I demand respect as a person of Cotardgender experience.

Ghost pronouns are the easiest pronouns to use.

I had such an upsetting experience on twitter today. A trans activist - exactly a person you’d expect to understand the importance of pronouns - completely disrespected my ghost/ghostself pronouns, which are clearly listed on my profile. Ghost/ghostself pronouns are pronounced with silence and a slight head nod - the easiest pronouns to pronounce - because they are the ghost of a pronoun. He gave me all sorts of excuses. It was “obviously a joke” since, of all things, I took the time to educate the reader as to how to correctly pronounce ghost/ghostself pronouns. Apparently, unless you use the ivory tower egghead ___/___ frame, your pronouns don’t count. They don’t have to use them.

I have since updated my bio to comply to this cisheterogrammatical rule, but I am still shaking, and vomiting hourly, every time the memory of this traumatic invalidation bleeds back into my conscious awareness. I thought I had done everything right.

If anyone is not aware, I am a cotardgender individual. Cotard’s delusion - inappropriately pathologized still by psychology - is the strong and persistent sense of personal identity that you are dead, a ghost, rotting, or missing organs. Obviously, some people actually are missing organs. Are they delusional? Of course not. And some people have more organs than doctors expect. A third kidney. A second uterus. Who is really to say what is the appropriate number of organs to feel like you have? The “normal” number and type is a social construct.

As a Cotardgender person, I have to go through my chronically online life encountering people saying “I’m dead” to communicate that they felt a strong emotion. Like it’s some joke to feel dead, and not my identity. I get that it is an expression and people do not mean to perpetuate stigma, but it still hurts. Or it would, if I could feel, but I can’t. I actually am dead inside, something these cis-living individuals could never understand. I cannot even interact with normal matter. I am typing this through a medium right now. Every time you do not use my pronouns, that is just one more reason for me to just give up and cross over. However, I have unfinished business, and so I will endure this corporeal punishment for the benefit of other Cotardgender people, including Cotardgender kids.

Being alive is a spectrum. Some people are closer to death than other people. Cultures for thousands of years all over the world have had different ideas about what happens to a person’s consciousness after they die. Zombies have existed in many cultures too. The binary life/death system is a colonial construct meant to marginalize local cultures and cement the supremacy of the Eurocentric living over the spirits of the dead. Their black and white thinking has marginalized and stigmatized Cotardgender people for millennia, starting with Lazarus, which has inspired cisgender people “finish the job,” leading to countless murders of the mediums Cotardgender people use to communicate.

#Ghostrightsareformerhumanrights