[2] Coincidentally, Scottish author David Lindsay used the similar forms ae and aer in his novel A Voyage to Arcturus, to refer to non-terrestrial beings "unmistakably of a third positive sex".
The article that first reported the pronouns treated them as something of a joke, concluding with the line, "A contestant from California entered the word 'uh' because 'if it isn't a he or a she, it's uh, something else.'
[citation needed] Also in 1977, Jeffery J. Smith, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Stanford University, writing under the pen name "Tintajl jefry", proposed "Em" as "a personal noun-pronoun which in itself gives no indication of sex, age, or number, though these may be shown by its context.
The setting was added along with several other "fake genders" in order to test changes to the software's pronoun code, and was left in place as a novelty.
[9][10] Other writers applied Elverson's original "th"-dropping rule and revived ey, such as Eric Klein in his legal code for a planned micronation called Oceania.
[11] John Williams's Gender-neutral Pronoun FAQ (2004) promoted the original Elverson set (via Klein) as preferable to other major contenders popular on Usenet (singular they, sie/hir/hir/hirs/hirself, and zie/zir/zir/zirs/zirself).
[18] This contact with genderless pronouns in virtual communities is sometimes a person's first experience and experimentation with presenting their gender in a genderqueer or transgender manner.