I wanna apologize once again for going off track yet again, but I felt this would fit here, It deals with a form of gender expression. For those of you that don’t know I’m a huge gamer. I have played video games and RPG’s (role playing games) since I was a kid. Most of the time I select the “male“ looking characters and uses names that really didn’t identity my gender. So the reason for this story is I have started playing a gaming app called Rise of Kingdom, because I missed gaming with my group here in Ottawa.
In RoK (Rise of Kingdom) the majority of avatar profile pics that are available happen to be “male faces”. So everyone assumes that the majority of people that play this game are ”male”. I happen to use a “male face”, because that is more inline with my gender expression. For the longest time everyone in my alliance referred to me using he/him pronouns. This didn’t bother me in the beginning, because I didn’t really know these people. However, as I started playing more frequently, I realized that everyone was referred to as he/him unless the player had a picture of their own face that resembled a “female”. The other times that female pronouns were used was if the person’s voice was heard in discord chat.
This got me thinking, if I used my face or talked in discord everyone would switch to she/her pronouns. Which would be wrong yet again. I wanted to talk on discord, because it makes parts of the game easier to play. However I was really hesitant. I didn’t wanna shock people when they heard “famine voice”.
Instead of doing so right away, I decided to feel the situation out first. I asked if people knew what non-binary was. A few people did and their was even a player who has a sibling that is. She helped me explain to those that didn’t totally understand. She then asked me what pronouns I used. I explained that in real life I use my name. However, that would be complicated in game, so I would be fine with they/them in this situation. Things went better than I thought.
My main point of this story is that you truly don’t know what a person’s pronouns are until you ask. So until you know for sure, I would suggest trying your best to use non-binary pronoun. I realize this will take some practice, but for people like me it would help us not to feel uncomfortable in these situations.
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