My boomer parents will die on the hill that it sounds “wrong” to use “they” to refer to a singular entity. And whenever they bring that up, I always remind them that the word “they” has been used in that way for AGES.
Example: “Whose umbrella is this? Did they already leave?”
It doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Watched a video that addressed this in good faith, because it is a tad awkward. They brought up and old term (because this isn’t new), “thone”, short for “the one”. And I’mma be real with you, “THE ONE, DIRK MCCALLAHAN” does ring kinda hard.
There’s a few things from history we should start using again, and this is one of them
Bring back Victorian era slang!! and I always say that!
Capes/cloaks are both stylish and warm.
Capes are bang up to the elephant!
It doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Most people arguing about this are coming from an emotional place, so facts and truths don’t really matter. If gender in language is important to your in-group, that’s what matters. Not the history of language. Not the dictionary. The group believes this. If you reject your group, you’ll die alone. Or that’s what the brain would have you believe. We’re all a little susceptible to social influence on belief. Some people are just unwilling or unable to overcome it.
Belief is social.
For many people, emotion is the only truth.
What’s craziest to me is that people so often adopt beliefs as to belong to some sort of in group, right, but won’t necessarily adopt the set of beliefs that actually immediately benefits them, ingratiates them to their immediate surrounding environment, gives them a more functional outlook. No, it’s way simpler, people just adopt the beliefs of what they perceive in their immediate surroundings. Oftentimes this manifests more as people locking themselves into increasingly insular media environments, rather than, say, having productive conversations with their kids, or allowing themselves to be convinced by their friends, or being able to even really talk on a surface level with their co-workers. Their immediate environment, their “in-group”, can supercede physical reality.
have you tried having these conversations?
they don’t go so well IRL than they do in your head. the conservation you want in your head requires two willing and thoughtful parties… often there is only one person with that mindset… or sometimes none.
I had at trans friend who I did talk about this stuff with a few years ago… but now they are a radicalized nutcase and they are more focused on being ‘pronoun’ police and making every topic about ‘their suffering’ etc. oftentimes sane people become crazy people.
I’m going to ignore the bit about your friend for now.
I have had the kind of conversation where you try to change someone’s mind. That is, distinct from the more common kind on the Internet where you’re just fighting.
It takes a lot of time and energy. You need them to see you as a member of one of their in groups, typically.
I have had a couple friends who would consume a lot of right wing media, but we shared some things in common. One was also working retail, both were video game nerds. I think because we had those things in common, they saw me as a friend, someone in an in-group, and thus listened to me.
If I had just sent them a YouTube video, they probably would have rejected it. If a stranger did, almost certainly.
Unfortunately, when I was no longer in their daily life they sort of drifted back to what their dominant groups thought.
yep.
my entire life I got shit form grammar nazis for preferring gender neutral language. now i get shit for not asking everyone their pronoun. and my entire life I have had to put up with people’s shitty assumptions about me based on my physical appearance.
it never ends. people just want to be angry and feel superior to others who don’t agree with them and browbeat others into submission, all the while being judgemental about how others look vs how they think they should look.
“He or she” sounds and looks so cumbersome. “They” is the superior pronoun on style/conciseness alone.
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Yup, either singular or plural. It’s clear from context because you always refer to them in a previous clause. The user did this, they… The class did this, they…
The user must do this before first use, if he or she fails to… Ugh
The user must do this before first use, if they fail to…😘👌
They has been used like this for a long, long time.
And what are all the other definitions? Words can have more than one, like “they” does.
It was beaten into me in school that this is incorrect. “They” is to be used as a plural pronoun only. It’s commonly used in the singular, but it’s wrong according to the English teachers I had. In referring to a person, you must choose either he or she under those grammar rules.
With that said, maybe it’s time for me to move into the future and accept that the meaning of the word has changed. I am confident those English teachers weren’t concerned about actual gender issues. Now, I think those issues are more important than the technical grammatical issues of English.
I’ve offended people in a social setting by insisting that this is the correct usage, when truly it was just me being autistic and informal rather than political.
Perhaps it was the English teachers who were wrong.
Correct or not, people have been using it like that for a while.
Fascinating! I didn’t know there was an article about this.
This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.
That’s more than official enough for me!
Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.
- Hey, it’s prescriptivists again, ruining everyone’s day
- Look what’s actually recent (if three centuries count as recent, but definitely more recent than seven centuries ago)
My child dresses itself.
“Ma, I’m a boy!”
I adore how callous that sentence sounds.
It used to be correct APA/MLA formatting to use “he/she” when the gender of a subject was unknown. That was changed back in the mid 00’s I think. The preferred format is now “they” over “he/she”.
That being said, people use singular they/them all the time in casual conversation. We just aren’t used to using it when we know or think we know the gender of the person. But let’s be honest, there have always been people that have been hurt by being misgendered. Hell, it was common for some racists to use they/them with black women in an attempt to dehumanize them. So this idea that the singular they is new is absolutely ridiculous.
Ok, even there we have bigger issues. How can literally mean figuratively?
Oh yeah, that one is absolutely terrible and I will die on that hill. Figuratively speaking.
“literally” being used to mean “figuratively” dates back to 3 years after the word “literally” began meaning “actually”. If this is a hill to die on, you need to use “literally” exclusively to mean “as written in the texts”. Common usage of “literally” to mean “actually” and “figuratively” both date to the 1590s
No one uses literally to mean figuratively. They use it to emphasize regardless of if what they’re emphasizing includes figurative language. Nearly every word that means something similar to “in actual fact” undergoes this semantic drift (actually, really, etc).
“She literally exploded at me.” is similar in meaning to “She totally exploded at me.” Not so much to “She figuratively exploded at me.”
Nearly every word that means something similar to “in actual fact” undergoes this semantic drift (actually, really, etc).
I looked into this for 3 minutes and found examples in multiple languages.
Neat.
New expression-insight remix into the human condition connected; We literally really actually feel the need to be sure we’re understood, no matter the hyperbolic lengths gone to, huh?
Colloquialization. Get enough people using a new word, or existing word in a new way, and it will eventually be added to the dictionary.
I accepted the inevitable downfall of mankind when “unfriend” was added in 2009.
But fetch still hasn’t happened. :(
Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen.
I’m curious when and where “singular they” was taught as incorrect. Coming from the Midwest in the 80s (not exactly a liberal or forward thinking place), I was taught in no uncertain terms that singular they was appropriate in many circumstances. And my teacher was old as hell, so her education on the matter probably dated to around WW2.
It must not be specifically gated on time. My instruction was rural East Coast. I’ve learned however just from the article posted in this thread that a singular third person has been in use for centuries, even recognized as such an official contexts.
Someone higher up this thread linked an article that singular they has been in use since the 14th century
It’s not correct though, it’s a style choice. Just like it’s not incorrect to avoid the Oxford comma.
I know a lot of people have a hard on for Strunk & White, myself included, but this is one stylistic choice that is now outdated.
I think of that like I think of the anti ain’t and anti Oxford comma stances. They weren’t entirely correct, they were enforcing the style of the time for educated use of English. Today educated use of English still doesn’t include ain’t, but it does use the singular they for people of unknown or nonbinary gender, and it uses the Oxford comma.
The language keeps evolving and stuff like this is part of that. Hell at one point the singular they was far less controversial than the singular you
The exclusion of the oxford comma is a really good example of grammar that’s a bit outdated. It’s far clearer to use it. Dropping it used to make sense when we used typewriters and ink, but in a digital world it makes no sense.
Yeah I told exactly one friend it wasn’t proper English and they were so offended. They were. So, so offended.
Yeah, if I recall the English classes from my language institute, They is only plural and the X cannot be used to neutralize masculine/feminine nouns.
Right. And at the same time, language is an evolving practice. New words are created all the time. Maybe, this issue was worth it to change the rules.
Madness. If you want to use gendered stuff, use one of the romance languages or German.
Why did they teach you this. Your singular teacher. What were they thinking?
It was like, one different teacher per every two months during a total of 16 months. It was the same in British english
Grammer rules are rooted in racism or classism pretty much every time. At least when they’re used to exclude someone instead of teach someone how to speak the language.
I’ve never heard this before. Would you have an example? Because if so, I’m about to get a lot less grammatically correct.
When someone says “you sure is” instead of “you are”, or wants to “axe” you a question, we are taught to consider them wrong. But they’re not. They’re just speaking a different dialect of English. Just like people from the UK call bathrooms “the loo”, and people from India say “do the needful”. There are loads of different dialect of English, and it’s racist to consider the “black” dialect stupid or incorrect. It’s not wrong, it’s just another dialect.
It counts as a dialect when a significant number of people use a certain version of the language.
I’m getting the sense that correctness in language is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s a relative term.
Yep. Language is only as good as it’s ability to transfer information. English is a good language (IMHO), not because it has good rules to follow, but because it can be flexible in order to transfer new ideas. Want to steal a word from another language? Want to verb a noun? Want to create a new word by gluing two other words together? Want to add a new definition to an existing word? Yes, yes, yessir, and bet.
Well, you can start from the fact that language is a living, changing thing. The only real rules of the language are descriptions of how people are using the language. Even after they put rules to it, those rules have had to evolve as speakers change how they use English. It’s not like we still use Shakespearean English as the standard of correctness anymore.
So, the set of rules that are written is just a description of how some people are using the language at the time. Can you take a guess which people’s use these rules are based on? You can bet it isn’t going to be the black people. And then these people can use these rules, which are just a description of how they use English, to say black people are wrong.
It’s funny to me how easy English has it. All you have to do is use “they”, and if people think that’s awkward, they should see how difficult it is to navigate it in a language with complex verb conjugations with gendered nouns and verbs. It’s complicated to the point that non-binary people will still use their assigned-at-birth (if that’s the term?) pronouns, to save everyone - including themselves - a headache. There’s of course a movement to change the language, but it’s difficult.
They went with them and then they decided to take off and took them with them, so we met up with some friends and then got together with them even though they didn’t join because they ultimately wanted to go home.
It’s less precise. That’s just a problem with English though. That said, just using people’s names more often isn’t that big of a deal and using gender neutral pronouns otherwise is, similarly, not hard and not a big deal. Nevertheless, I was referring to seven different distinct individuals in the above.
He went with her, but then she decided to take off and took him with her, so we met up with some friends and then got together with him though she didn’t want to join because he ultimately wanted to go home.
It’s still confusing, and the sentence is absurd, but you can get a better sense of how many people are involved with gendered pronouns. But no one talks that way, contextual clues would make it more obvious, and we’d use proper names in many of those instances by habit for clarification. That said, it would be easier if we just used a number-word in place of a pronoun. Thone, thwo, theree, thour, etc or something. Then we could refer to whom we mean with a numbered-pronoun to indicate agents. That would be the clearest way to differentiate agents in a sentence.
And to be very clear, I have no problem using non-gendered pronouns, but the idea that it isn’t slightly less precise is facile. But, again, only slightly. And who cares if it makes people more comfort and seen?
Unless the people in innane sentence are the same gender and it’s back to the same issue. You exists and it’s not an issue for anyone.
Even then, whether “them” references a group or an individual is left unclear–as I noted. E.g., “you” vs “y’all.” Exclusively using they/them is mildly less precise, but people acting like it’s the end of the English language is silly.
As I also explicitly stated, acting like it’s not slightly imprecise is facile. It could be worse, at least English doesn’t have gendered nouns like Spanish, Italian, etc. 😁
You don’t even need a convoluted sentence like that, just now on the news the reporter was talking about a trans woman’s mental health problems and said “Jane’s parents were concerned that they may harm themselves”
It is a bit of an awkward way of speaking
Yeah, and like in my own example, it’s easily clarified by simply saying Jane’s parents were concerned that Jane may harm theirself.
Over and beyond gendered pronouns, the overwhelming amount of confusing sentences I read aren’t confusing because of genderless pronouns. They’re confusing because they’re poorly written.
You sound like you live on Terf Island
yet the word you literally is about multiple entities
When my brain interpreted ‘they’ singular to refer to a unspecified so-far unnamed person or an already mentioned group, it was definitely confusing to have it suddenly used to refer to someone who had just been referred to by name. This was definitely a novel use of ‘they’ for me at the time and I don’t understand why no-one else ever seems to have this kind of confusion. I did get used to it but I don’t think it’s as universal as some of y’all realise.
Edit: I just learnt the term ‘indeterminate antecedent’ from the Wikipedia article someone else linked. Thanks to them, I just got a little bit smarter. ;-)
Since nobody has mentioned the actual reason for this phenomenon yet, the difference here is usually one of known vs. unknown gender/referent. (At least for practically all older speakers of English. Some younger speakers do seem to be able to use “they” grammatically to refer to known people. Changes in progress, woo!)
Your example is a perfect one: in a question like “whose umbrella is this?” we have no idea what gender the owner is, and so “they” is grammatical for the vast majority of English speakers.
Once the gender/referent is known, however, for many/most speakers of English (myself included), “they” becomes ungrammatical and the speaker must switch to “he” or “she”:
“Whose umbrella is this? Did they already leave?”
“That’s John’s.”
*“Oh, they need to come get it then.” (The asterisk here is the common linguistic notation for ungrammaticality. This also assumes that both speakers are familiar with who John is. You can still get grammatical “they” after responses that refer to unknown people, especially with common gender-ambiguous names like Pat.)
So, for anyone wondering why many speakers, probably including themselves (if they’re honest enough to admit it), seem to find known-gender singular “they” to be awkward/ungrammatical when supposedly “it’s been grammatical for a thousand years”, that’s why!
Alright, I made this comment in another thread but I’m copying it here. No, it has been used to refer to people of a known gender for centuries:
https://www.englishgratis.com/1/wikibooks/english/singularthey.htm
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend — Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3, 1594
'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech. — Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 3, 1600–1602
So lyke wyse shall my hevenly father do vnto you except ye forgeve with youre hertes eache one to his brother their treaspases. — Tyndale’s Bible, 1526
I already mentioned that we can get grammatical “they” with non-definite/unknown referents (your first and third examples), and in the second example Shakespeare is clearly referring to all mothers with “them”, so none of these are counterexamples to my generalization above. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find many examples with a specific, definite antecedent (though it is possible, of course - grammaticality is a spectrum, after all).
This distinction, as well as the fact that modern speakers are showing various innovative uses of “they”, has been well known for decades in the linguistic literature.
It kinda grinds my gears when people intentionally (or maybe just ignorantly in this case) misconstrue linguistic data to support their political positions, and that includes all of the boneheads acting like singular “they” isn’t a thing at all for their own nefarious purposes as well.
It doesn’t matter that English hasn’t had specific singular “they” until Gen Z. That’s just a fact of history and language, and has (or at least should have) nothing to do with the rights of non-binary people.
Stop using bullshit linguistic data to try to justify your political positions! All of you! This is how we get Hindu nationalists justifying their oppression of Muslims with ridiculous claims that Sanskrit is the original human language. Language is just language!
Edit: I just went and read your other thread, and it does appear that you’re just being disingenuous at this point, or at least doubling down after being proved incorrect. Your own source pointed out that Shakespeare would not have used “they” with specific individuals. Thymos is completely (and demonstrably) correct.
I already mentioned that we can get grammatical “they” with non-definite/unknown referents (your first and third examples)
The gender is known though. What a weird distinction to make that it’s talking about an abstract gendered person rather than concrete. I don’t know why the grammar would make that distinction (nor do I think it does).
in the second example Shakespeare is clearly referring to all mothers with “them”
Sure, but it’s in the singular. It’s “a mother” as the subject, not mothers.
none of these are counterexamples to my generalization above. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find many examples with a specific, definite antecedent (though it is possible, of course - grammaticality is a spectrum, after all).
The argument that is almost always made is that “they can’t be singular.” That argument is clearly bogus. Sure, maybe it historically hasn’t been used for a particular subject, but that’s a fairly minor grammatical shift. If we’re going to argue that’s wrong because it isn’t historically accepted then we probably need to speak a totally different version of English than we do because it has made much larger shifts than that in the past.
What a weird distinction to make that it’s talking about an abstract gendered person rather than concrete. I don’t know why the grammar would make that distinction (nor do I think it does).
Then you’re gonna be absolutely gobsmacked by the other grammatical distinctions that exist across the world’s languages.
It doesn’t matter if you know why the grammar would make that distinction or not - the distinction exists, and is widely accepted in the linguistic literature (as cited above) whether you think it does or not.
The argument that is almost always made is that “they can’t be singular.”
I’m not sure what that has to do with our conversation, since I’ve never made that claim (and neither did Thymos). If that’s what you’re basing your argument on here, then that’s a pretty egregious strawman of my position.
Sure, maybe it historically hasn’t been used for a particular subject, but that’s a fairly minor grammatical shift.
And yet it exists nonetheless, rendering your “correction” of my original comment (and your “correction” of Thymos’s comments in the other thread, for that matter) inaccurate and misleading.
If we’re going to argue that’s wrong because it isn’t historically accepted then we probably need to speak a totally different version of English than we do because it has made much larger shifts than that in the past.
I haven’t argued that anything is “wrong” other than your description of the historical use of English pronouns. Linguistics is descriptive, not normative, which means that the historical facts of English have no bearing whatsoever on what we “probably need” to do.
Once the gender/referent is known, however, for many/most speakers of English (myself included), “they” becomes ungrammatical and the speaker must switch to “he” or “she”:
I must be one of these “younger” people because I don’t get this. I have no problem referring to people as “they.” Sometimes I do so because the gender is irrelevant, sometimes to obfuscate who I’m talking about, and sometimes because they might not identify within the s/he binary.
What I don’t get is, how can knowing the gender suddenly make it difficult to use a neutral term, if it worked before?
Sometimes I do so because the gender is irrelevant
This seems to be part of the pathway of change that has led to the widespread adoption of specific singular “they” among younger speakers, and there’s some empirical evidence supporting this.
What I don’t get is, how can knowing the gender suddenly make it difficult to use a neutral term, if it worked before?
This is just one of those arbitrary rules that often exist in language, like how in many languages neuter/inanimate nouns can’t act as the subject of a sentence due to what’s called an “animacy restriction”.
For this specific phenomenon (the “older” ungrammaticality of definite singular they vs. the “younger” grammaticality of it), this recent paper argues that this is due to a difference in obligatoriness of morphosyntactic gender features. The paper is a bit technical if you don’t have a linguistic background, but the basic argument is that in older varieties of English, gender features must be obligatorily expressed in the morphosyntactic derivation if they are known, while in younger varieties, this expression seems to be optional, and therefore free variation between he/they and she/they is allowed by the grammar.
So, “It’s John’s. They need to come get it” is ungrammatical for older speakers for not obligatorily expressing the gender feature once it’s known, while it’s perfectly fine for younger speakers for whom expressing that feature seems to be optional in the grammar.
Maybe this analogy will help: Let’s say you meet someone, and you ask them “Do you have a cat?”. Note that you’ve used the singular here, though it’s acting number-neutral in this context. If they respond “I have two”, then it will immediately become ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular and ask “Does your cat like fish?”
Once you have access to the information that there’s more than one cat, then the arbitrary rules of English grammar require that knowledge to immediately be reflected in the morphosyntactic structure of your sentences from then on. And this makes no independent, logical sense, because there are tons of languages out there that don’t have plurality distinctions. But, English does, and so to speak grammatical English (for now), you have to use plural morphology to refer to more than one entity.
It’s the same for “older” speakers of English - just like it’s ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular once you know that there’s a “plural number feature” in the linguistic context, for older speakers of English it’s ungrammatical for them to continue to use the gender-neutral “they” once they know that there’s a “masculine gender feature” in the linguistic context.
Also, it’s important to note that this term “ungrammatical” is descriptive, not prescriptive - it’s not saying that it’s not “proper” or “correct” according to some arbitrary standard that someone decided on in the 1800s, but rather that’s literally not how those speakers’ mental grammars work. While it may seem illogical (and even regressive from a modern political perspective), every natural human language is composed of arbitrary rules that often seem illogical. Like how the past tense of “go” is the completely unrelated past tense of the older English verb “to wend”, “went”. Or how the past tense of the verb “can” isn’t “could” anymore – that’s reserved for modal usage now in most English dialects – it’s the completely awkward phrase “was able to”.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t, or shouldn’t, try to accommodate non-binary people of course, as is unfortunately often argued, but it does mean that, contrary to what I commonly see people say on the internet, doing so for these speakers does require a constant, concerted effort to consciously override their mental grammars.
Maybe this analogy will help: Let’s say you meet someone, and you ask them “Do you have a cat?”. Note that you’ve used the singular here, though it’s acting number-neutral in this context. If they respond “I have two”, then it will immediately become ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular and ask “Does your cat like fish?”
This helped a lot. It is true that I do not feel this way about “they”, but it does put things into perspective. Thank you.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t, or shouldn’t, try to accommodate non-binary people of course, as is unfortunately often argued, but it does mean that, contrary to what I commonly see people say on the internet, doing so for these speakers does require a constant, concerted effort to consciously override their mental grammars.
This is true also when someone you’ve known for a while transitions, or changes their name (like in the case of marriage, or just a regular name-change). Most people are okay with you tripping up, it’s expected even. It’s just when it’s done in bad faith that it becomes an issue.
“They” also refers to plurality. In the case of an individual having either both or neither and you aren’t trying to be disrespectful with “it” then it’s not confusing at all because it’s accurate.
That’s not relevant to our conversation here - we’re not talking about how language should be used (which linguistics, as an empirical/rationalist science, has nothing to say about), we’re talking about how it is used.
It’s important to understand that Hank is specific to say “correct prounons” and not “preferred prounons”. We as creature of civilization have to right to control our place in that creation, so when someone misgenders, it’s not that they are nessecarily showing disrespect, but being factually wrong. It’s okay to state the wrong thing if you don’t know, but if you insist that only YOUR interpretation of another person is correct, even more so than how THEY THEMSELVES interpret themselves, then you have crossed the rubicon in to bigotry.
To see another person on the street and think you have a better view of them than they do in a mirror is just wild levels of arrogance. They know themslevss far more than you ever will.
That’s John Green, but they’re the same person, according to the internet.
This is exactly the comment I was gonna leave, I strongly dislike the phrase “preferred pronouns,” because that implies that it’s a preference. Big props to John for making the distinction
The problem with “correct” pronouns is that what’s considered correct will differ depending on who’s saying it. There’s no confusion with “preferred” pronouns. Also, it is a preference, because some people use pronouns that are not the standard he/she/they ones. It’s not their gender that they chose, it’s (potentially) what pronouns they want to use to refer to said gender.
Try some proofreading your own comments. Dimwit.
Hey, just FYI the period before “dimwit” should be a comma. If you’re going to hold other people to a standard, at least hold yourself to the same one, asshole.
No. They are separate sentences.
“Dimwit” is not a sentence.
It is.
🤣 😂
Sorry if the quick comment I left on my phone while on the toilet wasn’t up to your standards, but since you aren’t actually contributing anything of substance I don’t see a reason to care what you think.
Edit: Jesus your comment history is sad. Seems like you never can think of anything worthwhile to say. Stay mad I guess?
It’s also proofreading
Bro just use singular they. Why is it so hard.
How does that differ from plural they?
the same way singular “you” differs from plural “you”
Right which is fine, but usually requires context clues to determine which and a story with multiple people can get real convoluted real quick. Maybe we should come up with some new terms, it’s our language we can do whatever we want
Thev
In my experience people react poorly to the accommodation ask of neopronouns. A lot of people will treat you as though you are childish, insane or you grew a second head. Outside the community or publication world neopronouns don’t see much action.
You can use it as a gender-neutral way to replace he/she, it still represents a single person, as opposed to plural they. Context is required to determine whom it represents.
English dropped “thou” a while back…
You don’t know the definition of singular?
Singular, “they” has not been taught widely to foreign learners (maybe not to native either?). I just recently learned about it myself from LGBT support content despite practicing since childhood, I never heard about it during my English lessons.
So yes indeed, many English speakers don’t know about singular they.Look at their post history and other comments in this thread. That question wasn’t being asked in good faith.
I see, though, a little bit of information may help him or other readers.
it would be used in the same way french uses vous (which can both mean they, or when speaking to someone formally (opposite from informal, which only happens when you know the person/are buddies with)). Using they, especially if you dont know them first hand, leaves ambiguity on the table since youre not making assumptions.
because people change their pronouns and they get pissed off if you use the wrong one.
I’ve had trans people tell me their pronoun. OK, cool. Then a few weeks/months later, they change it. Then they jump down my throat for not knowing the new one they have picked. One person I know was she/they, now they are he. well sorry if I didn’t check your FB status or whatever to see when you updated it… but last time I talked to this person and used the old pronoun they went OFF on me about what a facist I am or something. (let me add this person IDs as androgynous and claims to be asexual and does not have a gendered appearance)
Look, most trans people are cool, but there are a few out there who are DETERMINED to be complete assholes about it. And it’s like… ok I’m not going to bother anymore. I’d rather just avoid them entirely, just like I avoid middle-aged white women like the plague since too many of them have Karen syndrome.
You used they in this comment but don’t state you use they as a generic pronoun. Dude just use they
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From my experience most trans people are pretty clear cut. I get that they change their pronouns a lot when transitioning and coming out of the closet because it must be hard to pick a pronoun when you dont even know who you are. They are usually ok with the singular they. My problem is with tiktok queers and people who just change it for fun basically. I dont care if your pronoun is xe or idk but i do care when you dont accept if i use they(which i even use for cishet people because in my native language we dont have genders and its just generally easier).
sadly where I live lots of queers/trans are of the tiktok variety. a lot of them are trust fund types who aspire to be influences and have vanity jobs and want to lecture you on how they are an artist or something. they get really pissed off if you call them ‘they’ for some reason.
Avoid “them” meaning all trans people or the handful of dipshits you were choosing to talk to?
All of them now. It only takes a few times of being physical threatened and verbally assaulted before you just decide it’s not worth it. IME the ratio of cool trans people to psychos is 1:1, so it’s 50/50.
I get they feel ‘under threat’ but taking it out on well-meaning people who support you isn’t the answer… and frankly a few years ago it was never big deal. But like I said me not being ‘up’ on the latest pronoun you choose used to be NBD a few years ago… now it’s ‘erasing my existence’ or some crazy extremest nonsense. I have no interest in interacting with extremists.
You can’t know if someone is a dipshit until after you interact with them, btw.
Yeah painting all trans people that way is nonsense. It gets pretty close to bigotry territory. I gotta wonder where you live or what kind of choices you are making to surround yourself with that many unhinged people. Where I’m at I’ve encountered zero trans people that act like you’ve described.
I can only paint people with the experience they give me of themselves. If I’ve treated like a bigot, I will start be likely to start acting like one. I live in Boston and it’s become really bad the past few years. I have been physically attacked by trans people for standing in line at a coffee shop because they demanded I ‘give up my privilege’ and I ignored their crazy nonsense, so they escalated because they know nobody would take by side, because I’m the ‘big bad white guy’ and most of the staff were trans.
Least to say I don’t go to coffee shop anymore. And yeah, I am becoming a bigot because of how I’m treated with bigotry. It’s almost like hate breeds hate and I want no part of that horrible shit.
“You can’t know if someone is a dipshit until after you interact with them, btw.” That you said that is kinda at odds with what you are saying now.
If you are going to treat all members of a group as being the same as the worst members you have met then you are just choosing to be a bigot.
The issue isn’t trans people as a whole. It’s also not even close to half of trans people. There is something unique about your situation.
This person is either lying, or had some karen at the coffee shop go off, and is now stretching that. I have family in Boston, Including a couple that live Jamaica Plains. That has been like LGBTQ central for a while. They, and no one they know, have ever been assaulted by people over privilege, pronouns, or for being white/straight/male/cis. They said the only place they have ever seen such eruptions of behavior is online, meaning it’s just the rare karen.
That, or they are bigot that goes out and agitates this type of behavior. Then frames it in a manner in which they are the victim.
no, it’s basic survival instinct.
if i eat the purple berries and they make me puke, i’m not going to eat them again. am i now bigoted against purple berries? or should i just keep eating them and getting sick and doing it over and over again?
just like if i have a shitty meal at a restaurant, i won’t go back to that place, or that chain if it’s a chain. etc etc.
If you are going to make substantial edits to your post like that (as opposed to small corrections) I think you should either make a new post with the follow up information and ideas or make it very clear in your original post what the added content from the edit was.
Had a friend’s kid go through it and it was hard to keep up. Started as ‘she’ and birth name, then ‘he’ and a new name, then ‘xe’ and another new name, then ‘she’ but another new name, not original, and finally landing on ‘he’ and a new name. The ‘xe’ was super hard since using a totally new pronoun naturally is a bit more difficult. In the end, he turned out to stay ‘he’ and did some surgery and hormones and now if you didn’t know his history, you’d never get confused about the pronoun.
Meanwhile, an in-laws family member is super hard to treat as trans, because despite being a she, she doesn’t act or look vaguely feminine. Doesn’t like cosmetics, or styling hair, or women’s clothing. Generally wears jeans and a t-shirt. Her hair is long, but looks like grunge guy hair rather than girl hair. Also sports a full facial hair, because shaving is a pain. Says she doesn’t even want hormones or surgery, just wants to be considered feminine. Also is attracted to girls. The least trans person I have ever met. Near as she has said, she just thinks guys need to be stoic and tough and she doesn’t feel that way, but otherwise she pretty much has all ‘masculine’ sensibilities.
Most trans people I have met fall in the middle, they clearly adopt the target gender style or mannerisms at least, even if they don’t go so far as to ‘pass’.
I have only had one instance where anyone got upset about the wrong pronoun, and it was a sibling of the person, and the pronoun use was actually referring to a dog, but the sibling assumed the worst since there was no ‘he’ in the room among the humans. Haven’t seen someone personally get upset for themselves over a flubbed pronoun though.
That is a quality of life issue. This person’s issue is not their changing pronouns, it is that they are an asshole, who loves to milk the victim role.
I am a cis, male guy, who due to some hormonal issues looked androgynous and sounded like a girl when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and was addressed as “miss” quite often, and for the most part, people would just say “Sorry” when corrected, then address me as a guy.
This is how people should behave, the person you describe is just an asshole, whether they are aware of it or not.
Same issue I used to have with gay people, I used to think they were all loudmouth assholes, until I found out that what I had been exposed to was a loud minority, a ton of gay people are your regular Joe and Jane, and you would never know they were gay unless they told you.
Don’t let a loud minority sour your day, you have been doing the right thing, and the downvoted are overzealous, reactionary assholes.
I am a cis, male guy, who due to some hormonal issues looked androgynous and sounded like a girl when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and was addressed as “miss” quite often, and for the most part, people would just say “Sorry” when corrected, then address me as a guy.
Did you ever have someone insist that you’re wrong? I looked quite feminine from childhood all the way to around 25-26 years old. I can think of several occasions where people insisted that I couldn’t be a man.
The most positive one was when I was flying to the U.S., and ended up chatting with an elderly lady for a few hours while waiting for the check ins. She had a massive wagon with pots and pans and whatnot, and I had a tiny carry-on. Eventually we realised we’d forgotten to exchange names, so we introduced ourselves. She was like “but that’s a boy’s name”, “well that explains why your luggage is so small!” and every so often she’d say “I can’t believe you’re a man” incredulously.
Worst time was when I was frequently swimming in my teens, and a Karen-type person walked up to me, insisting I put on a bikini because I’m too old to walk topless. It didn’t register with me that she mistook me for a girl at first; I just thought this pervert old woman wanted me to dress like a girl.
I know, they are an asshole. Just like many cops are assholes.
But give the propensity of assholes in the group, the safest course of action is to just avoid them entirely. I also have no interest in interact with police, and yet I bet nobody would call me a bigot for saying that…
Eh, that’s different. Police officers choose the profession. Trans folks aren’t choosing the trans life, they’re discovering who they really are (maybe I should have just quipped “…the trans life chose them”, ha).
There’s nothing wrong with trying to avoid assholes, but when you start painting with a broad brush like that, well, it does smack of bigotry. Same energy as racists who memorize arrest statistics and then say things like “It’s not racist if it’s true!”
Also, to be clear: I don’t mean to accuse you of anything. I just see some uncomfortable parallels.
Personally, I don’t have a lot of experience in this area. I’ve really only been acquainted with two trans people, and I don’t/didn’t know them very well (I say didn’t because I haven’t seen the one person since before covid). Both were friends-of-friends type acquaintances that I’d see at game nights and the like.
Cool. I’ve been acquainted with dozens of trans people and known a dozen on a regular social basis and a few quite well…
turns out they are just like… people. some of them are cool… but a good chunk of them are selfish jerks just like any group of people.
for some reason people want to lionize trans people as they suffering saints… and anyone who criticisms trans folks is clearly a hateful bigot… which also tells me they know nothing about trans people and put them on a podium. the brush i paint trans people with is broad… because they are people. they aren’t some other subspecies of human beings with superior moral worth, empathy and insight. some of them are really great, most of them are not so great, and a bunch of them are awful humans who delight in antisocial behaviour. have you ever hung out in trans internet forums? they are full of awful hateful and bigoted shit… often direct at other trans folks, and incessant gatekeeping about who or what is really ‘trans’. it’s disgusting.
and being trans is a choice. just like me presenting a a cis het man is a choice. just like i wanted to dress up in a woman’s outfit an go out tonight… that would be a choice. just like the trans folks who go around policing other people’s pronouns, fashion choices, and their gender worthiness choose to do that.
but of course don’t let the complexities of the human condition and identity get in the way of a good ‘hurrr durr well yer a bigot and i am a good purrrson for saying so’ internet self-righteous indignation.
I’m getting pretty old.
Transgender stuff is new and confusing to me.
My only experience with it was in a bar I used to frequent in Los Angeles, though I think they were more transvestite than transgender. Pronouns never came up there. We just used names.
It’s easy for me to use any name given when introduced. If you introduce yourself to me with a feminine name when you appear quite male, it’s no skin off my teeth.
Pronouns are more difficult simply because of my embedded native language of English dictating gender. While difficult, it’s no more inconvenient than to slow myself down, think about what I’m saying, and try to use what’s preferred. If I should slip up, then maybe a brief, “oops, sorry about that,” is in order.
The hardest thing for me is if I have known you as one name and now I’ve got to use a new name. This has nothing to do with gender or politics however. It’s just how my brain stores things. My sister uses a different first name in adulthood than when we were kids, and I never have been able to adapt. Since my sister is awesome and understands me, she gives me a pass on this.
Bottom line, the linguistics can be difficult for us oldies, but that doesn’t give us reason to fear, hate, or persecute.
I’d even go simpler than that. “If calling people by their preferred pronouns is one of the hundred biggest challenges…” Inserting “correct” into the statement just begs to get into an argument with a conservative and feels like you’re trying to force them to accept a different reality than they want to.
IMHO it’s simply a personal preference thing. Let people live how they want to live. You don’t have to convince everyone that Sally is really a woman trapped in the body of a man, you just have to say that it’s her preference you call her as a “she”. People should have the freedom to define themselves. That’s it. End of story.
My conservative neighbor brought up trans stuff thinking he’d use all the conservative media talking points and my answer was simply “it doesn’t really bother me. I’m a live and let live kind of guy. If they want me to use a different pronoun I’ll do my best to switch to that pronoun.” If you spin it as a freedom instead of a reality then it’s easier to accept.
It’s the right phrase, and if it triggers a conservative to start arguing, so be it
but someone’s preferred pronouns are the correct ones to use for them
I agree with most of the sentiment, but we don’t let children go around saying things (especially wrong things) that offend people just because they believe them. Why should we accept when an adult does it?
There IS a correct answer, though. If someone says, “My name is John”, you don’t get to tell them, “Well you look like a James to me, so I’m only going to call you James”. That would be incorrect. You don’t get to define other people’s existence like that.
Same thing. ‘John’ isn’t a preferred name. It’s his name. Calling him a different name would be incorrect just like using different pronouns.
We had a temp receptionist called Joyce at my job. She said that at her old job they called her Mama J, and indicated that she would like to be called that here as well. I guess we were all assholes who defined her existence by calling her Joyce.
Nicknames aren’t pronouns, they’re nicknames. If her legal name was Mama J and you didn’t call her that, yeah, that would probably constitute harassment over time and her asking you to call her by her legal name.
What would actually be comparable is if you addressed her with male pronouns. Since the discussion was about pronouns, not nicknames.
You are asking us to tolerate the intolerant.
that’s what tolerance is. not tolerating them is being intolerant, and self-defeating ultimately.
sorry, should we go an extirpate the Amish because they don’t accept lgbt+ people in their community? or another community that disagrees with lgbt identities? are we going to bomb the middle east in the name of trans rights? those are utter ridiculous ideas, so is the idea of being ‘stamping out intolerance’. all that tells me is you think others should conform to your beliefs or be removed.
no, we’re not. because that’s insane. we tolerate the intolerate all the time. just like you don’t scream at your annoying co-worker who bores you to tears about sports or wahtever shit they try to chat you up about.
Look up the paradox of tolerance. In order to be tolerant, you must be intolerant of intolerance.
ok. lets just round up all the intolerant people and re-educate them until they are tolerant like we are.
because it’s totally cool fo us tolerant people to be fascists, as long as we are eliminating fascism!
Hey man, I’m just sharing the philosophical concept of what happens when a society is tolerant of everyone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
No one is suggesting that only fascism can prevent fascism. It’s the ‘right to refuse service’ when people are being an asshole, and you have to exercise that right when people go too far. There have to be some consequences for being intolerant in order to maintain a tolerant society.
No one where? Here?
Where I live in liberal leftie land… people are 100% often totally for facism, as long as it’s targeted at the ‘right’ people. And ironically, also they all bend over backwards to accommodate assholes as long as have a minority identity, because you know, it’s perfectly ok to treat people like shit because you’re categorically oppressed.
And in the few spaces that are generally open to everyone… they get shit on by these same supposed tolerant people, becuse these spaces are not ‘safe’ if the evil bad majority is allowed into them.
It’s pure insanity. Largely fueled by nitwits who have no experience with genuine oppression and tell me I’m an asshole when I tell them my stories of genuine racist and sexism, because it makes them ‘uncomfortable’. lol
I do not dress to suit the amish. And I do not speak to suit these gender-obsessives. Towards that sort of dictation, no, I do not practice tolerance.
But I do tolerate those who think (dress, live etc ) differently from me to peacefully do their thing.
(To clear up your equivocation there.)
This seems sane to me. How about you?
Isn’t using \they\ is just better all around because
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Not everyone identifies as binary, so they makes it better for everyone
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Not everyone is willing to come out and reveal their identity, especially at workplace, so why only use correct term with those who reveal themselves. It is not relevant at work, in fact it may lead to biases
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Specific pronouns do increase cognitive overload for everyone. Imagine trying to remember not only names but also pronouns of 100s of colleagues and friends. Linkedin has started adding pronouns? If you forget, someone will get offended.
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Now even conferences are manufacturing pronouns pins. These pins get discarded and this just causes more waste
\They\ is just simpler and better for everyone. I think we can even start to eliminate \he\ and \she\ to make more inclusive society.
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It’s an inherently anti conservative thing, funny enough. At least with how some conservative voters think – Keep government out of it and let people live how they want to. Respect how they want to live, as a good neighbor.
I agree with you that spinning it as freedom is a good way to do it. You could probably put a Christian tilt on it as well.
That’s a fair point. When I said “choose” I meant that they did not necessarily go with what they were assigned at birth. So it was “choose” in the sense of choose to be honest about who you are. I guess saying coming out of the closet would be more accurate. Sorry for the confusion.
My conservative neighbor brought up trans stuff thinking he’d use all the conservative media talking points and my answer was simply “it doesn’t really bother me. I’m a live and let live kind of guy. If they want me to use a different pronoun I’ll do my best to switch to that pronoun.” If you spin it as a freedom instead of a reality then it’s easier to accept.
That sounds to me like he realized he couldn’t have the argument he wanted to have, not that he accepted anything. Edit - but I generally agree with your overall point.
Yeah, let people live. But also, let me live. Let me define myself the way I want. Stop telling me what the fuck to say and do and think and labeling anything that is ‘different’ than your way of thinking ‘bad and wrong’.
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Using pronouns isn’t a “problem” though, it’s that people genuinely don’t care.
I don’t care very much if I’m honest. I’ve never interacted with someone who informed me that their pronouns were not the usual ones.
It also never happened to me but I imagine the conversation would be something like:
Hello X
Please don’t call me X I don’t like it, call me Y instead
Ok
~ ~The end~ ~
People genuinely do care considering Jordan Peterson’s entire career is based on the whole “you can’t force me to use your pronouns” bullshit that no one was trying to force him to do in the first place.
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So you’re saying that the loonys care.
Loony for. Loony against. Twins, basically.
No, I’m saying bigots and assholes care. You can be sane and be a bigot and/or an asshole. And there a huge number of such people.
And if you mean that people who know what their gender is are loony and would prefer it if people didn’t get it wrong, you are probably loony yourself.
They’re both loony.
You’re loony yourself if you think someone consistently calling you by the wrong gender every time they talk to or about you wouldn’t be very rude.
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Since that is totally irrelevant to what we are talking about, no I don’t.
I will start by saying I am very open minded and really don’t agree with a lot of what Peterson says. I’m also pro LGBT and leaving people be who they are and love the life that makes them happy… But he’s right that we shouldn’t be forced to use someone’s pronouns. At the time there was discussion about making this a law. If someone wants to be a prick let them. Better to know who they are.
No one is being forced.
For fuck’s sake.
Peterson just lied about the bill.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qbnamx/no-the-trans-rights-bill-doesnt-criminalize-free-speech
No one is stopping him or anyone else from being a bigoted asshole. Asking people to stop doing it and telling them why is not forcing them.
Ok. Thanks for the clarification.
Sorry I got mad, I’m just so angry that people believe that lie because it’s turned into so much hate against trans people.
Thanks for the apology. I really hate the LGBT hate. I don’t understand what’s wrong with letting people live their own lives the way they want, if they aren’t physically affecting others. Shame my original post got downvoted so much. I didn’t think it was offensive.
Edit: also thank you for correcting my misconception over the law! I’ll make sure to correct people going forward.
Wow this sounds really reasonable, wtf kinda drugs is Peterson on if he thinks it restricts free speech…
TLDR: bill C-16 adds gender identity and expression to the list of discrimination protections, a list which already includes gender, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. So yeah right now you can’t fire someone for being black, under C-16 this will also apply to trans people. Ontario already has this in their provincial laws, so Peterson is already living under such a “regime”.
Wow this sounds really reasonable, wtf kinda drugs is Peterson on if he thinks it restricts free speech…
If I recall, Peterson’s entire idea on that was that it would result in misgendering being considered hate speech, though it’s been a while so I might be misremembering.
No one is being forced
I think you misunderstood his hyperbole as a literal thing
Of course people aren’t putting a gun to your head. But there are often consequences for not doing it.
lots of people are being harassed and intimidated into it though. lots of people take an absolutist stance on pronouns, and if you misgender someone or don’t ask them what their pronoun is, you are considered a ‘bad person’.
labeling and harassing people into social conformity is being forced to do something.
What people? I have never seen anyone get angry about being accidentally misgendered.
No one is being “harassed” or “intimidated” into calling people what they want to be called. You’re just an asshole if you don’t do it because you’re not giving them a very basic amount of respect: the acknowledgement of the right to be who they are.
On the contrary in fact, I’ve seen people be very forgiving if you accidentally screw up but genuinely mean well. I accidentally misgendered a friend of mine once, and when I realized it I immediately started profusely apologizing. They appreciated it but said it was all good.
At the end of the day, everything can be distilled down to one maxim – be genuinely kind to people, and 99% of people will respond in kind and forgive mistakes.
Sure, anyone can make a mistake. Trans people know that just as well as cis people. If you just say sorry and correct yourself, most trans people would probably be fine with it. It’s the people who do it on purpose that are the problem.
I have, many times. Don’t know where you live… oftentimes it’s not ever the trans person getting mad… it’s a straight cis person with a hero complex goes around as a self appointed pronoun police officer and calls you names if you even ask them wtf the deal is.
If someone was a jerk to you, then that person is a jerk.
If everyone is a jerk to you, then you’re probably the jerk.
It was made a law, it’s also a law in many parts of the US. It’s not about preventing random people from being pricks, it’s about discouraging harassment from employers, school administrations, and government officials. They’re prohibited from persistently misgendering you in the same way they’re prohibited from calling you slurs. I struggle to imagine a scenario where life would be improved by removing those sensible guard rails on civil society.
Nobody is “forced to use pronouns” at present but this stance misses the point. It looks at the harms of misgendering as a situation that doesn’t cause other inequities and harms.
For the average social interaction where you are on equal terms but can walk away being misgendered is something a lot of us hate but live with like any small annoyance. It is like stubbing your toe. Not fun but whatever it’s fine that’s just “someone being a prick”. But if deliberate misgendering is allowed to happen over a long period in a workplace setting it is not something we get to walk away from. If we have to regularly interact with that person or lose our ability to feed and house ourselves then we are forced to have mental health problems because someone essentially doesn’t like being told what to do. Having to deal with panic attacks at work because you had to be locked in a room with someone hitting every trauma trigger you have exposed to the world or else you have to find a new and maybe worse job is a barrier to participation in society.
If it’s in a medical setting where we have to balance our health outcomes knowing that if we don’t comply with the misgendering our care is impacted because a doctor holds our lives or the relief from pain in their hands. A lot of trans people become shy and don’t seek help early and often because they equate doctors visits with a sense of powerlessness and shame knowing that they can’t stand up for themselves. In that instance it’s not just “someone being a dick” you are placing someone’s complete physical wellbeing before someone’s egotistical need to be “right” about you.
If a trans person in a social club and misgendering isn’t checked by a majority it can mean that they might not have a choice on whether or not to go. The world becomes a smaller place when you have gender related trauma.
Deliberate misgendering in a professional setting isn’t just “someone showing you they are a prick” the burden always falls upon trans people disproportionately because our participation in society often forces us to compromise directly on our health and there are real traumas and weaknesses that underlie our transness. If someone was openly making rape jokes around someone you knew had sexual assault trauma you’d step in right? Why not the same for someone with gender related traumas?
What Peterson is railing against is protections for participation in regular society through professional setting misgendering cases.
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Gender-concerned people telling me how to speak is like fundamentalists telling me to wear a dress. I tell them both to piss up a rope.
What’s with the comments in this post?
I feel like it was written by people where English is their
thirdfifth language.Not knocking it. But even AI sounds more natural.
the bots and trolls are here now.
I believe they prefer pronouns of it/apache helicopter.
Guarantee most of the people who argue about pronouns on the internet don’t even know a trans person.
I mean what will they make us do next??? Ask us to call them by their names as well?
As a person who learned English as a 2nd language, I would like it if you could transform the language into gender neutral and end this insanity.
I still get classic genders wrong, this whole LGBTQ movement is confusing me even more when I’m trying to type/speak.
English is gender neutral. You have to deliberately apply a gender to something unless that word is gender specific, like cow or bitch referring to female animals.
In my brief forays learning other languages one of the more frustrating things to learn is that you can have female refrigerators, male buses, and gender neutral roofs. That is not gender neutrality.
So I don’t get your issue with genders, seeing as they have nothing to do with English language neutrality and everything to do with how you address a specific individual at their request.
In one of the languages I know, there isn’t a different pronoun for each gender; there’s just one pronoun to indicate ‘they’ in the singular form. Maybe that’s what they meant.
In what fucked up language are refrigerators female? They’re obviously male.
Heresy! They are neuter!
Spanish and mayB Italian iirc?
you put things in them
In Persian we don’t have genders for anything. No words, no pronouns, nothing. So having gendered pronouns for me is not gender neutral. I would rather call everyone equally “they” than get into this game of what are you identifying yourself because it makes the language more complex for me.
How is it more difficult? If someone’s name is Joe Smith, you would commonly expect to refer to them as Joe. But say they ask you to refer to them as Mr. Smith. Ok, no big deal, right?
Referring to someone by their preferred pronoun is no different. If Joe wants to be “they”, it’s no big deal.
The apparent issue is with gender and people’s personal hang ups with it. People change how they address others all the time, formally, informally, professionally, familiar, marriage name change, etc. So all I’m getting here is resistance to what…? LBGTQ people?
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Hey buddy, if you’re gonna be that mad, at least be correct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders
Notice how “English” is listed there in the “No grammatical gender” list, which is what’s being talked about here.
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In English, when we say “gendered language”, we mean “grammatically gendered language”, not just “language has gendered pronouns”.
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A language doesn’t “have gender” in any way other than noun class. Gender is cultural and exists outside of the confines of language. So “gendered language” would likely be referring to grammatical gender and not gender.
The original commenter who used the term “gender neutral language” meant “non-grammatically gendered language”, that much is clear from context. It was a semantic mistake. Hopefully things are cleared up for you now. If you have a point beyond semantics, feel free to make it.
From zero to insult in one post? C’mon man, your incorrect use of terms isn’t my problem. I don’t need a PhD in linguistics to meet your unstated requirements to have an opinion on this.
If you want gender neutral pronouns in order to avoid the inconvenience of having to address the groups of people you singled out, like LGBTQ, that’s what you should have said instead of clearly specifying an entire language’s use of gender. You obviously know the difference in your ragepost, so next time spend some effort to get your message across correctly the first time and don’t have a fit when people can’t read your mind.
I think you should also understand that even if gender neutral informal pronouns like “they” do develop and become common usage, you’re still going to have to learn to address people in their preferred pronoun if they ask.
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Wait until you learn languages with gendered articles
The thing about grammatical gender is that it doesn’t really have much to do with sex or gender identity. In German, for instance, ‘mädchen’ (girl) is neuter. Gender in French is 98% assigned based on the pronunciation of the three final syllables. In Danish, living things tend to be ‘common gender’ and inanimate objects tend to be ‘neuter’.
It’d be more accurate to call it ‘noun classes’ than gender.
It’d be more accurate to call it ‘noun classes’ than gender.
And that’s exactly what they’re called in other languages like Hawaiian and Swahili.
Well, yes. But not for Indo-European languages which is… mostly a historical artifact. But we’re still sticking to teaching traditional grammar using traditional terminology, which is super frustrating. Imagine if you kept teaching maths in a manner which you knew was fundamentally wrong, but it was just too much work to reeducate all maths teachers.
Well, as a German, I wouldn’t agree. Generally, nouns describing men are masculine and nouns describing women are feminine. “Das Mädchen” is just an odd one out because it’s the diminutive (always neuter in German) of “die Maid”, which in turn is feminine.
Yes, this doesn’t really apply to objects, but it mostly does for people.
Sure, there’s some correlation - but when 99% of words in a noun class can’t have a biological gender it seems weird to name it after the 1%.
Well, you’re arguing terminology. But the original commenter’s point was about the association of grammatical gender with gender, and that is definitely a thing in German.
Der Arzt (Male doctor) -> die Ärztin (female doctor) is an example where the grammatical gender changes with the gender of the person, and that’s almost always the case.
Child - das Kind - grammatical gender: neuter. Referred to in context using the gender-neutral pronoun ‘es’ (it). The pronoun used correlates with the grammatical gender of the noun used, not the gender of the person referred to.
Eg Ein Kind lacht. Es hat etwas gesehen. (transl: A child laughs. He/she/they saw something.)
I know. But generally, the gender of the noun describing a person correlates with the gender of the person described strongly.
Ok but my point is that when it doesn’t correlate, it becomes clear how grammatical gender is independent from the person’s gender.
It becomes even clearer when you consider all nouns by definition have a grammatical gender - inanimate objects, abstract concepts, etc, even though the thing described clearly doesn’t have a gender. Eg die Tür ist offen. Ich schliesse sie. (transl.: the door is open. I close it.) ‘Sie’ being the female pronoun used to refer to the grammatically female door.
Honestly biggest reason I list they/them is just because I don’t think we should gender language in general. Any pronouns are fine, as long as you aren’t trying to be dehumanizing with it. I use they/them a lot when referring to other people and most people don’t care, but a few cissies thought a hissy fit over singular they.
bro, there are folks out there who think spanish/french and other gendered languages are wrong and bad.
I have never met anyone in real life that doesn’t address you the way you ask them to. My language, however, does not have gender neutral pronouns so the “did you just assume X gender” question is kinda annoying.
My question comes from a grammar /German background: We have four cases. They have different pronouns. Which ones should I list?
English also has cases, we just don’t think of them much. It’s why pronouns are typically given as nominative/objective pairs: she/her, they/them, etc. So, similarly in German you’d probably only need to give one or two examples to make it clear which set to use. Or give all four.
Whichever ones you want English speakers to use when referring to you.
Simple, isn’t it?
Everything is simple when you know the solution.
I was not really expecting English speakers to use my German pronouns, they are for German speaking people.
Would that be the Dativ or Akkusativ form? They are both quite common and important
Okay, then you use whichever English pronoun you wish to use. Again, pretty simple. I really don’t think this is something you couldn’t have figured out for yourself just by spending time around English speakers or even just watching English-language media or listening to English-language music.
Es geht nur um das Geschlecht, also er/sie/es. Mann kann das gleiche auf deutsch machen, die Fälle haben eigentlich nichts damit zu tun.
Es geht nur darum, wie sich der Person fühlt. Leute mit eine biologische “Zwischen-Zustand” sind ein gutes Beispiel für uns “0815” leute. Sollte ich sie oder er sagen zur eine Person mit weiblichen Büßen und einen Penis? Die leute (und auch andere die sich als nicht Standard fühlen) wollen einfach selber einschneiden wie man sie adressiert.
(Entschuldigung wegen meinen Grammatik-Fehlern, mein Deutsch wird ständig schlimmer)
Yep, pretty much what UNY0N said. It is about the gender, not the pronouns per se. It is an English thing that they have gendered pronouns when mostly all other stuff in the language is (assumed not) gendered. Such meticulus discussion of pronouns detached from gender makes me wonder what your reaction would be if someone held a door open for you and then called you Fraulein. Would you feel misgendered then?
Lol, that happened already.
Most commonly used English pronouns are typically listed as “he/him”, “she/her”. Sometimes people add possessive forms as well ("ie “she/her/hers”. “They/them”, “she/they”, “he/they”, “they/he”, “they/she”, “he/she”, “any” are other common options. There’s not hard rules though.
From what I recall from briefly studying German, there’s still a masculine/feminine/neuter pronoun in all 4 cases. Couldn’t you just use the appropriate one in each case?
whichever one you feel is the most correct any any one time
I have to deal with extremely bad gender dysphoria, so yes I would trade my struggles with any transphobe who thinks they have it rough
