I get the impression that he either is, or was, the self-insert/OC of a gender fag dev, brooding wasian with anime hair and a mysterious past is very on par for that, or he's the bone that management threw to the more political charged members of the dev team to make up for them having to put up with chuds like me in the game's fan base.
What I do find unusual about Pocket's pronoun nonsense is how understated it is, and how completely absent it is from his actual character. Almost all tranny/tranny adjacent characters always end up being excessively obnoxious about it, much like trannies themselves. So the fact that Pockets faggotry is literally never addressed at all in dialogue is really strange to me, as I'd expect him to have at least half a dozen lines mentioning how stunning and brave he is by now.
My suspicion at the moment is that whoever in Valve wrote him to be a gender thing either left or moved on to a different area of development, hence the 'was', and now they're stuck with this hot potato of lore that they don't really know what to do with. They can't retcon it without sending the Reddit fags into a frenzy, and probably inviting a couple of very pointed articles from an already hostile games media about trans errasure, #TransGenocide, so they'll probably end up just ignoring it and never addressing it directly. Or Yoshi could post an image of Pocket in a tranny flag dress curb stomping a chudjak like the scene from American History X, but only time will tell.
