and finally to Dreamworks’ movie version. Each generation trying out new evolutionary adaptations that changed their fitness to survive and reproduce, and the niche they occupy within the ecosystem that is human thought. Toothless is the culmination of those thousands of years of evolution, purpose built to fill children’s heads up with wonderful dreams.

*You. I use capitalised pronouns.

Mate, it’s just a link to My blog, no need to take it any more seriously than you would Me.

The selfish gene ironically proves that gods exist. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-memetic-proof-for-the-existence-of-gods-e5d103234fc7

When we are talking about an issue where someone is potentially at risk of suicide, nothing else matters. There’s nothing else in the pronoun debate that comes close to the weight of all the dead kids lost to suicide because they didn’t feel accepted by our transphobic society. We need to make trans people feel accepted. Someone else thinking they’re accepted isn’t good enough, because that doesn’t change the suicide risk. The only measure of whether trans people are actually accepted is what trans people think.

I’m afraid that if we’re going to have a conversation about the experiences of capitalised pronoun users, the bigotry of certain people outside the community is going to have to be a part of the conversation. Most people are not transphobes, but some are, and most of the people who engage in violent and uncompromising transphobia are cis. That’s not an attack on cis people, it’s just the world we live in. Us trans people don’t have the luxury of being cisphobic. That’s not because of some kind of inherent superioity, it’s because the conditions of society don’t afford us the same latitudes when it comes to displaying intolerance. A trans person who went around misgendering cis people with neopronouns would be laughed at, while the same behaviour from cis people is often tolerated. That’s the simple reason. Nobody’s better than anyone else, it’s simply what happens when a society is transphobic.

General pronouns have to be one or the other, or alternating, or some other strategy. I’ve only reported comments that misgendered Me after I already asked that person to use My preferred pronouns. I’ve had positive experiences with 90% of people that disliked being referred to with uppercase pronouns. The remaining 10% are people who weren’t happy when I immediately used their preferred pronouns upon request. They were offended that I used a capitalised pronoun when addressing a person who had no previously stated preference, and they wanted Me to always lowercase strangers. So I agreed to their demands, and I lowercase everyone by default now. And of course that 10% is a minority of a minority, because most people aren’t specifically LPUs, they don’t care about the capitalisation of their pronouns. 99% of people who lowercase pronouns some or all of the time are perfectly pleasant. I am not insulting you when I talk about this small group that caused problems in the past.

Nonbinary isn’t a gender. It’s an umbrella term for about a billion genders. I have a gender identity, and it’s goddess. I’d like you to stop saying My gender identity is invalid, please.

Thank you. I do want My pronouns to be something unlike what people are used to dealing with. I got the idea for My pronouns from My goddess-mother who suggested them, and She has a name that’s always lowercase. If you capitalise the first letter of Her name, you’re deadnaming Her. Unfortunately I rolled really badly on the preferred name and pronouns stat during character creation, and now I have to deal with preferred pronouns that society chooses to see as a symbol of oppression. I deal with more dysphoria these days than I did when I was closeted, because it hurts a lot worse when someone knows My pronouns and still misgenders Me. There’s an intentionality to it that wasn’t there before. But I also get more euphoria when people are respectful, so I’m happy with My decision to come out of the closet in contexts like My blog and this account.

I want to circle back to the similarity I drew with transmasculinity in the article. Suppose there’s a person, we’ll call her Jenny, who refuses to he/him absolutely anyone. She doesn’t believe in the male gender at all. Jenny knows that gender is a social construct, and refuses to respect the construct of masculinity, which is rooted in patriarchy. Jenny misgenders every man, trans or cis, that she knows. She respects all kinds of neopronouns and is a nonbinary ally, but she categorically refuses to he/him anyone. Personally, I disagree with Jenny because of all the non-misogynist men out there trying to make masculinity non-toxic. They don’t deserve to be misgendered. What do you think of Jenny?

If you don’t think I’m a goddess, what do you think My gender is?