[xigoi]

I think you're confused. In Spanish and other languages, both pronouns and other words depend on grammatical gender. Saying that you can “guess based on the pronoun” doesn't make sense, because the pronoun depends on gender too.

It's true that inanimate objects have kind of arbitrary genders, but for specific people, they're based on their actual gender.

[danShumway]

> because the pronoun depends on gender too.

But you can ask the pronoun. If you know the pronoun, you know what variants of words to use, don't you? You don't need to know if the person is transgender or what their gender identity is, if they use `el`, you use masculine word variants to refer to them.

I'm not sure what I'm missing here; the only reason why knowing the gender identity would matter is if gendered word variants are allowed to mismatch pronouns in the language.

And even in that case, does the specific gender identity matter, or do we really only need to know whether someone wants to use masculine/feminine word variants when referring to them?

[xigoi]

Well, you could ask about the pronoun and use it to determine gender, but how is that different from asking for gender directly?

[danShumway]

My understanding is that it's reasonably common for a chunk of agender/nonbinary people to use traditional feminine/masculine pronouns.

It just seems a bit more direct to ask how people want to be referred to; I would compare it to how typically in web forms we ask people if they go by Mrs/Ms/Mr/Dr/etc directly, rather than asking them if they have a PHD and are married.

Especially if we're talking about gendered languages where there isn't strong support for nonbinary pronouns/variants. Someone telling us that they're agender/nonbinary doesn't actually help us much in that situation; we won't know from that information alone whether to use feminine or masculine variants.