You’re ascribing too much meaning to it; sure, they/them are used for non-binary people, but it’s also used for people of any gender when that information isn’t known.
Refusing to acknowledge any acceptable pronouns for you in general conversation just makes you come across as belligerent. I suppose we could just use your name all the time, but it gets pretty stilted.
“Saint_Cad is coming to visit, Saint_Cad is bringing hot dogs, Saint _Cad is bringing Saint_Cad’s new partner over…”
Street addresses, especially for homeowners, are public information. If there’s a functional need to share my address, I’ll give it, because you can find it out with my name and city anyways.
I think the disconnect here is that I expect people in the English speaking world to know my gender when they learn what my first name is. Even here in 2024, nobody has ever seriously asked me what pronouns I prefer to use. I will likely continue to refer to people as he or her based on the the various gender indicators provided though I will of course defer to their preferred pronouns when informed.
But demanding someone out themselves when they are not ready to (again coworkers) or lie about their gender-identity is not belligerent?
I don’t know why you think I’m stupid. I know how pronouns work. If you ask me to tell you my pronouns and I choose not to
That does not give you the right to badger me until I do.
I will promise to not get offended if you use the pronoun you feel is appropriate given my physical appearance. (getting back to the OP)
Gender-identity can be a very personal issue some people feel that everyone should be compelled to reveal. Maybe you don’t have a problem publicly revealing your gender but that doesn’t mean you have the right to bully me into revealing mine. Again the tradeoff is that I accept your usage of the pronoun I physically (genitalicly?) appear as.
But, that was the crux of the joke: Pat had a name which could be male or female, and was written to be ambiguously-gendered to the extreme – the character simply did not clearly present any clear gender indicators, and subtle attempts to get Pat to clarify their gender always met with failure.
For the large majority of people, their gender is clearly unambiguous to others who meet and interact with them. A cis male who has a typically male name, and who presents as male, has spent his life being referred to by he/him pronouns – they fit his internal paradigm of his gender, and he has, until recently, probably never given any thought to the idea that he might possibly have to provide any clarity to another person as to his “preferred pronouns.”
In my profession of education? More and more. One conference I went to, pronouns on your badge were originally mandatory and they changed it only because people demanded to have it optional because they were in the position that they didn’t want to lie about their gender but were not ready to reveal it to fellow professionals.
An assembly I was at required that in order to speak you needed to provide your name, district and pronouns. That last one was not enforced but it was still technically a rule.
No one, in the conference scenario, is asking you to out yourself or detail any dysphoria or anything at all.
It’s a simple question of “today, in this context, how would you like us to interact with you and refer to you?”
You can use a different answer in a different context. You can change your mind. You can accept whatever people assume of you, or you can say “masculine is fine” and move on, just as you can say “my name is David, please call me Dave”.
It’s not nearly as deeply personal as you’re making it out to be. It’s a verbal handshake, not a contract and lifelong commitment to an identity.
I understand that CIS people aren’t used to this, because we never really had to consider our gender identity. But it’s not nearly as hard to understand as people make it out to be. You don’t need to be able to relate to gender dysphoria to understand that people have prefered forms of address, and just use them. Cis people are just so used to theirs being obvious and intuitive, they don’t realize that those forms of address are, in fact, their preference too.
I had a local coffee shop near my place that I would go to on occasion. The barista was androgynous, had an ambiguous name and (not kidding) a little framed sign on the counter that said, “Do not assume gender” (or something like that…it’s many years ago now).
I didn’t know what to do. Confront them and ask what pronouns I need to use?
I’d rather they made it clear. Considering they were serving many people it seemed to me it is on them to make it clear and not make each customer figure out what pronouns to use.
In this case, I’d say, unless you, for some reason, needed to refer to the barista by a third-person pronoun, or were going to be interacting with that barista for more than a few moments, it’d probably be a non-issue.
And, if that “do not assume gender” sign, or the barista’s nametag, didn’t feature their preferred pronouns, probably safest to go with “they/them” if you needed to actually use a third-person pronoun.
My default from a lifetime is to say, “Excuse me sir/ma’am.”
If I needed the attention of the barista I was left with “excuse me” or “hello” which seems a little rude or throwing balled-up napkins at them (definitely rude and I did not do that).
More than that though, it is a lifetime of habit I now need to overcome while waiting for my tea and bagel.
Saint_Cad has a point about requiring people to share their pronouns being bad etiquette. Someone using non-binary or otherwise non-traditional pronouns might not want to stand up and out themselves as part of a targeted minority in front of a bunch of strangers, especially if it’s a situation where they won’t have to interact with a majority of the people they’re being introduced to.
Of course, not addressing it formally at all means each individual trans person has to advocate for the right pronouns themselves. And in that situation, the only people making a point about their pronouns are likely to be trans people. Which puts a lot of them in the position of having to figure out, “Do I pass well enough that I can just not bother, and hope that people get it right independently, or do I make my own pronoun tag, which instantly marks me out as trans, because only trans people are making a point about what pronoun to use?”
The ideal solution is to offer a space for sharing pronouns, but not require it - and for people who aren’t worried about their pronouns to share their anyway, as a sort of protective camouflage for people to whom proper pronouns are a big deal.
That’s a very succinct statement of the issue. Thank you.
English is a mostly non-gendered language. But where it is gendered, it’s tenaciously so.
As @mnemosyne said, there are lots of ways to simply not use any pronoun at all. But that’s not our collective habit and most of us here are kinda old and hence slow to change.
The societal definition of “polite” is changing even as we speak. More to the point, the consensus of what constitutes “polite” has become much less uniform.
Witness the ongoing kerfuffle in the current thread about use of first or last name and Mr. Mrs. Ms. in conversation with clerks, co-workers, or strangers. We each have a metric for what is and isn’t polite, but we don’t even remotely agree with each other on what that metric is. Instead of one universal standard there are now several broad camps, plus a bunch of outliers.
Many people find that really disorienting and resent the loss of the verities they thought were eternal.
Again, why do you presume I’m cis? Maybe I don’t answer because I don’t know what pronouns to use. Of maybe I am at a certain spot on the gender-spectrum and I don’t want to lie but I don’t want to come out to fellow professionals. Maybe I feel God™ does not make mistakes and I refuse to participate in gender-pronouning because it is offensive to my religion.
Simple for you. Were you aware that some states are trying to require teachers to inform parents if the child uses pronouns different than their birth gender? And in some states, the requirement may end up that a teacher must report the student to the parent if the teacher suspects the student identifies differently than their at-birth assigned gender. I want you to now tell those students that can’t reveal their gender to their parents how easy of question “What’s your pronouns?” is to answer.
Or for some people it is not as simple as you make it out to be. So far you entire argument seems to be “This is how I feel about this extremely complicated topic therefore everyone else should feel the same way I do.”
“As someone who’s supported by management, adequately compensated, and afforded a healthy work/life balance. But I’ll just play along with the performative egalitarianism here instead.”
