>emotional QB
Only a matter of time until MMVP coob shows up?
Oh, it's some obscure fic by some guy named mod, or moodrah, or modirah something. While you might not have heard of it, I assure you it exists: It's existence is immortalized as Fargo (one of DA BEST pmmm fics) claims to be referencing it with its chapter 38's chapter title: "This Story's Dead".
Actually didn't know that, deleted my post. Sorry Moid.
...I'm totally lost. What happened?
I feel like that's mean-spirited? People don't intentionally forget things; punishing people for honest mistakes made without malice, in a leisure activity, is a great way to prevent people from feeling comfortable with participating in the first place.
It's an honest mistake the first time, but when people keep making the same (easy to avoid) mistake after being corrected, the conclusion might be that people don't care enough to put the effort in to get pronouns right. Disrespectful, no? It's an even greater way to prevent people from feeling comfortable with participating.
Habits are hard to break. Punishing everyone else for it doesn't seem logical.
I would assume that votes that use the correct pronouns don't share the malus. And in that case all you need to do is a minor change to whatever the plan that you copy pasted is.
If someone struggles with pronouns it's on them to take three seconds before they post to make sure they got it right. Arguing that the people being disrespected are 'mean-spirited' and discouraging people from participating by enforcing correct pronoun usage isn't the best look.
You know I've tried being polite about people messing this up, and that just wound up in people continuing to misgender the character and show that they really don't care about nonbinary identities in the slightest.
My suggestion would be to bar the offending person from having their vote count in the next/current vote, or something. That way, everyone else isn't punished, it's nothing lasting or hurtful, and, hopefully, gets the job done.
...it's kind of the opposite, actually. Most people in this day and age have serious disconnect between referring to a singular person with "they"/"them"/"their" because they were raised with the knowledge that such words are meant to refer to multiple people. That takes time to overcome.
Singular "they" has been a completely standard part of English usage since at least the 1300s, and is used naturally in speech by the vast majority native speakers (including people who have been incorrectly taught not to use it—acquired knowledge of language generally wins out over taught rules—and even by pedants who falsely claim it's ungrammatical). If your first language is English, you probably use "they" as a singular pronoun all the time without thinking about it.
No one's saying it doesn't take effort. It took me effort and practice when my partner switched to they/them, and I still mess up sometimes. But it's worth the effort to show someone the basic courtesy of respecting their pronouns.
