I impulsively deleted my post after I read your response, but I decided I should clarify. I certainly wouldn’t use it/its in the way I described with anyone who didn’t understand and consent to my reasons for doing so. I have no desire to “get off” on asking people to refer to me as such more broadly. I’m sorry if that was unclear. I’m new to talking openly about this stuff after many years of compartmentalization and shame, and that can lead to my misjudging what’s enough or too much information.

At the same time, I do think some of your premises are a little off base and a little dismissive. You asked if using it/its promouns was necessarily validating self-hatred or dissociation. I was just trying to offer an explanation for why, in my private use case, it wasn’t. Maybe my use case just isn’t relevant to the question you were posing, but you made no reference to how publicly or privately people used it/its. I gave you an answer that does only apply to people with whom I’m romantically and sexually intimate, yes. But language exists for intimate contexts too, doesn’t it? If you say “Isn’t it/its just reinforcing self-hatred and dissociation?” then I say “Not when it helps me accept my body in romantic/sexual contexts,” then you say, “But that’s just a fetish,” isn’t that kind of arbitrarily siphoning off the use of pronouns in one-on-one relationships from the broader conversation of why we benefit from using non-cishet-compulsory pronouns im general?

On some level, yes, my use of it/its is probably a fetish. But that hasn’t made it any less empowering and therepeudic for me, and that’s all I was trying to get across. I think for everyone except perhaps those on the aro/ace spectrum (whom I can’t speak for, although I know of ace people who use it/its in similarly limited contexts to mine), sexuality is so interinvolved with other aspects of one’s identity that a fetish is rarely “just” a fetish. Until I came out, this and other thought processes you might describe as fetishistic were my only self-authorized way of coping with dysphoria, and my shame over this sense that my problem was “only sexual” was a huge obstacle to my coming out. In reality, I was using the premise that it was only sexual to blind myself to the broader kinds of pain dysphoria was causing me about my social identity.

Sorry this ran a little long. This conversation sort of hit a nerve, but not for reasons you could’ve understood given my original post.