This is not a pit thread and I’m not calling anyone out in particular. I’ve just noticed a growing trend on this board. Poster A is male, (or female). Poster B has interacted with A enough, or is in a thread where the preponderance of he or she pronouns about A clearly show A’s gender. B makes a long post about A consistently using they/them.
I’m not a fan of singular they for known individuals at the best of times. Although I’d respect if and use it for someone who specifically requests if for themselves, it’s pretty much always better to use “he/she” constructs or repeat their name when unsure. However, extending that when the gender of someone is known and clearly there to see is just silly.
I have in the past had a habit of assuming anyone I’m talking to online is male and I have been trying to shake myself of that. If you’re referring to the post I think you are, I didn’t know that person’s gender and didn’t want to assume. I have since seen other people refer to them as male, so now I know.
I disagree with the OP. Using non-gendered pronouns always and everywhere is the direction society is moving towards. I too struggled with the singular “they” for awhile. Not anymore. It’s the default to be used in writing everywhere. With only explicitly requested exceptions.
And what am I supposed to do when I don’t actually know the gender or how they – uh – that person would prefer to be spoken of? Yes, there is he/she, but it’s so unwieldy.
‘They’ is not incorrect. Its use has been expanded, and in my mind that’s a good thing.
There are posters I’ve interacted with here for over 20 years whose gender I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head. I know some people remember personal details but I’m not one of them. But where I am certain of someone’s gender and that they have no other preferred pronouns, I do tend to use the gender-specific ones.
If you don’t like the pronouns people are using for you, do speak up to indicate this. But everyone gets to establish their own pronoun preferences.
If I truly know whether a poster is a man or a woman, I’ll use the correct gender. But even after 9 years on the Dope, there are times when I forget, especially when, sometimes, a man has a rather feminine-sounding user name or vice versa.
Because the people using it are not using it about generic people, they are using it about specific people, which is not good; then taking it a step further and using it on specific people whoise gender they know.
Yes, this. Half the time, I don’t even notice their user name when I’m responding, so there’e no way I’m going to keep track of their preferred gender. Once again, posting on the Internet is unlike real life.
I don’t think I’ve ever been at all ambiguous about my gender here; I don’t mention it in every post or anything, but when it comes up it comes up and I’ve never been coy about it or anything. I’ve been posting here for many years now, yet just the other day another long time poster called me “she”. Apparently, they thought they knew, but didn’t.
I personally do not always recall the gender of another poster unless I’ve been interacting with that person for quite some time, as many as there are, and I don’t usually think it’s an urgent enough issue to go digging into someone’s profile (which rarely includes that info anyway) to get the right pronoun for a comment when there’s a safe neutral that very few object to (I don’t mind being referred to as “they” by someone in that position, and I’m quite female).
Not meaning to be insulting (this isn’t the Pit, after all), but I think you’re making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill here.
You’re making the unwarranted assumption that that’s always known info. There are people I’ve been interacting with in the MMP for years whose gender I’m a little hazy on until/unless they say something that clarifies that issue. You may have a good enough memory for very minor details that you would be able to identify the gender of any poster who’s been here longer than, say, a dozen posts. I do not, and I doubt I’m the only one.
Based on your username, I can guess that you’re male, but I’m not 100% confident on that and even if you tell me, I probably won’t remember if we go some time without interacting. I usually don’t consider a poster’s gender anywhere near as important as intelligence (including writing ability), reasonable behavior, and ideally a sense of humor. It’s certainly not important enough to me to spend several minutes mining through someone’s back posts to find out whether they’re male, female, or other when a perfectly valid neutral option exists.
Exactly. I’ve been playing Botticelli in the Game Room for most of the past year, and I only just yesterday discovered that one of the other regular players is female. The poster’s gender not being at all relevant to the game, it simply never came up before, and matters not now that it has - I’m not going to interact with her any differently now that I know what color booties she wore.
As to the OP’s second point, “they” is much more concise and elegant than “he/she”, and I prefer it on those grounds alone.
I have mentioned my gender here on occasion, but I certainly don’t expect people to remember it. I couldn’t give a rat’s hinderparts if I’m referred to as They rather than She.
Come to think of it, I’d much rather be correctly referred to as They rather than incorrectly as He, or even she/he or he/she.
There is nothing new in referring to a single person of unknown sex as “they” in casual English. It goes back centuries. Doing this gets corrected in very formal circumstances (i.e., in English classes and in edited publications), but it’s not new at all. See this website:
As it happens, when I closed this thread, I went to the “What were you THINKING” thread, and the first post I saw was Smapti’s post about Banquet_Bear, that I think was the one to which he referred in post #3 of this thread. He called BB “they” through the entire post. It wasn’t distracting and neither added nor detracted from the point he was trying to make.