I was going to drop this as a DM to the mods, but then figured it’d be worth making a discussion topic so other folks could weigh in. Would it be worthwhile – and if so, possible to implement in Discourse without too much trouble – to create an optional place in folks’ profiles where they could indicate preferred pronouns if they so choose?
Beyond the reasons why they’re useful to have for in-person interactions, I feel like pronouns are especially useful in online spaces like this since, speaking just for myself, I know I’m prone to jump to conclusions based on incomplete information like the user names and avatars folks use, which can lead to incorrect assumptions.
I can definitely see reasons why some folks would prefer not to list any, so hopefully it’s possible to make them optional rather than mandatory. And allowing users to enter whatever they want, rather than being stuck with a prescriptive list, also seems to me like a good approach. But I’m not sure how feasible any of this is, and while I did a quick temp check of a couple people who were on chat earlier today, of course that’s not a full and representative sample of site users. So as I said up top, figured I’d start a topic and see what the mods and others think!
