For a long time now, many of us have been opting to add our preferred pronouns to our social media accounts. The aim of this is to normalize gender discussion, so that anybody who may want to include their own does not feel like the odd one out.
On Instagram, until now, those who choose to do so have been adding their gender pronouns alongside other info in their personal bio, taking up precious space from the 150 character limit. Instagram has noticed this, and it seems they’re in the process of changing it.
This lets you keep the bio for listing other interesting facts about yourself, and makes it even easier for people to show their personal pronouns in a very natural, unobtrusive way.
As of yesterday, you are now able to add up to four pronouns to your profile, and you can choose whether they appear publicly, or are only visible to your friends. If you are under 18 and have an account, this setting will be turned on automatically.
We have no exhaustive list of pronouns available from Instagram, and from what they’ve told us so far, this new feature is currently “only available in a few countries” (nobody knows which).
Instagram’s introduction of an integrated pronoun feature comes a few solid years after Facebook, which implemented a dedicated gender-designation field way back in 2014 (although it has been accused of having limited options since then). LinkedIn just joined the pronoun fray this year as well, bringing a similar feature to their own platform in March.
