Using this room again because another user had a question about "avoiding pronouns", and I'm going to assume they're approaching this in good faith, but this is going to take way more than a single comment.

TL;DR: The CoC perfectly allows someone to generally use Neutral Pronouns. The only exception that people need to be mindful of is the specific scenario where you use 'they'/'them' to refer to someone, and that person specifically says "actually, I'm not comfortable with 'they', please use 'she'". In that scenario, you should start using she/her to refer to her.

That scenario is, in my estimation, pretty rare; but it does happen, and it is a thing that some people, both cis and trans, care about, so the expectation is that you should take it seriously.

"Avoiding pronouns" is kind of a different thing though.

The thing is that most people in the matter of everyday conversation use pronouns. This isn't a debatable fact. Even people who speak more formally are probably still going to use pronouns as a matter of practice.

So if your response to a general fear you're going to get someone's pronouns 'wrong' is to say "alright, I'll just avoid pronouns entirely, that'll solve the problem!", it makes me think you probably have a misconception of what the problem actually is. Because yes, misgendering someone is a problem; but what a lot of trans people, myself [tepidly] included actually want, is Positive acceptance, not Negative acceptance.

A trans woman [generally] isn't just looking for people to not call her a man; she's also looking for people who will acknowledge she's a woman. Pronouns are a part of that contract.

Now, again, without digging into intent (because I don't care about intent, I can't know someone's intent, I can only care about the perception of the intent behind a person's behavior) if you start talking like that about Eliza specifically, it sounds like you're very conspicuously avoiding using pronouns for only Eliza.

And if Eliza is a trans woman, it will give the impression that the reason you're doing this is because you don't actually acknowledge her as being a woman.

It is possible to speak in a way that avoids pronoun use generally or entirely without sounding artificial, but that mode of speaking doesn't represent the whole range of how we talk or how we engage with each other, and it is still going to rub up against the issue that for many transgender people, that mode of speaking can still come across as dysphoric.

So that's why "avoiding pronouns" isn't a viable blanket strategy for being respectful to users. It's a strategy that sounds nice until you get into the weeds of it—and if you use it, you probably won't encounter problems right away—but just assuming it's an unproblematic strategy is going to bite you if you aren't prepared for the (very real) scenario where it becomes a problem.

/thread