litwickweer:

queering-the-void:

furbearingbrick:

justcisgenderthings:

To the people who say “alternative pronouns were only invented on Tumblr”:

I take it you’ve never heard of thon/thons/thonself? That’s understandable. It’s been a flop… for over 100 years.

Charles Crozat Converse coined thon/thons/thonself in the late 1800s at most.

Sources seem to be mixed on its actual coinage year, but again, it’s agreed to be the 1880s at most. He did actually publish the coining in 1884, though. (Wikitionary says 1858, but that’s the only place I see 1858?)

thedaysaltsavedmylife said: lmao and they/them have been used as singular pronouns for seven hundred years but ya know who needs facts when you can just buy a fedora

Other gender neutral pronouns that were invented outside of, or even predate, Tumblr (list is far from comprehensive, these are just used more widely, have historical significance, and/or are in print):

Spivak pronouns, originally invented 1975, and used in online communities for a while. Ey/em/eir/eirs/emself (the Elverson set). (There’s also a few variants that popped up later). There’s actual publications using these; they were the standard after singular they until recently

Ve/ver/vis/vis/verself - proposed by the writer Keri Hulme in the 1980s. Used by Greg Egan in the science fiction novel Distress, published 1995. 

Hu/hum/hus/humself (from ‘human’ I think) was used for a bit by Sasha Newborn, starting 1982

The coinage of the ze and xe pronoun sets is uncertain as far as I can tell, but variants on the ze pronoun sets are the second most popular gender neutral pronouns currently, after singular they. The Random House Dictionary puts the coinage of ze or zie in 1970-1975, noting an etymological derivation from German Sie, which sounds potentially inaccurate to me, since there was pushback against similarity to Sie from the genderqueer community

Xe is usually considered a derivative of ze, but it appears in the Unitarian Universalist magazine UU World in May 1973, before ze was in common use. It’s possible xe was coined independently multiple times

Nounself pronouns are the only ones that seem to have originated on tumblr, from the overlap of the otherkin and nonbinary communities (though like the modern otherkin community started to emerge in the 1960s so still not entirely a “tumblr thing”)

okay so like this whole post is great but ngl the only thing we can keep thinking about and chuckling at rn is “who needs facts when you can just buy a fedora”