I thought as part of our efforts here to be more inclusive we were making a deliberate move to be more gender-neutral in how we refer to other posters, hence the “they.” I think in the past there was/is the perception of this place being male dominated, so using something other than “they” (more often than not, “he”) reinforces that perception.
IMHO anyone with a preferred gender pronoun can always request their preference, but it’s not always going to be remembered. I remember posters much more from their avatar anyway, which doesn’t always hint at their gender, so the neutral “they” seems safer and more respectful when referring to them.
Also, i am making a conscious effort to switch to “they” unless i am very very certain someone prefers a different pronoun. Partly, it’s because i have a lot of friends who prefer “they” and I’m trying to get used to it.
Partly, i think it’s a good practice. In most cases (including most of what people post on message boards) the gender of the person isn’t, or shouldn’t be, very important. And just as i prefer “Ms” for all women (and really hope that “Mx” catches on for all people) i think it’s better not to draw attention to a person’s gender when it’s not relevant.
I think it’s overboard to attempt to be inclusive of people - and to extend it to everyone - who MAY constitute 1% of the population if that. The “they” issue was generated on behalf of the transgender folks and if they wish to be called “they” I suppose one could honor that. But to shift the common usage as a form of deference or respect for such a small portion of the population seems silly. I imagine we can find all sorts of characteristics and qualities and features of the population that are found in similarly small numbers. But we don’t defer to them for their particular needs. Yes, overly woke and silly.
There are some posters here whom I have interacted with extensively, and know many details about their life and work, but for whom gender isn’t actually one of the details I know. This would be quite rare in face-to-face interactions, of course, because for most people, gender is visually obvious… but we don’t see each others’ faces, here. Some posters use a picture of themself as their avatar, but even then, it’s not always obvious that the picture is of themself, as opposed to, say, some celebrity whom they identify with. And some names have an implicit gender to them, of course, but not all. And there aren’t actually all that many cues in someone’s own writing about their gender: “I” and “me” can work for either, and something like mentioning one’s husband or wife makes one gender more likely, but not definite. You can go by what pronouns others use for a person, but then, how sure are you that they know a person’s gender, either?
Some message boards have an option for gender icons that you can choose to display next to your name and avatar. If we had those, then yes, it would be easy to tell (if the person chose to display it). But I don’t think there’s any easy way to add that to Discourse (easy for us, that is: I’m sure the programmers could if they wanted to).
Try 40%. In this thread, I count 12 people who have some indication of gender in their username and/or avatar, and 8 who don’t. And that’s being generous, because in those cases where there’s some indication, I don’t know if it’s always an accurate indication.
This is as good a place as any. I will try to remember. Although… As i compared that post just below this, i thought, “i remember someone here saying she prefers to be referred to with “she” pronouns”, but i couldn’t remember who it was.
Fwiw, now that various places, including my work, have started asking for pronouns, I’ve decided my answer is “any”. I’ve been called “she”, “he”, “they”, and “xe” (in that order of frequency, as best as i can guess) and i realized that I’m fine with all of those. I am afab, and usually go by “she” pronouns, but if the guy giving me my takeout food addresses me as “sir”, i just say “thanks” and pay. (And despite having a typically female body, this kind of thing isn’t terribly uncommon, either in the winter when I’m bundled up, or over the phone.)
Erm, no. “They” as a singular pronoun when you are unsure about gender is hundreds of years old. I use “they” online because I don’t know your gender or because I am speaking of a hypothetical person, not because of “deference” to trans people. If anything, it is more out of a deference to women, who may well be bothered by the default assumption in nearly every context being maleness.
Sometimes a specific trans (or not trans) person requests to be identified as “they” as their chosen pronouns, which is fine. But it isn’t the reason that I, at least, use singular “they” when gender is unknown; that has more to do with avoiding the assumption of maleness.
Sometimes I catch myself writing out a bunch of "he"s in reference to a hypothetical or unknown person, and then I try to go back and change it to “they”. Not because I think the hypothetical or unknown person is trans and identifies as “they”, but because I don’t want to exclude women.
Just as I suppose you missed all the posts pointing out that, on a semi-anonymous message board, many people use “they” because the friggin’ gender of the person being addressed is unknown.
I’ve gotten “sir” a few times by phone, usually when I had some sort of upper respiratory thing going on that affected my voice. As for in-person, my body shape is female, as is my face. I’m not exactly the frilly girly-girl type, but in the absence of confounding issues such as a thick coat and hood/hat, I’m pretty definitely visually female.
QFT.
As for misgendering, I hope mods take context and intent into account, since I’d rather not get punted for a lapse of memory with no hostile intent.
Just to confirm, no, we’re not going to ban someone for occasional honest mistakes. That’s why we have human moderators instead of robots (well, other than @engineer_comp_geek ), so we can look at context.
But that’s kind of my point: if I misgender someone on purpose, to be a jerk, and then falsely claim I’m doing nothing of the sort — that kind of looks exactly like me misgendering someone by accident and then honestly saying so.
Sure, maybe I’ll get the benefit of the doubt, but maybe I won’t — but if I don’t misgender someone, there’s no question; I’m simply and only not misgendering them, and full stop.
While we have to be more careful online where people are vague about who they are, when people use “they” to refer to a known and declared “he/him” or “she/her” an an IRL situation, it comes off as unbelievably affected and pompous hypercorrection. There’s absolutely a herd mentality around this.
People ought to be equally sensitive about degendering people as misgendering people. It’s the same kind of disrespect.
There is a poster here that I would have sworn up and down was male. I saw a post 2 days ago and was like, “He’s a woman?” So I’m sticking with “they”.
I am respectful of gender preferences and have tried to be careful to use ‘they’ unless I’m 99% sure of the preferred gender of the poster to whom I’m referring.
But I will say, the use of ‘they’ as a singular non-gendered pronoun has confused me at times, not so much in the boards here, but in other situations. Such as, I sat down to watch a show that Mrs. Solost was watching in the middle of the series, and one character kept referring to a non-gendered character as ‘they’. I had to ask Mrs. Solost to which group of people the character was referring. She said, yeah, that confused me for awhile, too.
I think someone should come up with a new singular non-gendered pronoun, similar to how ‘Ms.’ was coined back in the 60s or 70s.
I’ve had plenty of clerks at grocery stores or other retail outlets refer to me as ma’am even when I was rocking a full beard. If most of your customers are women, ma’am is just an automatic response and I certainly don’t take offense. While it’s obvious from my avatar that I’m a guy (that’s clearly a male ork), it doesn’t bother me in the least for someone to refer to me as they here in writing. There’s a lot of people here and I can reasonably see someone not being sure, or, like that grocery store clerk, getting into the habit of using they. No biggie.
In person, I would probably be mildly annoyed by someone referring to me individually as they. Not annoyed enough to say anything unless I was expected to regularly interact with them though.
