Question. I have a character who choses the personal pronouns of ze/hir to fit a certain profile.
As I am going through revisions I feel like I'm in the La Brea tarpits having all other characters respect her choices whenever they mention her.
"Is ze coming?"
As opposed to: "Is she coming?"
Would to be reasonable to limit the use of ze/hir to being in her presence or in official communications?
@J_Windrow A tangent: this whole mess is the fault of a language that requires irrelevant information in pronouns. Contrast 1: Is the agent coming soon? Is the agent who has female genitalia coming soon? Under what circumstances could one possibly care about the agent's genitals? Yet you must specify if you use a pronoun.
French is even worse, demanding gender for inanimate objects.
@J_Windrow yeah, nouns instead of pronouns when possible. I dislike the construct his/her. As an engineer I often used [s]he. Reluctantly I've come to think best is elimination of singular and plural. They - referring to one person.
@walterbays I get the tangent. And yes, when I took French in high school and college I goggled at inanimate objects having a gender.
I've already concluded I need to remove almost all of the pronouns and find a way to revise the areas where someone is referring to the character's recent phone call, etc.
There is, in fact, one character who has a bee in his bonnet about the character being transgendered. Of course, he wouldn't ever use the preferred pronouns.
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