Dear TV writers: Please stop being weird about pronouns

polygon.com:

In the fourth episode of The Acolyte, Osha (Amandla Stenberg) meets some new Jedi and Jedi-affiliated friends. One of them is a small, otterlike creature named Bazil. Bazil and Pip, Osha’s fussy robot companion, keep sniffing and beeping at each other, interrupting the mission briefing Osha is trying to follow. After, Osha approaches Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen) for an awkward exchange all too familiar to queer people watching television in the last few years:

Osha: Who is that?

Jecki Lon: That’s Bazil.

Osha: Is he [dramatic pause]… or they… with us?”

This is the latest example of what I’m going to call the Globby problem, expertly parodied on The Other Two: well-meaning writers and showrunners — some of them queer themselves — trying to awkwardly insert nonbinary or genderqueer representation into their show, usually through the show’s requisite “weirdo” character. The result is, instead, often pretty othering.

In The Acolyte, Osha only asks about Bazil’s pronouns, not those of any of the other people she meets. This reveals more about Osha than I think The Acolyte’swriters were intending; the exchange implies she is actively othering Bazil and assuming he (yes, it is later revealed Bazil uses he/him pronouns, which makes all of this even sillier) must be gender-variant because he looks odd to her.

I get that the effort is to remind the viewer that not everyone subscribes to a binary of gender expression, and Osha is trying to be open-minded about that. To be clear, I’m not asking for every character to ask every other character about their pronouns when they first meet. That would be extremely boring television! It’s very easy to establish characters’ pronouns by having other characters use those pronouns when speaking about them. This happens all the time. (“This is Bazil, they’ll be helping us on the ground” is the easiest thing in the world to put into a conversation, in a world where Bazil uses they/them pronouns.) But The Acolyte going out of its way to make a