If you haven’t played Hollywood Visionary, I believe there are various gender neutral honorifics in there. But I think allowing input is a very good bet as it’ll mean everyone’s happy 
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I haven’t but it’s on the list, thanks for the recommendation. I’ll get to it as soon as I’ve finished replaying Choice of the Vampire (which I’m tapping for some NOLA inspiration!)
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This is an extremely detailed, but not necessarily super historical, list of looooads of queer and gender neutral titles for pretty much everything.
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Wow thanks, that is super-detailed, and very helpful! I’d actually already considered one of their suggestions, “citizen”, but I decided that that felt a bit too much like the kind of thing people would call each other in a cyberpunk dystopia. (Also, part of me is amused at the idea of Southern police officers in the 1930s addressing people as “comrade”!)
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Apologies for necroing this thread, but I have a related query, and I thought it would be better to put it in here than to start a whole new thread for it.
I need an Italian-speaker’s help. I have an Italian character in my latest chapter, and at one point I want them to address the MC in Italian. For male MCs, they’re going to say “Dottore Spillane”, and for female MCs, “Dottoressa Spillane”. Are there conventions for how to use this title for nonbinary people? (I understand that non-b forms of address can be tricky in languages with gendered nouns and adjectives, but I was wondering if there is any protocol that’s been developed to address this). Thanks in advance!
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(Disclaimer: I’m not a native Italian speaker, just studied it in school)
The first thing I’d note is nouns like dottore drop the e when being used as a title, so male MCs would be referred to as “Dottor Spillane”.
For non-binary MCs, I think you have several good options. If the Italian character is familiar with the MC or has at least heard their title in Italian secondhand, you can give the player a choice of what title they’d like.
If you want a set title, “dottor” is pretty neutral, so it could be suitable for NB MCs as well as male MCs. “Dottori” is the masculine plural and could be a good choice.
Modern Italian is trending towards using the masculine form for everyone, but there’s no grand consensus.
Some relevant links:
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Thank you, that’s very helpful! I’d seen the Wikipedia page, but it wasn’t very helpful, but the second and third links you provide are exactly what I was looking for! Thanks so much.
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Just throwing this out there, but for Vikings, the term “Jarl” was used for both male and female leaders, so I assume that would include gender-neutral folks as well. New Orleans is a far cry from Scandinavia, but the more you know the more you know!
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“The Honourable” <name. was used in some historical contexts, though more for people with loosely aristocratic connections than for an academic. Someone whose parent was a non-inheriting member of a noble family, for instance.
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