Pronouns over DNS

This document proposes a standard way to specify personal pronouns using DNS TXT records, primarily for personal websites.

Record Format

Create a TXT record with the name pronouns. This will apply to the subdomain pronouns.{DOMAIN} (e.g., pronouns.example.com).

Record Contents

The record's content should be a slash-separated list of pronouns: words used to refer to someone in place of their name (e.g., "she/her" or "they/them").

Each pronoun in the list is called a "segment". A segment is a string of characters without any forward slashes (/). Each segment should be:

• At least one character long
• Trimmed (no leading or trailing whitespace, spaces can exist within)
• Lowercased

To ensure consistency and ease of parsing, segments should appear in this order (examples provided from a she/her base, as those are my pronouns so it was easiest to work with):

1. Subject: (Required) The pronoun used when referring to the person as the subject of a sentence (e.g., "She went to the store").
2. Object: (Required) The pronoun used when referring to the person as the object of a verb or preposition (e.g., "Give the book to her").
3. Possessive Determiner: (Optional) A pronoun indicating possession before a noun (e.g., "Her book").
4. Possessive Pronoun: (Optional) A pronoun indicating possession that stands alone (e.g., "The book is hers").
5. Reflexive: (Optional) A pronoun referring back to the subject (e.g., "She looked at herself in the mirror").

At least the subject and object pronouns are required.

Examples:

• they/them (subject, object)
• she/her/her/hers (subject, object, possessive determiner, possessive pronoun)
• he/him/his/his/himself (subject, object, possessive determiner, possessive pronoun, reflexive)

Multiple Records

If you use or are comfortable with multiple sets of pronouns, you can create additional TXT records with the name pronouns. To indicate your preferred or default set, create another TXT record named primary.pronouns. The content of this record should exactly match the content of one of your pronouns records.

Parsers should prioritize the primary.pronouns record if it exists. If no primary.pronouns record is found, parsers may choose any of the pronouns records or present all options to the user.

Example:

• pronouns: she/her
• pronouns: they/them
• primary.pronouns: she/her

Consistency

It is recommended to use the same number of segments for each record, however that is not mandatory.

Extra

This originated, as far as I can tell, from this blog post by fasterthanlime. If someone can find an earlier source, I'd be happy to amend it, but this is an attempt at formalizing the format.