Gender is a long-standing category in languages, and it’s often much more complicated than just male and female:
I find Garfield usually pretty disturbing on its own. (The “its” is referring to the strip, not the very-uncatlike-cat.)
Especially since most very long term posters show up as “Guest”. On this board, at least, that doesn’t tell you anything at all about the poster.
I certainly wouldn’t flag somebody for using male pronouns for me; I just drop a comment into the thread. At least, unless they appeared to be deliberately persisting in it – but that’s never happened here; I generally just get something along the lines of a quick ‘whoops, sorry’ and if they do it again it’s after a gap of time long enough that we’ve probably both forgotten about the prior incident (I don’t know whether I’ve had it happen more than once with the same poster; I’m not keeping track.)
Will that do?
It would be nice to have you back. And I think that, for the foreseeable future, that’s as close as you’re going to get.
I have. I can see what they’re doing, and I think it’s better than consistently using the generic male; but I’d rather they use “they”, if only because the repeated switching seems to me to actively call attention to the gender of the people referred to, which rather contradicts the intended sense of ‘person could be any gender’.
Sorry, that’s not good enough for me. I am seeking a standard in which gender-free language is always acceptable, without exception, and that no one can obligate someone else to employ gendered language.
To me, such a rule defeats the purpose of gender-free language.
Sorry. I enjoy your posting, but i don’t think we can promise that.
Then that’s the end of the story. I might read but I won’t post.
The discussion of your avatar reminds me of an exchange my daughter heard in her science classroom between a middle-school boy and girl discussing potential Halloween costumes. The boy said, “Skeletons are for girls!”
So that’s what I’m going to think of every single time I see your avatar from now on.
My oldest is a toddler and this last Halloween she became obsessed with skeletons (and by extension skeleton dinos, so we had some fun museum trips!), so she would agree wholeheartedly.
FWIW IMHO such would be a very jerkish standard.
I believe that if I am aware of a poster having preferred pronoun I should, within reason, attempt to respect it.
Intentionally using “they” referencing @colinfred, knowing and remembering that he objects to such, would IMHO, be being a jerk. Of course I am likely to forget, goldfish that I am, and may fall into my new normative of “they”, and I’d hope no offense would be taken.
But persisting after a reminder? Rude.
I’d even try to remember your somewhat unique preferences, but would be very unlikely to succeed, maybe just repeating your whole name lots …
I’d ask why it is important to you to have others’s preferences disrespected, but you aren’t posting anymore…
We can’t have gender free language. I don’t think it’s possible.
There are times when it’s necessary to understand the situation to know what chromosomes you have or now, how you may identify.
That expectation goes too far.
Sure it is:
We aren’t talking about language with no words for gender or sex, we are talking about grammatical gender (gendered pronouns, variants of nouns and adjectives, etc)
There is no gender in spoken Mandarin Chinese. There are many languages without genders at all. Here are some of them. Note that it works slightly differently in every language:
I understand that. But you can’t expect it to be the norm. In writing, speaking or thinking. It’s not possible.
Not in this lifetime.
I live here. I post on a board here. I’m not liable to be posting, or thinking in Mandarin Chinese.
In this lifetime there are already languages where it’s true.
My position is that using gender-free pronouns is by definition not “misgendering.” It is simply not making any reference to gender at all.
Gender-free third person pronouns should be treated no differently than gender free pronouns “I” or “thou” or “you.” Gender simply doesn’t enter into it.
It’s like saying I’m mid-identifying your ethnicity if I refer to you as “human” or “a person.”
It’s true for billions of people, and English is already 90% gender neutral - only pronouns are gendered, basically. Imagine how much harder it would be for speakers of a language that genders objects and doesn’t even have a neuter word?
This board does not compute in other languages from its origin.
You can translate it anywhere. How do they fill in when some poster says she, her, him, fae, whichever?
What? I find that number hard to believe.
Nuts and bolts and screws are even gendered
I don’t know what you are asking here?
Which number?
Between most forms of Chinese, Persian, and Tagalog, we easily have millions of people.
Or if you mean the 90% figure - many (most Indo-European ones at least?) languages give grammatical gender to all objects.
In English, you are “she”, I am “he”, and a table is an “it”.
In many, many languages, that’s not the case. A table is a “he”, a chair is a “he”, a door is a “she”, etc.
In Hebrew, the suffix that makes a word plural differs based on whether the word is male (im) or female (ut); in English the suffix is always the same (s).
From the earlier linked wiki page:
Describing something like a power cord as “male” and “female” does not give them grammatical gender; a male extension cord is still an “it” for example. It’s just a shorthand that no one over the age of 12 is likely to screw up.
We don’t speak those languages here. Sorry.