At like 4 AM a few nights ago, sleepless, I frantically penned down an apparently brand new idea for a gender-neutral pronoun in Esperanto, despite not being a proficient Esperantist. It's like this:

• geu estas neduuma esperantisto (they are a nonbinary Esperantist)
• mi ŝatas geun. (I like them)
• ĉu vi vidis gees katon? (have you seen their cat?)

To quickly explain the idea: Esperanto has a prefix that (unofficially) forms gender-neutral words, and a suffix that (mostly unproductively) forms pronouns, so I figured that the most obvious way to create a gender-neutral pronoun in Esperanto would just be to smash these two affixes together: ge- + -u = geu. Simple as that.

To me this seemed like such an obvious idea in hindsight, that when I looked into it the next morning, I was genuinely surprised to find that apparently no-one else had ever come up with this idea before me: all the other neopronouns coined in Esperanto thus far apparently just smash the gendered pronouns together, or take the gendered pronouns and replace the first letter randomly. This approach comes with its own advantages and disadvantages, but in any case my proposal isn't really trying to "compete" with these other neopronouns, any more than they competes with xe, you know?

Edit: A neat little coincidence is that Korean has a gender-neutral pronoun commonly romanized as geu. Maybe that was a subconscious influence!

In completely unrelated news, did you all know that Margaret McDonald (any/all) is non-binary? I don't know when xe came out as non-binary, but xe's an English-language anime dub VA who I have heard in a lot of different things over the years. I was just watching the movie Tamako Love Story with my mom, in which McDonald plays the titular Tamako Kitashirakawa: I couldn't remember the VA's name, so I looked it up, and that's how I found out that thon was non-binary. Among many other credits, ae also plays Miho Nishizumi in Girls & Panzer — which was frankly the only name I could pull out of my butt, I literally said, "Tamako sounds like whoever it was who did Miho" — and McDonald also voiced Rikka Takanashi in the ever-goated Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions, and he also played Sachi Momoi in Maria Holic, which interestingly enough is an anime dub that just straight up drops the T slur at one point.

So yeah, nonbinary pog.

Also, e's pan.