Well, I obviously wasn’t there, and have no idea with what tone it was presented.
But to me there’s a big difference between “What’s your name, and if you have any pronoun preferences, please let us know now” vs “ok, everyone MUST now introduce themselves with their name, and also a detailed and exhaustive cataloging of all of your pronouns, OK GO”, if you see what I mean.
For a smart person, you sure seem to like to put words in others’ mouths. I’ve never heard someone use ‘they’ to refer to one person, as it’s a plural pronoun. Wasn’t taught that way, and don’t use it that way. Of course I use pronouns, but have never been asked to state my preferences in public.
If you wish to continue your bullshit outrage over something I haven’t said, then have at it, but it will be a monologue.
You’ve never heard someone say “if someone wants a great car, they should buy a Toyota” or something like that? Never in your whole life?
I’m pretty sure** Chefguy** has used “they” in that sense. Where you’ve lost him (I think) and me (I know) is that “they” seems to be used for a singular person? Is that correct? I’m as accepting as can be with whatever pronouns people want to use (note that I only heard that usage in a gender class earlier this year), however, this use of “they” has me confused. Is the idea that “s/he” can be replaced with “they”? Instead of saying, “She’s over there,” one would say “They’re over there”?
Una, ss guin said, this is a case of ignorance, not malice. What might be obvious to some people isn’t always clear to others.
Yes, that is the case as I understand it for some folks.
“They” is a good default when you don’t know the gender of the person. “if someone wants a great car, they should buy a Toyota”, as iiandyiiii says. Extend that to situations where you have some reason to think the person in question is transgender or genderqueer. “They” might not be their preferred pronoun but it’s inoffensive and because of its neutrality, never wrong — at worst it is imprecise.
Another thing is when someone says, “tell us what your pronouns are”, someone who’s not really all that familiar with gender issues might be like, “well what do you mean by ‘my pronouns’?” As in what context. It might be better to also say it like, “Tell us what your pronouns, as in how you want to be referred to, (she/her, he/him, they/them, etc)”.
A lot of this is really new to people, even the most trans-friendly individual might be like, “WTF?”
Huh. The first time I ran into this, I was confused, too. No, it’s not at all obvious. But I asked and was told.
If you are talking to me, I prefer “you” or “we” or “y’all”. If I am talking about me it’s “me” or “I” or “we” or “myself”. If you’re talking about me and I’m not there, I don’t actually care what pronouns you use. You are probably least likely to confuse others if you use “she”, but I’ve been called “he”, “ze”, and “they”, as well. So long as it’s not malicious, it’s fine.
I have. I have about a dozen friends who prefer it. And I still can’t get used to it.
I can use “they” for an unknown person (although it tends to sound sloppy to me.) “Look, someone left their wallet here.” But say “Sam went to the mall, and they saw…” and I think “who was Sam with?” EVERY SINGLE TIME. Drives me nuts. I’m trying to get used to it, because, friends, yah know. This is a form of expression I have heard in ordinary conversation maybe 30 times, but it still trips me up.
That use of “they” is novel. The singular “they” used in the 14th century (and deemed grammatically incorrect for about 150 years until, I dunno, maybe 1995, although it never dropped out of common parlance) is for an unknown person. “Look, someone left their wallet here. Let’s look and see if we can figure out who it belongs to.” Not for a known person. Even replacing “who it belongs to” with “who they are” triggers my “BAD GRAMMAR” reflex. But it doesn’t actively confuse me, like the specific singular they.
Anyway, I’m trying. And I respect that language changes, and that this is a good change. And I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually. But I kinda resent it when people act is if it’s supposed to sound completely normal to me. Yeah, the minor problems of the majority, I know. I’ll go find my “trans ally” hat in a minute. But this is the pit, so I figured it was a good place to rant.
”Tell us what your pronouns are” could have saved us sitting through a lot of awkward and uncomfortable “It’s Pat” sketches during Julia Sweeney’s tenure on SNL.
With the adoption/acceptance of “they/them/their” as referring to specific known singular individual, are we keeping noun/verb agreement wrt number (”Rodney, the transgender person I’ve hired as my new chauffeur, is such a treasure; I can hardly wait for you to meet them! They is bringing the Rolls around - - there they comes now!”)?
Disclaimer: English is not my first language.
What is wrong with “it”?
If you want to use they to indicate 1 person what should I use to indicate a group? Or does that become clear in context?
Like:
I am
You are
She/he/they is
We are
They are?
Other than being literally dehumanizing?
People keep saying this, despite having no problem differentiating between the two identical forms of ‘you’. It’s bizarre.
My preferred pronouns are elided and the possessive is gender-neutral, with a number which refers to the objects owned and not to the amount of owners… I probably would have understood what was being asked but depending on who else was there, I might actually have said what I just wrote.
Nope.
”Rodney, the transgender person I’ve hired as my new chauffeur, is such a treasure; I can hardly wait for you to meet them! They are bringing the Rolls around - - there they come now!”
Matching gender but not number.
Grammatically, I would have preferred “it”, expanding its use from babies of unknown gender to adults. But that comes with “not a person” baggage, and “they” seems to have won.
I do know some people who prefer “ze” or “e” or “xe”. If only they all preferred the same new pronoun, we might have been spared “they”. But “they” is clearly winning.
‘They’ won centuries ago. Singular they predates the loss of the t-v distinction in standard English, again by centuries. (Though not the singular use of ‘you’, which started out as a French-influenced sign of respect. It just took a couple centuries to fully displace thou.) Despite this people who happily use the singular you have been bitching about the singular they since the 19th century (several centuries after singular they became enshrined as a standard, and uncontroversial, usage).
I know this poster has taken involuntary leave of the messageboard but I wanted to mention in passing that during the 1984 British miner’s strike a subset of the LGBT (well, LG at least) community actively worked to raise funds and awareness to support the striking miners despite having no ulterior motive for doing so. They even made a film about it.
See my post above
“Look, someone left their wallet here.”
That’s been common parlance for ages.
“Look, someone left their wallet here. Let’s look in it and see if we can figure out who they are.”
Has been recognized as bad grammar since they started writing grammar books, but has nonetheless been commonly used.
But “Sam went to the mall, and they saw…”
With that “they” referring to Sam has no historical precedent to speak of. It’s a novel extension of the singular they used for an abstract person.
It’s not a bad change. It’s probably a good, helpful change to our language. But it’s a change and it feels really weird to anyone who came of age before it was invented.
And the lack of distinction between singular and plural “you”? That is annoying enough that regionally we have “y’all” and “youse”, fixing that problem. I’m not even from one of those regions, but I started using y’all decades ago for clarity in speech, when there might be confusion as to whether I was speaking about one or more people.
Personally, I’m rooting for the plural “theys/thems”.
Since he brought it right to a thread about “trans-stuff,” I think he sussed that it was about gender.
No, it isn’t solely a plural pronoun.
I recommend you write Merriam-Webster and tell them that they’re incorrect. Let us all know how that goes.
You were the one who jumped in with the flip comment about multiple personalities, something which implicitly ties the stigma of mental illness to use of gender-neutral pronouns. You made that statement without even trying first to fact-check, so I’m correcting your ignorance. You can call that whatever you feel like, I guess.
I don’t believe I ever implied it was malice, but it certainly takes a lot of ignorance.
Having actually sat through maybe 2,000+ situations where someone asks “what are your pronouns,” I can say that in every case it was done in a very clear-cut meaningful manner. It’s almost always along the lines of:
"Let’s everyone introduce ourselves and state their preferred pronouns. For example, I’m Skeeter Crawfish, and my preferred pronouns are ‘he’ and ‘him.’ " If the leader of the group doesn’t explain even that little, then you can take an example from everyone else in the audience: "Hi, I’m Jayne, and I go by ‘she’ and ‘her.’ ", etc. Or…ask the leader of the group what the heck they mean?
Fleeing the meeting over momentary confusion sure seems like a nutty over-reaction.