Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback The player's pronouns being locked to sex

It's primarily something that you find in internet culture, not in the real face-to-face flesh and blood world.

The wilds of the internet, and the actual functional real world in which people live and interact with others face to face are two very different things. When you have no sense markers at all, you'll generally use an unknown or undefined reference - so in online settings, the use of neutral terms of reference is absolutely the norm, and is polite. We also do this in the real world when talking about or referencing someone that we haven't met before or don't know who isn't present, and thus whom we have no sense markers for (at least until someone else passes that information to us). When we have sense markers to inform us, however we go with them unless someone informs us otherwise or corrects us. This is perfectly fine; our brains are wired that way - that is, to take in information from our senses and create an approximation of the world around us based on that information. As more information is supplied, we refine and update that image. It's healthy, and there is nothing wrong with that. Attempts to change this practice based on internet culture only ever succeed in creating less clarity.

It is not the norm in the real world outside of the internet, and that's actually perfectly okay. There's nothing wrong with being wrong, and being corrected. It doesn't hurt anybody, and it doesn't (or shouldn't) cause upset unless it is actively done out of malice... in which case it's not the act but the intent that is harmful, and it's best not to confuse those two.

I don't think anyone wants to ruffle anyone else' feathers here; I'm sure no-one intends anything harsh or argumentative... However, I personally would find it very jarring and immersion-breaking if everyone outside of camp followers and companions, everywhere, used neutral terms of reference for your character, all the time. It would be really off-putting to me. It would be especially off-putting if they did so only based on a choice that I made for my character in character creation personally, that they have no way of knowing about.

Edit to add: To a certain extent, language does come into play here as well. Using neutral terms of reference in English suffers a mild level of potential confusion, because we have the same word usage for both undefined or unknown, as we do for a plural. Other languages, on the other hand, may handle this far easier - any language that has a single term pronoun reference that directly just means 'that person', wouldn't have this problem. French, for example, has a neuter, but its neuter is equivalent to inanimates and insentients, so it's not appropriate for neutral personal reference; other languages may have a more elegant way of phrasing that doesn't hit that hurdle. You might see this sort of thing make the transition to a real world space more easily in places where the language suites it. I only speak English, Latin, a bit of French, a bit of Japanese and Mooglish, so my knowledge isn't complete.