Because of how "it" was used against me, and others like me.
About a year and a half(?) ago, one of my partners, lizzy, told me it was changing to it/its, and I felt dread. I associated "it" with harm, and I never never never never wanted to participate in that harm.
I couldn't say it at first. Like actually I was incapable. I would try to form a sentence like "I should go see lizzy, and give it a kiss", my brain would reach the word "it", and the part of my brain that forms sentences actually crashed and needed to restart every time.
Now here's the important part:
THIS IS A ME PROBLEM
I am aware that this is 100% my own issue, my own trauma, that I, myself, have to deal with. So I am dealing with it. I kept trying, and eventually I was able to stop my language center from crashing, and got to the point where I was merely struggling to force the word "it" into a sentence in my mind. Then I got on cohost, and saw all the it/its bitches making posts like "YEAH I LOVE BEING A THING" or whatever, and seeing all that positivity helped me get to the point where I could actually type "it". And shortly after that I was able to say "it" out loud.
Now I'm at the point where I can treat lizzy like the silly little thing that it is, and I get to see it smile when I do. And now I have another partner using it/its pronouns (Nox ๐), and I was worried about slipping up out loud or in text with someone new, but I haven't. I still occasionally have to mentally correct myself, but that gets more rare each time. It makes my partners happy to refer to them correctly.
Isn't it nice to treat your partner the way it wants to be treated? Isn't it nice to treat everyone the way they want to be treated? Isn't "it" nice?
i was on the other side of the same problem; i learned early in my Being A Queer experience that calling people "it" was wrong, because it dehumanized them. so i held the belief, when encountering people who used it/its pronouns, that this was a bad thing. if it wasn't bad to them, it was bad to other people.
thing is, the problem was never inherently the pronouns. it was consent.
those who use it/its pronouns consent to it. that is what matters. using a method of identifying someone else that they don't consent to is why calling someone "it" is bad. but some choose to use those pronouns, and because they consent to it, i will use "it."
once i realized this, one of my headmates immediately started identifying with he/it pronouns. it finally felt comfortable enough to be its true self around me, and considering it could never get away from me to identify itself as such, it made me feel a lot of guilt and shame for having made someone i care about so much feel that way. but even as i type this out i can feel it smiling.
it doesn't use it/its for the same reason many others do. it uses those pronouns because it just wants to. it makes it feel nice, and that is justification enough.
so, yeah! use it/its pronouns! or maybe you don't use em for yourself, but you should use em for those who like using em! it's all about addressing others the way they wish to be addressed.
