> What exactly is that that make people feel the need to point out their pronouns?

Well, this part in particular is pretty easy, I'll go into more detail below, but it's shared struggle and/or solidarity, with a healthy side of pure convenience, since if you don't specify your pronouns online people often flat out just won't know them, and people tend to use pronouns in written text a lot, so it's useful to know them.

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In more detail:

It's interesting to me often to see how perspectives about transgender identity differ inside of the particular trans communities I pay attention to and outside of them. Outside of those communities, people look at pronouns and think, "this person is signaling that they're important, they're trying to pick a fight, they're signaling that they belong to a tribe, they think this is their entire identity."

Inside of those communities, people are thinking:

- It would be nice if people didn't misgender me.

- It would be nice if I could find some other trans people online who have similar experiences to me.

- It would be nice if I didn't have to feel out of place when I asked people to use a pronoun.

To the extent that trans people have a communal goal, that goal is often centered around specific political oppression; oppression that, putting my joke above aside, is not US-centric. Europe legitimately does have a giant transphobia problem, it just tends to manifest slightly differently than the US's transphobia.

Trans people use community partially just as a friendly way to find other people like them, but also partially as a political tool to build solidarity in the face of very targeted, deliberate oppression. This is, again, something where I see huge differences outside of and inside of trans communities. People outside of transgender communities look in and think that people are mad about innocent mistakes or that they're trying to complicate the entire world. People inside of trans communities are dealing with coordinated efforts to take away their rights, and on top of that one of the highest suicide/assault rates of any group on the planet. That kind of stuff tends to make them want to stick together.

Because of that context of being hyper-aware that there are people who don't want you to exist, it also imbues coming out with a kind of power and self-actualization, because there's a statement there being made that the people who want to erase you aren't winning. A phrase I have heard multiple times about coming out is that you don't come out when you want everyone to know that you're gay/trans, you come out when you're unapologetic about being gay/trans. Everyone is different, that's not universal. But it is a thing for a lot of people.

And last but not least, there is a sense of solidarity there. I mentioned above that it's actually really annoying for trans people to have to specify pronouns everywhere and call attention to themselves, most trans people I interact with are not trying to be weird about anything. When a lot of people, even people who aren't trans, specify their pronouns, what that does is it kind of masks the trans community from feeling like they have a spotlight on them. Far from being a "standing out" thing, normalizing people specifying their pronouns allows trans people to draw less attention to their identity in situations where they don't want to.

Because yeah, sometimes trans people want to just go talk about sports or computers and not about gender, and it's awkward if every time they join a new community if the first thing that they have to do is out themselves as trans or feel like they're the only ones using pronouns or asking about this. It's another isolating experience. So sometimes people use pronouns as just a way to make everyone else feel more comfortable and to make trans people feel like they're standing out less. Sometimes there's really no conspiracy beyond that.

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Stepping back from the oppression angle again, there is also a sense of fascination and exploration. I'll speak for myself on this front, I have ADHD and I am asexual. I have been very fortunate not to have experienced much if any discrimination over this, I am an extremely privileged person. However, even though I don't have discrimination forcing me into solidarity with people:

- I like finding other asexual people online because it's interesting and cool to see how people are different from each other. It's honestly just kind of fun to find out that something you thought was universal wasn't. I always thought people were joking about their experiences with stuff like puberty. It's just... cool to find out that people are diverse.

- Similarly, I sometimes try to seek out ADHD communities because it's nice to have people who understand what you're thinking about. I spend 100% of my time in public masking and figuring out how to communicate with people, and it's exhausting, and sometimes I run into people who understand something about me where I don't have to spend a bunch of time explaining it or suppressing it, and that shared understanding feels really good.

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We can also kind of back up and apply this overall logic to your question about "White Germans". The part that makes that creepy to me is what communities they're signaling to and what I read into what they're trying to do. It's hard to think of innocent reasons for that kind of signaling. In the US, it is very hard to feel isolated over being white. It is very hard to feel isolated over not being Jewish. I don't feel like that captures any of the stuff I'm talking about above, I don't think that white people are surprised to learn there are other people like them in the world, and I don't think they have a legitimate sense of solidarity over real oppression.

However, rephrase that same question just slightly differently, and suddenly the entire thing changes. I do know people who are extremely into parts of their heritage like being Pennsylvania Dutch or tracing their family trees. They're going around making traditional German dishes or talking about sauerkraut, and I don't think there's a single racist thing about that. It's great, and it brings them a lot of joy, and if they put it in their Twitter profile than good for them. And obviously there's not the oppression/solidarity angle for those people, which is a big part of trans community, but there is a really fun personal angle of baking foods and learning old slang terms and finding other people who had similar childhoods, and finding out that a word or pronunciation that you thought was universal was actually really localized to your childhood.

So it's not really identity or community that's the problem, the problem is that if we see someone say "White German with no Jewish Heritage", we all kind of know what community they're talking about and who they're signaling to. We all kind of know that they're not talking about baking sauerkraut. So context/phrasing matters.