It’s not like language has ever been issue free. Just rewrite. “Joe, who had a good year last year, plays for the Yankees.” “Joe plays for the Yankees, who had a good year last year.”
Or do what most people appear to do, write ambiguously and insist that it’s perfectly clear from context what they meant. (Sometimes they’re even right.)
They’re grammatical constructs. The same person can be referred to as ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘she,’ ‘they,’ or ‘one’ depending on the sentence.
Claiming that you get to dictate the pronouns that someone has to use for you when they’re not even talking to you? That isn’t about pronouns or about grammar. It’s about social gender, which means it’s about one’s desire to impose a constructed vision of themselves on others’ speech, but mostly on others’ view of them. It’s a performance for the audience of one, the silly person making demands that they always be ‘they.’ I am not obligated to participate in your nonsense.
If they were mean about it, yes. But if I insisted that I were plural, I’d probably benefit from being taken down a few notches, even if it bothered me.
Meh. I put that word in there myself.
But I take your point. I hated my name being shortened when I was a little kid. And when I was a teenager, I got used to it.
It costs semantic clarity. ‘Xe/Xim/Xir/Xaboodle’ is ugly, laughable, and difficult, but less confusing than ‘they are/they do’ for a singular antecedent.
How about I call the crazy damn fucker a slur, a profanity, and an obscenity instead? That seems more socially constructive.
My daughter is dating a they/them person. Sometimes it’s momentarily confusing when she says “I’m meeting them for lunch,” and I automatically interpret it as more than one person. That is nowhere near as awkward as me saying, “well, I can look at that person and determine their gender based on their appearance, regardless of what they think, so I am going to use pronouns they have specifically asked me not to.” I can’t imagine that would do my relationship with daughter’s partner much good at all. But, yeah, it does sound a little bit strange sometimes.
“There’s someone over there in the distance. They’re trying to tell us something, but I can’t quite make out what they are saying.”
Every native English speaker uses this construction. All the time. It’s not like someone went through their Chaucer and picked something unintelligible.
And again: either you think there is a need/use for gender neutral pronouns, in which case we make something work because there is a need, or you don’t think there is any use for gender neutral pronouns, in which case let’s talk about that.
And I use ‘they’ for a singular indefinite person all the time! It appears repeatedly in the OP!
That’s not what I have a problem with. This person is not Mr Nobody, not a shadow nor a hypothetical. This is an concrete individual who seeks to make things more difficult for me when I proofread what I write for clarity. It may be because of sheer pretension, or it may be because of mental illness, or just social experimentation.
But when I throw up my hands and just say ‘she’ because it’s actually semantically correct–and we can all see your boobs, kid–then I’m the bad guy?
There is a social utility in being nice to people. There is also a social utility in calling out the nakedness of the emperor. I’m not always sure which is best. But I am not obligated to encourage your mental illness.
Ok. So your position really is that all humans are either male or female, and maybe secondarily that you can tell which they are by looking at them.
Why don’t you just say so, instead of making this somehow about language?
What you really want is to tell these people that they are a man or woman, regardless of what they might think, and that’s why you don’t want to use any other pronouns.
It’s only semantically correct if you ignore the reality of gender being about more than genitals. You’re free to say “Well when I grew up boobs=she, and I don’t give a shit if she feels differently.”, you might even be correct that some kids with boobs are just pretentious about pronouns, but you’re also ignoring a shift in understanding and experience of gender. That’s why you’re the bad guy.
That’s exactly what I complain of! That sort of, um, lexical merger (I’m not sure if that’s the right term) is what I am resisting! One of several things I hate about the German language is the ambiguity of ‘Sie.’
And if it’s just oneself, well. Maybe that person is ‘multiple’ for some reason, in which case it sort of makes sense to me. Or maybe they’re going through some big gender stuff, or maybe they are having major identity issues of another kind, and the right response there probably varies, with agreeableness just being a cautious starting point. But if it’s a form of ‘I’m not like the other girls,’ I think I should probably just go with ‘he,’ and see how this person likes that.
Look, I admit I’m being crabby about this. I find this usage a lot more annoying in practice than I expected to in theory, and I have discovered that I actually *hate *it. I’m not just rolling my eyes, not just feeling aggrieved on behalf of the English language and its conventions, but annoyed. No, you are not plural. Knock it off and stop making it harder to write about you just because you’re so special. You’re non-binary? Well, we all are, aren’t we? Who really embodies the gender binary anyway?
And note, the ‘good’ result, what people like this are going to get with apparent compliance, is the eye-rolling, the laughing behind the back, and virtual scare quotes in inflection when ‘they’ is spoken aloud. But they go for it anyway, because they’re seeking control in an adolescent way.
It’s not that I don’t sympathize. And it’s much less self-destructive than the stuff I did for control as an adolescent. But there are limits to what you can expect of others when you’re reinventing yourself.
And the thing is, people who do this probably aren’t being jerks about it. It’s everybody else jumping in to tell me I’m doing social interaction wrong. But see, it’s not about them either. The normals playing along are feeding into the non-binary person’s dissociation, and I’m not convinced that isn’t a form of cruel group play.
The deeper I dig into this, the more problems I see with it. There’s a lot of gendered language that are part of manners and politeness. I’m not seeing a real answer to all of that social difficulty, sir, madam, or bisex.
And I just started out worrying about my own sentences sounding confusing to me and probably to others.
So, ‘he’ it is.
My emphasis. Why don’t you err on the side of caution and assume what I’ve bolded above? It’s much more likely to be the case than the person considering themselves ‘multiple’.
Why do you go to all this trouble justifying your choice to do what’s easiest for you? It’s because you actually realise it makes you the asshole, right?
It’s used though when the person is undetermined as shorthand for saying “he or she”. “If someone comes to the door, tell them that I am out” means “…tell he or she than I am out”. I wouldn’t see someone who was clearly a man in the distance and say “They are trying…”, I would say “He is trying…”
I guess the question is whether a particular individual is happy with me using “he or she” to refer to them if we’re using the argument that “the singular ‘them’ is actually quite common”
No, because I’m not a gender essentialist!
OK. Let me try to explain where I’m coming from.
Consider languages with no neuter gender. I know that my inkpen is not anymore a lady than is my pencil. Gender is an arbitrary linguistic construct. But ‘la pluma’ takes feminine adjectives and ‘el lápiz’ masculine. Yes, this is ridiculous, and English mostly averts it. But it is how Indo-European languages do things.
A pronoun is not a noun. It is a grammatical particle that acts like a noun. And no word is the thing described. There are cases where ‘he’ and ‘she’ are used as nouns; but in their usual use, they are pronouns. Their use is determined by semiotic convention, like the conjugation of ‘to be.’
And formal English actually has a long-standing conventional answer to the question of a third-person personal pronoun describing a person of unknown sex. That person may have any or no sexual identity, but the pronoun takes the ‘masculine’ gender: ‘he/him’ pronouns. That’s arbitrary, and rooted in a lot of Indo-European gender silliness and Anglo-Saxon sexism, but it’s a word’s gender, not a person’s. And I appreciate that it isn’t ‘they,’ because it avoids muddying the number distinction, which actually does seem to reflect a more meaningful distinction in reality than gender does.
Informal English uses ‘they’ for the same thing, at least in my Midwestern dialect. But there’s a pretty good reason that’s informal.
The desire to make English more like, say, Indonesian, and merge ‘he’ & ‘she,’ is appealing to some of us. But it’s impractical and highly unlikely, because it takes away commonly-used meaning.
So what we get are individuals trying to define themselves out. And it comes off as a bit mad. ‘Xe’ doesn’t read as no gender, but a fourth gender, after ‘he/she/it.’ So they try ‘they.’ But that muddies number. It’s doable, but it’s so awkward, and it costs us some semantic distinctions when we use it.
While I don’t call myself ‘non-binary,’ my online identity is at this point a bit ambiguous. I get called both ‘he’ and ‘she’ online, as well as ‘they.’ I could correct people, but I choose not to. (And I really wish certain posters wouldn’t chime in to correct people when I don’t do it myself.) And online, I have the luxury of just not telling people what pronouns to use. I’m exploiting the very kind of thing I’m complaining about, and have been for years. That’s why I feel like a hypocrite!
But if this sort of cultivated ambiguity is now spilling out into meatspace interactions, I’m starting to wonder if my own gender ambiguity has been a mistake. I do this in text, behind a whole lot of walls. I think I’d look like (even more of) a fool trying to do it in real life.
And since I don’t really believe that gender even is a real thing (the Moon is feminine in French and masculine in German; the Sun is the other way around), I just want us to stop making a big deal about one’s preferred gender. I know this won’t happen, though.
Here you’re mixing two things: The gender of words, which is slightly odd but likely just a transfer from having gendered words for animals depending on their sex. And the gender of people, which, despite what you believe, is a real thing. I really wish people would start realizing that lived experience is a non-blinded experiment with n=1.
In which I’d like this post to start off by expressing my disapproval of thread titles starting with “in which”.
I think both of these posts do a good job of summarizing the meat of your argument.
It’s incorrect to argue that we can’t use “they” because we can’t tell who it refers to. Pronouns can always present that problem. It’s up to the writer or speaker to make the matter clear to their audience. It’s incorrect to argue that “he” is more appropriate than “they” in the case of an unknown gender, because that rule changed in the common usage years ago. It is incorrect to assume that anyone is asking you to use a gender neutral pronoun out of a sense of pretentiousness. I find that assumption unbelievably insulting. Whose life, exactly, is made easier by choosing to be publicly asexual, or pansexual?
Get the fuck over yourself. You’re not being “crabby”. You’re being a reactionary, disgusting, self-justifying whiner, who came to this thread for support in your hateful attitude. No, it’s not acceptable to dislike people you don’t understand and blame it on their use of language.
Kindly fuck the fuck off.
“Pretension” isn’t about making your life easier, it’s about being special.
I don’t mean that anyone is specifically claiming to be [gender whatever] to be special, but “It doesn’t make your life easier” isn’t an argument that it’s not pretension.
If I understand the argument for pretension, it is that someone is claiming “they/them” under false pretenses as a way of garnering attention AKA being special. Hence my counter argument that claiming an alternative gender status is unlikely to be a positive experience. I find it unlikely, myself, that many people are pretending to a different gender in order to use they/them (or even just asking to be called they/them) but I suppose that some people think that even negative attention is better than none. Espousing this idea, however, is akin to stating that women make fake assault claims for attention. It is dismissive, and harms legitimate claimants.
A-fuckin’-men.
The OP (the post) is perplexing, firstly because it’s entirely unclear why the OP (the poster) is so outraged over this issue. The second point is that, although I have rarely if ever come across someone who insisted on being referred to in gender-neutral terms, if someone did, it would seem to be a matter of common courtesy to do so. So the OP in that respect seems deficient in that virtue.
Also of note is that if the OP knew and cared as much about language as they claim, they would appreciate that cultural changes are one of the major drivers of how languages evolve. And one of the cultural changes we’re experiencing is a move away from male dominance of, well, pretty much everything, and toward a more egalitarian view of gender roles. I’ve noticed that writers who are sensitive to language do tend to either use gender-neutral pronouns in contexts where gender is indeterminate, or alternatively, to preferentially use the feminine pronouns. I admit that I tend to be a traditionalist in that regard and don’t always make the effort to do the same. The problem with the OP I suspect is that they would get their shorts in a knot and pointedly refuse to do so, claiming a great respect for language, but not so much for the people who speak it.
Visit any socialist community and post this opinion and see how that works out for you.