amenon wrote:Open question to anyone calling Natani a 'him', that cares to take it: What would it take to get you to change?
Basically, for Natani to decide that he prefers a different pronoun.
For a long time I used female pronouns for Natani without really thinking about it. I don't know any transgendered people personally, and it wasn't a topic I had given much thought to before, so initially it never even occurred to me that I might *not* use female pronouns. I had seen some here on the forums using male pronouns, but it took a while for that to 'click' with me and realize that it might actually be important to some people. (I can be... a bit slow on the uptake sometimes.
) I still continued using female pronouns for a while, but eventually I had to admit that I was doing it out of a bit of emotional discomfort with the idea rather than simply inertia or convenience as I tried to tell myself. I decided that I needed to sit down and think carefully about the whole topic of transgenderism and how I wanted to think about it, and eventually I decided that I really should use male pronouns instead.
Essentially, my personal position is that you can argue this entire topic up one side, down the other, across the floor, and up the first side again and you're never going to come to any real *ironclad* conclusions that will convince everyone. And that goes double for a fictional universe where the situation has some significant (and occasionally ill-defined) differences from real-world transgenderism. And so I personally think that the only real justifiable reason to go one way or the other is the preferences of the person involved. Gender - as in, 'what do you
feel?' - is by definition a mental construct, and it's *their* mind, after all. And really, what is it that makes us a *person* if not our mind? If the mind/soul/whatever that we call 'Natani' considers itself to be male -
for whatever reason, conscious choice or otherwise - then what grounds do we have to claim otherwise? To use a possibly silly analogy, if someone says they feel sad, is it reasonable to tell them that they must be wrong and can't possibly feel that way?
And so, in my book it comes down to pretty much the simplest possible question - 'what do *you* think you are?' And so far, Natani has expressed that he considers himself to be male. I don't care *why* he thinks of himself that way, because ultimately I don't think it *matters* why. If he thinks of himself as male, then he is. If he decides that he wants to think of himself differently, then I'll use different pronouns.