Instagram Now Has A Section For Adding Pronouns To Your Profile

Instagram has finally added a special section just for adding your pronouns to your profile, so you can stop using up precious characters in your bio space

Even people who are straight and cisgender should find ways to share their pronouns with others. Not only does this remove any ambiguity and put strangers at ease, knowing they’ll refer to you (and gender you) correctly, but it normalizes sharing pronouns for everyone, reducing cases of misgendering overall. What’s not to love about that? And as of today, it’s a little bit easier for everyone to share their pronouns — Instagram just added a special section to users’ profiles just for pronouns.

This is great news. While many users were already sharing their pronouns on their Instagram profiles, they were forced to use space in their bio to do so. Since the platform limits bios to just 150 characters, this used up precious space that now, rightly, has its own section.

Users can choose from a wide variety of pronouns, including he/him, she/her and they/them. Once selected, their pronouns appear in small gray text next to their user name on their Instagram profile.

“When having a conversation, people use pronouns to refer to someone without using their name. You can add up to four pronouns to your Instagram profile to help others refer to you,” the company wrote on an instruction page that shows users how to add their pronouns to their existing profiles. “Pronouns you add will be displayed on your profile and won’t be used to refer to you elsewhere on Instagram.”

For now, the new pronouns feature is only available for Instagram users in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, but the company says there are “plans for more.”

One in four LGBTQ+ youth use pronouns that “fall outside of the binary construction of gender,” the Trevor Project found in a 2020 study. That makes it more important than ever to normalize putting our pronouns on display, so people know what they are without having to ask. Using inclusive pronouns and respecting someone’s chosen pronouns is just basic decency, but research also shows that it has a profoundly positive impact on people’s mental health and wellbeing — especially LGBTQ+ kids.

So far, people seem to be big fans of this move by Instagram, and they’ve been celebrating by immediately adding pronouns to their profile — and praising the platform.

This move by Instagram hopefully signals that other major websites and platforms will soon make this change, further normalizing the sharing of pronouns all across the internet.