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When this book came out I'd previously seen ze/zir which sounds less jarring in legacy English. I think this was from a few people in the sf world in online discussions rather than in fiction, though I can't really remember anymore.

Either way, it scales better than having everyone publish an individual pronoun policy and every else remember it, O(1) vs. O(N^2).

Diaspora is excellent.

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I went to a small rural school on the east coast and circa 2005 or so I recall getting a mass email from an acquaintance explaining their new pronouns of ze/zir. That was the first I had ever heard about someone preferring different pronouns, and it was probably close to a decade before I heard those particular ones in any other context. All that is to say that it makes sense if it had made its way out to a rural college in 2005 it was probably being used a bit more widely in the SF a few years prior.

Also chalk up Tim Leary for "hir" back in the 1970s (maybe 1960s).

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