A character in this troper's original comic was intended to be female from the page I introduced her. Because of her mask, her GenderBlenderName ('Lanier', if anyone's keepin' score) and my... ''impressionistic'' style, the main problem in keeping this a secret was keeping other characters from using pronouns.

This troper had a hard time when he wrote a story titled "It". To make the TwilightZoneTwist work, he had to be very gender neutral in regards to the titular monster, and avoided the pronoun "it" at the same time. People actually liked it once they realized what It was: "It" in the phrase "Tag, you're it".

Stephen King is a troper?

Heard it a million times, thank you

I don't think that giant inter-dimensional spider monster and the it in "Tag you're it" are really the same thing.

This troper has a tendency to slip into this when writing suspense or horror. It doesn't help that even when a name is mentioned it's about a 50 percent chance it's a TomboyishName or not. Unfortunately, some of this horror transitions into sex scenes... so her beta readers occasionally experience a brief case of Slash Whiplash.

Ugh. This (male, heterosexual) troper was a victim to Slash Whiplash not too long ago. He was over halfway into a well-written Batman Beyond fanfiction when...it revealed itself as a yaoi work. Despite attaining new levels of squick, he forced himself to finish reading the story, because yaoi aside, it was that well written.

This troper has experienced a case of ''het'' whiplash during a particular fanfiction. I thought I was alone.

This troper once wrote a story with Death being completely gender neutral especially since Death was not in the usual {{Grim Reaper}} mode, and realized this writing is only as hard as one makes it out to be.

ThisTroper has remained gender neutral while talking to web-forums in ''self-description''. It worked, kinda, it's just that the circumlocutions to describe possession (i.e. not using "his" or "her") are the worst. The troper is sure that it pissed off half of the forum (in which case, I'm sorry).

Same here. Although, I'm not sure that the forum has realized it yet, and just makes assumptions.

While playing [=MMO[=RPGs=]=], ThisTroper tries to stay gender neutral when talking to players for the first time. It's a bit awkward and usually the recipient picks up on my awkward English. It gets embarrassing when I forget and guess the wrong gender (almost always calling a lady a guy.)

You could always use "shkleez" or "shklers".

ThisTroper has been deliberately trying to stay gender-neutral in his writings on the web when the gender of the person isn't relevant. He mostly just sticks with singular ''they''. God bless singular ''they''...

Not to forget ''one'', as in "One could say..." This troper does it even when gender is relevant, which apparently makes guessing one's gender a matter of "playing the odds," to quote another.

This troper takes steps to avoid it on forums. He has often been mistaken for a girl due to his typing.

By your continued use of proper grammar or your topics of conversation?

This troper hates using gender-specific pronouns, and will use "they" even when others have just used he/she and the gender is completely obvious. He's not sure why (and doesn't apply this rule to himself, for some reason).

I think of myself as gender-neutral, so recently, I started, as a self-imposed challenge, to refer to myself without mentioning any gender-specific language constructs. It's actually quite hard to do in the Main/RussianLanguage, because it means (among other things) avoiding active singular past tense verbs about myself. As a result, I've started stuttering and slurring sometimes, but it nevertheless gives me strangely persistent sense of warmth and satisfaction. Even when speaking about other people, I try not to use singular third-person pronouns unless absolutely necessary.

This Troper identifies as androgen, and thus tries to use gender-neutral language on the internet. It's much easier when using the first person. And failures to do so ''do'' happen. I am certain that if you try hard enough you can find a reference to my real gender on this website. Somewhere.

You identify as a masculinizing hormone?

{{rutheni}}: By now, my friends probably identify me as lysergic acid diethylamide. Moving right along...

I believe the word you were looking for was "androgyn."

this troper dislikes unnecessary gender-specific pronouns on principle (they should be an optional specification, dammit, not an inherent feature of the language), and tends to default to "one" or "they" depending on tone, or, in desperation, the incredibly ugly "(s)he".

To write in an absolute gender neutral language, this troper just switches to Finnish. Ha!

Seconded. Especially for this troper, as the local dialect prefers the Finnish word for "it" as the third-person pronoun. Not that the other alternative would be any less gender neutral.

Pointedly avoided by This Troper, who will argue that, in just about any language, you use masculine pronouns to describe any group that is not composed solely of women. "They" is inherently plural ("Any troper can edit their favorite page" is wrong- it should be "''his'' favorite page", or "''her'' favorite bage, if all tropers are female).

This troper disagrees! Generic 'he' as the Australian educationalist (a woman) described it, is just wrong. As far back as the early 19th century Jane Austen was using 'they' as a gender-neutral pronoun. Generic he seems both old-fashioned, particularly American and very offensive. When TV adverts say 'he' about even cows with udders (NZ language is becoming more Americanised with every day this constant listener to quote Dorothy Parker - 'fows up'!

Actually, the singular "they" has a long and respectable history as an English construction. It was only in the 1800s that Hellenophile grammarians attempted to force English usage to conform to the grammatical rules of Latin, which has no similar construction. As English is grammatically a Germanic language rather than a Romantic one (even if much of its vocabulary is Romantic), this is rather a futile exercise.

I don't want to sound snarky, but I think the adjective you are looking for is "a ''Romance'' language". (And Greek/Hellenic is not of of those.) But I agree, English is occasionally very Romantic; just read poems by Shelley or Byron. One the subject of useful pronouns, French has its genderless ''on''.

Yes, but "on" means "one", as in "one's favourite page", which makes you sound like the Queen.

At least in casual, Quebecois French, "on" can be used as "we," "one," "everyone," and even "they." I don't know about its usage in other contexts, though.

This troper really digs "one's favourite page" and constructions like that. I also would like to petition to make "dude" gender-neutral, despite its origins.

Some of this troper's female friends already use "dude" that way.

This troper would like to humbly suggest the above troper read 'a person paper on purity in language' by douglas hofstadter. It is written from the perspective of an alternate universe where instead of having gender-defined pronouns, the have race-defined ones (whe for a white person, ble for a black person). The peace comes across as startlingly racist and clearly shows the value of the gender neutral pronoun.

It's brilliant. ''Brilliant''. ''The'' deconstruction of gender-specific language.

Alas, not so brilliant. This so-called deconstruction relies on very specific conventions (and American-centric conventions at that) in order to carry its point across. If the term 'white', for example, held no real connotations of MightyWhitey, and 'black' had no negative vibes associated with slavery, then chairwhite and firewhite might work out just fine. I'm Chinese, btw, which uses gender-neutral pronouns so I don't have a beef with it. But forcing a language to do something it shouldn't? Bad idea.

Not to mention that you just compared noticing someone being male or female with racism. I mean, seriously, I just spent ten years undoing my programming so that I recognize that being female has value, and now people want to erase it from the very language by blending me in with the guys.

I disagree with your claim about the America-centricity of it. I (the troper who first mentioned it) am not American and I never even realised it was.

It seems shocking to us, but in that alternate universe, the way they use it clearly carries no connotation either way. It's unoffensive to them even if its offensive to use, and vice versa. It strikes me as a kind of clever rhetoric.

This troper exercises a variant, and usually decides his characters' sex by dice rolls.

This troper does this for hypothetical characters in essays (although usually by flipping a coin rather than rolling a die).

This troper also exercises this, but always asks someone else to determine whether even or odd is male or female.

Averted in a story this troper wrote. The intention was no one knew what a specific character's gender was, but since it was in first person, the troper just had the narrator go 'fuck it, I'll just pick a gender for them.' They got it wrong.

This troper hopes to do this with a character in a story she's planning out. It's going to be lampshaded, and if it manages to take off and become popular by some miracle, she'll refuse to answer any questions relating to the character's gender as she doesn't really have a plan. She wants to see the ''hell'' that will break loose over it.

This troper didn't realize she had done this until she was asked if the protagonist of the story she had written was her. (She had been picturing a middle-aged man as the protagonist, herself...)

Same with me only flipped; I had a ''SailorMoon'' fanfic with Naru as the first-person narrator and I hadn't thought about whether or not it would be easy to pick up the narrator's gender for readers who weren't familiar with the series.

ThisTroper sometimes uses this in their work. Just to mess with people. Sometimes, they can go on and on about a character with out revealing a character's gender (if they even have one).

This troper has every reason not to come out of the closet, but doesn't feel comfortable lying about the gender of her crushes. Since gender neutrality is nearly impossible in Spanish, she uses the word "Person" as if it was pronoun.

This troper once took a Spanish test where he was asked to fill in blanks in sentences. For example, "Los chicos son _______ (thin)." would be filled in with "delgados". Then came one question where the subject's gender was not specified (it was either "I" or "you"; this troper doesn't remember), with two blanks. This troper finally assumed the subject to be male and conjugated both adjectives to the masculine form. After the tests were graded and handed back, the teacher told us, "You got full credit if both adjectives were the same gender. However, if you had one masculine and one feminine, you lost the point. You can't be both male and female; this isn't Jerry Springer."

Utterly painful for {{rutheni}}. One of his stories features a mostly-female {{hermaphrodite}} character who's one person but pretends to be two. Also, he doesn't want to use neologisms. ... If anything is this painful, I'd better be deriving some pleasure from it.

This troper is writing a story where one of the characters tricks both the other characters and the readers. Not only that, they CannotTellALie. Pussyfooting with words FTW!

This troper writes a lot of fanfiction, particularly for Tsubasa Chronicles, and has a hard time writing about Mokona, since it's gender neutral. Also, in her original story, she had a bird that was important to the plot who was gender neutral, but was referred to as both a he and a she, which is actually what made it that way.

This female troper roleplays as a male character. The problem is, her friends, who also roleplay with her, know she's a girl -- it feels really awkward to be referred to as "her... him... actually, what do I call you?" and it breaks the whole narrative flow of the conversation. She's resorted to using GenderNeutralWriting, which is ''slightly less'' awkward.

This troper tried playing as a shapeshifter character who could change gender on a whim and didn't feel any attachment to either one. Very awkward, though the character was very interesting. This troper would just change pronouns when the gender changed, but (male) troper would also use the character's name enough so that people got the picture. Generally, this troper has found that if you can write for a character well enough that it seems like a separate person in his or her own right, then people get less confused. It also helps if the people you roleplay with are used to opposite-gender roleplaying, which isn't all that uncommon.

This troper made it quite well with a masked character in her story once, if you consider you can't change "he/she" for "it" in Portuguese. After a really long time, this troper decided to the reader into believing that character is a male, when it's actually a female.

This troper has an adventure-fantasy story in the works and will have to employ this when I introduce a character named Arias. Please wish me luck.

This troper likes to avoid all mention of their gender as much as possible, and has as gender neutral an avatar as they can manage on GaiaOnline without using an 'I am' pose. Also, at least two of this troper's RP characters are designed to be androgynous.

I'm writing a story told from the perspective of a person who was on a prison planet. One of his friends was a woman in disguise called Ed. The disguise had a pretty good reason. As Ed said: Men get raped less. I was planning to write gender-neutral about Ed, since the narrator already knew about her gender at the time he was writing his story, but since that would make things forced, I just dropped it and let him write as he remembered it, with Ed appearing male (and constantly wearing armour) to him and everyone else while he was imprisoned. And only telling how he met Ed afterwards and discovered he was female when everybody was busy trying to get their lives back on track.

There are some cases where I've had to make use of this trope on ThisWiki to avoid spoilers. Okay, if the protagonist is a SweetPollyOliver and the example is bending over backwards to not refer to the wearer of the stylish uniform with any pronouns, you're probably going to catch on pretty quick, but I figure I should make a good-faith effort, and it seems wrong to actually just use the wrong pronouns.

I tried to once write a novel prologue using only gender neutral terms to describe the main character and reveal the gender later as a character developing revelation. Unfortunately, due to the way the English vocabulary works, it didn't work out.

This troper usually writes from the POV of a robot or machine. First, this is because it thinks like one. Second, this is because robots don't have genders. This hasn't stopped it from accidently referring to a particularly attractive ship as she or to a particularly powerful gun as he. And you can't figure out this troper's gender from its text either. Ha.

Traditionally, all ships are female, so this isn't entirely irrational. It's entirely based in supersitition - "a good ship is like a good woman: Nurturing, protective, and really fricken' dangerous to piss off."

This troper is in the process of actively questioning not only her gender identity but all gender identity, but doesn't yet give enough of a fuck not to use "she", since in her sphere it's the least morally loaded. However, she does enjoy Spivak pronouns and "one", since she's got no problem sounding like the Queen of England.

This troper loves Tagalog, partially because, with that language, gender neutral writing can be pulled off without sounding stilted or awkward no matter what point of view is used. It helps that, aside from having no gendered pronouns whatsoever, there are remarkably few gendered words.

Many gays and lesbians do this when talking about their partners to people they don't feel the need to come out to. Phrases like "significant other" and "my better half" see a lot of use.