Hi, my name is Bill and my pronouns are …

Irrelevant.

That isn’t a joke, but it probably needs explaining. To understand why it is so, we have to realize consciously what we know subconsciously: you don’t use gender based or related pronouns when you talk to someone.

Consider this. How many times have you walked up to someone and use “he/her/him/it/they” to refer to the person you are talking to? I’ll bet the answer is “never”. How many times has someone done that to you? Nobody has ever walked up and said “Hi, Bill. How are he doing?”. I’ve never said to a Jane “Hi Jane, are she coming to lunch with us?”. I’d bet neither have you.

What do you say? “How are you doing?” “Are you coming to lunch?”. Sure, technically those are all “personal pronouns”, but only in the sense of them referring to a person. However, every pronoun that you don’t use to reference the person you are speaking to directly is really an “impersonal pronoun” because you are referring to a third party.

This is why they are irrelevant. I have no right, moral or otherwise, to tell you what you must say when referring to me to someone else. Beyond that, it is not something I can actually control or determine in the vast majority of cases. For example, you might be thinking “what the hell is wrong with him?” or “wow, he is right”. But, and this shouldn’t be a surprise, it has no bearing on me.

Even if you said it aloud to your spouse or friend, it has no bearing on me. Even if you said “wow, she wrote this?!” it has no bearing on me or my life. It might confuse someone else if they then look at my name and/or picture, but that will reflect on you — not me.

Which is why this whole thing about “my pronouns are” is utterly useless. The only pronoun referring to me you use when talking with me is “you” and the only pronoun I use referring to you when talking with you is “you”. Beyond that, I have no business telling you what pronouns you use about me impersonally. The vast majority of the time I won’t even know. If you use the wrong impersonal pronoun I won’t sweat that either since it does not look poorly or well on me regardless of what you say. Even if I hear it.

You and I are individuals, and in my view we should treat each other that way. The best way we do that is just do what we’ve always done when talking to someone: use “you”, “your”, “you’re”, “yourself”, and our names.