1.) issa joke lol. they obviously can’t and wouldn’t do that. they’re exaggerating, that’s the point of the joke. 2.) the author is not male. she along with many other mosspaca authors are female but like to draw themselves as male characters as an online persona (for her it’s the male character often seen with black bunny ears/mask) and have their weibos set as male to match. she’s not trans.
old xian has never stated they preferred he/him pronouns or that they liked to be called that. even their coworkers and boss in mosspaca refer to her as ‘she’ on weibo very often. however, if you prefer to call her that because it makes you more comfortable than that is fine :)
inserting myself here lol ~I’ve seen pics of her online and she certainly doesn’t appear to attempt to look male as most trans men would do (and I don’t mean this as in a “oh they re not male passing” type of way cause that’s transphobic as hell, i mean it in a you can legitimately tell she’s not even trying and she has a manicure, wears female clothes, etc.) . All she does is wear her bunny mask in public fan events. Just my input as someone who is Russian from the Russian fandom but some people from the Russian translation team have close contact with them and even met her in person and she does not go by any male pronouns. They’ve also mentioned how it’s her online persona and not an actual thing she truly identifies with. There have been autograph signings too and many people referred to her as she then who met her. ╮( ̄▽ ̄)╭
I think the point that should be made here though is that anyone here is free to call her whatever they feel most comfortable with (whether that is she/her, he/him, or even they/them if they wanna play it safe) but don’t go around correcting people like the OP and force others to call her “he/him” because you feel you’re in the right. I for one wouldn’t hesitate to call her “he/him” if that is what old xian wanted but since I truly believe it to be only an online persona and there have been no statements made by the author otherwise of wanting to be called he/him and as other anon said, on weibo still being referred to as a she on there sometimes by her coworkers and never correcting fans, including the russian fans who have met her. Considering the author already writes about lgbt+ work, I don’t think they’d hesitate to simply say “these are my preferred pronouns” but they never have. I think you using “they/them” is completely fine and your reasoning is fine too. just do what you prefer.
true. I feel like the best possible way to describe or give an analogy to it would be like drag queens personas. drags queens are males and they identify their genders as such, however because of their “personas” they don’t mind being referred to as “she”, “queen”, “sis” etc.
overall I think old xian identifies as female but bc she has her male online persona, she also doesn’t mind being referred to as whatever (she/he/they) because of that persona. so ppl can choose whichever~
pretty sure the author already drew nsfw stuff, "one day" i'll hack her drive