Alright, I was leaving it alone in the comments, but now that it's made it's way onto ballp.it, let's start a brief and non-reductive dialogue1 about this:
Inre: "I'll call you by the pronoun you were born as", I stand by that joke. I still think it's funny. The premise is, in response to a piece of content that was particularly atrocious and with the treatment of all of Tumblr as a single entity responsible for that bit of content, I'm going to issue the very worst punishment I can think of, which is to use that one person's birth pronoun. Other jokes I've done can be at times unnecessarily tasteless or aggressive, this one I'm still happy with.
The negative reaction to this seems, to me, to imply that the statement being made is that people using pronouns other than the one they were born as is me making a statement that this sort of behavior is silly or bad, or that it comes from a position of thinking trans* people are "less than", which is wrong in a way that doesn't need to get explained here.
There's also the connotation that this joke minimizes the struggle of trans* people by saying it could just get revoked if they do something wrong. Which, yeah, that's exactly why I'm happy with the joke. Does a person calling another person the wrong gender pronoun invalidate the gender identity that person had previously discovered for themselves? Jesus, it shouldn't! That's a whole lot of power to imbue on another person.
What I'm saying is, if you think a comment in the current episode identifies me as transphobic, that's incorrect. If you think one or more of the jokes is in itself transphobic, I disagree on that point.
I will back off on the "they" argument however, since I realize that what I'd like is the perfect operational pronoun that doesn't exist, and "they" is, while not perfect, more correct and agreed-upon than anything else and therefore it's fine.
1: Come on internet, we can do this.