This came up in the FotF thread and deserves its own Suggestion. It started as:
Would it be possible to get more control over gender in the future? As well as the pronouns used themselves? I don't expect trans dwarves in the vanilla game, but being able to have enough control to mod it in thoroughly would be really nice. Being able to designate pronouns for a caste would be pretty much solve the problem, I think.
Caste-level tags for pronouns would help in a number of cases where a modder would like a little more control over how the game refers to a caste. At the moment, pronouns are hard-coded as follows:
A caste with a [MALE] tag uses "he" and "him" and "his" (and a mars symbol)
A caste with a [FEMALE] tag uses "she" and "her" and "hers" (and a venus symol)
A creature with no [MALE] or [FEMALE] tags anywhere uses "it" and "it" and "its" (and no symbol)
An ungendered caste in a creature that has genders uses feminine pronouns (but no symbol)
Plural is the same for everyone. Second person is the same for everyone.
The above works just great for typical cases and for insects (where the neuter castes are actually sub-females), but there are three specific cases where moddable pronouns would be very helpful.
1. Supporting localization in languages other than English.
Pronouns can be fairly complicated and English happens to use the same words in several categories. Simple string-replacement won't cover all of the cases. For example, Spanish differentiates second-person references into personal and formal.
2. Dealing with neuter castes. If we add a genderless "golem" caste to Dwarves, it would use feminine pronouns even though the proper form would be "it." The modder could decide that non-reproducing castes are treated as sub-males or sub-females or "it". The modder could also refer to a genderless creature as a "he" or a "she" if desired.
3. Dealing with non-standard references. The simplest use-case is to make all references gender-neutral (probably by abusing "they"), but a society might have for example a biologically male caste that is socially feminine. This only matters if the caste is fertile and capable of marriage, otherwise it can be treated as a special case of 2 above.
An extension would be to allow noble positions (or even professions) to override caste-level tags. This allows the royal we as well as strange customs such as referring to all generals as male, or all priests as female, all no-good cheesemakers as "it" or whatever.
I recommend keeping the default behavior exactly as it is, because it does work for the majority of cases. The actual tag might look something like:
[PRONOUN:I:we:me:us:my:our:he:they:him:them:his:their:his:theirs:himself:themselves:'♂']