2026-07-08: Handling Pronouns In a Public Signup Event

I'm participating in speedrun marathons again. Games Done Quick is on, I signed up for Licenseathon and Big Bad Game-a-thon is in the throes of its setup process for September. I'm even eyeballing a couple of other events to help out or submit runs for. It's a good time.

A lot of smaller marathons use a tool called Oengus to do submission handling, planning, and scheduling and while for the most part it's a neat tool if you handle your marathon in a very specific manner, it falls down in some places. The worst is pronouns, and that splashes out to some events using it handling pronouns incorrectly too. So I'm going to ramble about this.

Why Even Display Pronouns?

Displaying pronouns on overlay has been a thing for about 7 years now. The event most people probably saw the practice begin with is GDQ. I believe Power Up With Pride might have done it first. The practice was met with pretty lukewarm reception when it hit the big events, but now it's pretty normalized; for the better in my opinion.

If you're debating doing this in an event you're setting up, I encourage it...

• It may not be obvious. Some people insist you can "just tell", but before you even introduce complexities with gender identity and expression, I think anyone who's done any kind of phone-based work can tell you that's not true.
• It signals you've done at least a modicum of thought about being welcoming to folks who may not cleanly fit into "obvious" gender role expression.
• If people for whom it's "obvious" provide pronouns, it normalizes the practice for everyone to be able to express their pronouns without looking weird or out of place.
• Pronouns on overlay is an amazing warding spell against a type of person who, more frequently than average, is trouble. I'm serious here! The kind of person who sees pronouns on overlay and closes the stream is more often than not pretty toxic and demanding while contributing nothing back to your community.

Now, there's complexities here depending on what language your event is in. Some languages it doesn't make sense. But for most anyone reading this rant, it does.

Point is, this little change tends to be a pretty good "community garden tending" thing, showing what you prioritize as far as letting your runners express who they are, and what you don't care as much about in the face of the criticisms people usually raise about it.

Collecting Pronoun Info

Let's talk about collecting that info first. Oengus takes that info in with a drop-down they populate from pronouns.page and you just pick one, or more than one. A lot of events then use that info to populate their info. This is also wrong (and very annoying, speaking as someone who had to just deal with it¹).

The field to express pronouns should be a freeform text field you can type anything into. There's no way you can anticipate everything every person submitting to your event may possibly want there so you should just allow anything. As a very basic example, Oengus constrains what it allows in the pronoun field to basic sets like he/him, she/her, it/its and while the list is fairly extensive, if you use mixed format like "it/her", you can't express that. You also can't accept neopronouns someone running Oengus or Pronouns Page hasn't added to their dataset.

If you're worried someone may use the pronouns field to make jokes? Let them; it's free red flag detection in your signup process. If someone submits something bigoted, you probably don't want to give them a mic anyway.

Next and equally important, the pronoun field should not be mandatory. Why not, if I'm going to all this effort to encourage people to give pronouns and "normalize" having them on overlay? A few reasons:

1. Some of your runners may not speak your language as a first language and their language does not have the same conceptualization of pronouns.
2. Some folks are not comfortable using their assigned pronouns but are not "out" enough to use their preferred ones. Forcing pronoun info submission means they have to out them self or misgender them self and neither option is acceptable.
3. Some people genuinely have no pronouns for one reason or another.
4. Someone may not be comfortable discussing pronouns regarding your event, specifically.
5. Some people may have multiple pronoun sets and it's simpler to just not use any for a one-off event.

So there are legit reasons to not provide them.

Pronoun Displays and Info Usage

So you have the pronoun info for your runners and with everything set up this way, you can derive a runner not submitting pronoun info to mean "I do not want pronouns displayed". That's pretty good.

First you may need to curate that info a little. A lot of people, when they submit things to marathons, assume someone will look at the info they submit and take instructions in pretty much any text field. So you may get someone who submits a pronoun field entry like "she/her (but if it's not ugly to have the pronoun field blank, have none)". Some people also put "N/A" in these fields despite being able to leave them blank. It seems silly to point out, but don't just copy that info into production overlays without checking it!

If anyone submits something absolutely headass like a tired old transphobic joke, this is a good opportunity to say to yourself "This person looks like trouble, do I want to give them a microphone?"

Next make sure your hosts and anyone speaking on stream and to your runners have that info somehow. BBG distributes a host cheat sheet with a couple bits of run info, runner info, and pronouns are included.

As for displaying that info on stream, there's a few anti-patterns I see from some events that I want to touch on:

First, you should not use any gendered icons or color coding. A lot of folks, the first time they have to display this info, gravitate toward "Well let's make he/him blue and she/her pink" and that typically has a bad mouthfeel to it for a couple reasons. Not only do I feel we should be trying to denormalize pink/blue antics but some people are he/him and reject the idea of masculine coded stuff, or she/her the same with feminine coded stuff. Also that's kind of exclusionary to nonbinary people, and a nightmare to make fit in a color palette to boot. Just don't. Pick a color that fits your overlay theme and use it.

Next, if someone does not provide pronouns, your overlay design should aim to not have an ugly obtrusive blank in it. If you have some kind of "Pronouns:" field header in your overlay, hide the entire field if someone does not provide pronouns. The goal is to try not to draw attention to "This runner did not provide pronouns" because some folks infer things from that that may not be true. Better to downplay it for someone who did not provide them. Besides, a big blank field on the overlay looks bad.

I really like how GDQ does it: a small "tab" poking up out of the border of the nameplate, the tab having a background that blends into the border. If someone does not provide pronouns the entire tab is not present.

If there's a conflict between what the runner provides and what you see in other locations (Discord profile, Twitch info, etc) you can ask for clarification but you should err on the side of what the runner gave you in any situation of doubt.

Another important factor of all of this is it's ideal if you have the ability to switch pronouns easily. I don't mean during the run or anything, but in rare cases you may have a runner who switches pronouns between run acceptance and marathon time. If that's cooked into a layout or sitting in a database somewhere only one person can edit, that may not be ideal. What is ideal is if your hosts and live staff can just change that on the fly before a run starts.

Summary

So to summarize: if you're going to do it, you need to handle it a certain way to not be weird about it:

• Do accept pronoun info from runners when you take signups
• Do keep the pronoun form a freeform text input where the runner can provide whatever is right for them
• Do check submitted info for people who provided "notes" or other info you may need to act on
• Do make sure your setup staff and hosts know each runner's pronouns
• Do reach out to runners in private if anything is unclear and be responsive to change requests if they come up
• Don't force runners to provide pronouns if they don't want to
• Don't use stereotypical iconography or colors for common pronouns; use colors that match your overlay palette and design
• Don't leave an ugly dangling "Pronouns" field on the overlay if someone does not have set pronouns

tags: tech