Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

The Sims 4 now lets players use custom pronouns

EA and developer Maxis have announced they added a new feature in The Sims 4 that finally allows players to customize pronouns for their Sims characters.

EA and Maxis wrote in their blog post on Tuesday that they have been working to add custom pronouns since last year, after receiving feedback from the Sims community. To make that feature a reality, they worked with two leading LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations, GLAAD and the It Gets Better Project, to research and understand how pronouns are used among transgender and non-binary players. In doing so, they learned the contexts in which binary gender pronouns were used in the game and worked to develop a means of customizing pronouns to make the gameplay experience more inclusive for everyone.

Previously, players were only able to select she/her and he/him pronouns during the Create-a-Sim phase of their gameplay, which trapped non-binary and transgender players into a binary gender system that didn’t reflect their lived experience. Now with custom pronouns, players can go beyond the binary confines and select they/them pronouns or create custom ones that are not included in the pronoun drop-down list. Pronouns can be added in their subjective, objective, possessive dependent, possessive independent, and reflexive forms.

Customizable Pronouns in The Sims 4™

As of this writing, the custom pronouns feature is only available in English, and it will be expanded to more languages in the future as Maxis continues to tweak the feature.

The custom pronouns feature comes three months after EA released the My Wedding Stories content pack in The Sims 4, which sparked controversy in Russia because its promotional materials featuring same-sex couples broke the country’s “gay propaganda law.” EA initially announced it would not release the content pack in Russia in compliance with the law, only to backtrack and release it there anyway after listening to concerns from players in and outside the country.

Editors' Recommendations

Cristina Alexander
Cristina Alexander has been writing since 2014, from opining about pop culture on her personal blog in college to reporting…
The best gear to buy in Pikmin 4
The player stands with Oatchi and some Red Pikmin in Pikmin 4.

After surviving your crash landing, which itself was a mission to rescue other crashed explorers, you will need to use anything and everything you find in your environment to survive in Pikmin 4. The titular Pikmin, and your new pup Oatchi, will do the bulk of your work for you, but it will be up to you to craft your own gear to create in The Lab. There are dozens of gear items you can get, but all of them have a cost so you will want to prioritize getting the strongest ones first. This will make your early days trying to survive in this mysterious land that much easier. Gather up your Pikmin and do some research on the best gear you should buy in Pikmin 4.
How to buy gear

Before you can start buying gear, you need to unlock The Lab where it is sold. This will happen very early on after you rescue the castaway named Russ in a cave in the Sun-Speckled Terrace. Once he's back at your base, you can interact with him to spend any raw materials you collect around the map. Some gear items won't be available right away, requiring you to either do specific things or accumulate enough Sparklium first.
Best gear to buy
Charging Horn

Read more
These are the Diablo 4 settings to tweak for the best performance
inarius diablo 4

Diablo has been a staple on PC for decades, so it's a big deal when a new one releases. And Diablo 4 ups the bar for the franchise in both the gameplay and visual department. In this guide, we're going to show you the best settings for Diablo 4 so you can get the most out of the game.

Thankfully, there are a ton of settings in the game to improve performance. I've tested the game for dozens of hours to arrive at the best settings, as well as looked at all of the other PC options available in the game.
Best settings for Diablo 4

Read more
The Sims 4: Horse Ranch expansion is a warm slice of Western charm
A shot of Sims dressed in Western-style clothing, performing a line dance. One Sim in a red shirt is sitting down at a piano, playing music.

Sims players have long been hoping to see horses introduced into The Sims 4, especially after they were initially baked into The Sims 3: Pets expansion pack back in 2011. That long wait is over. The Sims 4’s newest expansion pack, Horse Ranch, brings horses into the current generation of the game with a whole host of new gameplay and storytelling options for horse lovers to dig into.

In a press preview event, several Sims 4 team members, including the production director JoAnna Lio and lead producer George Pigula, walked press members through the expansion pack’s offerings -- from the new world of Chestnut Ridge, building out the perfect ranch, to gameplay mechanics like riding, training, and bonding with horses.

Read more