In the digital age, gender identity and expression has become easier to share now more than ever. You can see it in Instagram bios, in email signatures, even in “coming out” tweets. Sharing your own gender identity forthright is as easy as typing your pronouns into your phone.
This practice of normalising preferred pronouns is one that should be practiced by everyone, including cisgendered individuals. Fostering an environment (even just a digital one) where it is totally normalized to let people know how you wish to be identified is the base work of then applying that practice more and more into the real world.
I often include my own pronouns (she/her) within my email signatures to professors, in one case it prompted a professor to email and ask me about it. We had a short conversation about this normalization and the next class period she went around and invited students to share their own preferred pronouns. It may seem like a small act but it is one that helps foster an enviorment where any identity is completely accepted.
This idea of normalizing gender identity digitally is a practice almost everyone can participate in to a degree and the effects don’t go unnoticed. People who don’t fit the constraits of cis men and women have existed throughout all of time and deserve to have their gender identity correctly recognized just like anyone else. Having this information be more normal and available allows gender identity and expression to be practiced and lived much more fluently.
It helps remove a layer of questioning you may have about someone’s pronouns and treats them like any other individual and not some “intriguing commodity” for how they identify.
Of course if you are in a situation where sharing your pronouns would put you or someone else in danger for whatever reason please do not feel obligated to do so. If your gender identity is something private to you that you don’t feel the need to share with the world, then that’s what works for you!
The practice of having your own personal pronouns within your various forms of social media signatures is a choice that at the end of the day is completely up to you. But if you are someone who is comfortable in your gender and comfortable with sharing that with the world, adding your pronouns to your social media is a step you totally should consider to help speed up the normalization process.