I was asking about a term I hadn’t heard before.
I was wondering if the usage here was Freudian.
Ya lost me there, I’m afraid. What’s Freud got to do with it?
True, but kind of meaningless, given that fully half the American electorate is functionally irrational at this point. Rational or not, there’s certainly no lack of people who sincerely believe that the queer rights movement exists for the specific purpose of turning your kids gay.
“Freudian Slip”.
QuickSilver has been making some questionable statements about trans people and I wondered if the usage of language here was due to an underlying belief that trans rights are being pushed on people.
I know we’ve had plenty of posters suggesting as much on this board in the past, though they’re often more open about it.
I see, thanks.
There’s a weird brouhaha in my profession where, as best as i can tell, some people think that others are trying to turn people trans. So i think it’s worth being careful with the terminology.
Either I’m misremembering your profession or man you folks have changed since I had dealings with you lot on a regular basis!
Though My best friend runs a chapter of an engineering group, and boy has that gotten politicized to the extent of being completely useless for professional networking or education.
I’m a casualty actuary. And mostly, we stick to our knitting and do our jobs. But our professional society has published an intention to increase diversity in the profession and to make the profession more welcoming to various minorities. I would guess that most members have completely ignored this, but there’s been a lot of feedback in both directions. The opposition ranges from “concerned about reverse discrimination” to overtly racist. But probably the weirdest was when an article was published by a staff member who included pronouns in her by-line, and it elicited a response from someone who accused her of something like “pushing transgenderism”.
Ah, yes, a classic. Our indicating that we do not assume the “automatic default”, means we have an “agenda” to overthrow and replace what it referred to. So designating pronouns = agenda to make us all renounce “normal” binary identities. Comes from the same place as cultural diversity = anti-white-anglo opression, and Secular society = persecuting Christians.
Because there is nothing more radical then cis-male me announcing that my pronouns are he/him. To be clear, I’m agreeing with you on the stupidity of jumping on someone making that announcement.
Heck, back in the day I would have loved if people had made that a standard part of their email signature - worked a lot with people on the Indian subcontinent (mostly by email) and struggled figuring out if various non-European names were male or female.
Exactly. Set aside political considerations, or supporting people’s identities, it’s just pragmatic to make communication easier.
As a cisgendered, late middle-age white male, I’m perfectly willing to use whatever pronouns someone requests, but I hope they understand that 1. I’ll probably screw up now and again, if the person wants a “they” or “it” and 2. if they want something completely non-standard like “Vis” or “Eir”, I’m going to screw up a lot, and probably figure out ways not to use pronouns at all. Is that fair? I’m asking honestly.
I once helped teach a class that had about a dozen people who weren’t “cis” in it. As best as i could tell, every one of them picked a different set of pronouns. We had some he/she/they people, we but had Xi and Xe, and Ze and Maybe one Ze used zim and another used zer.
I, who at that point was still struggling with the singular “they”, took great pleasure in correcting the young hip trans-friendly teachers who tended to give up and call all of those people by “they”. “I think Jay uses ‘ze’”, I would say while we discussed the class.
So honestly, no, that’s not unreasonable. And pro-tip: it’s almost always acceptable to just use the person’s name.
That’s basically what I meant when I said “figure out ways not to use pronouns at all.” Frankly I have enough trouble remembering names, remembering non-traditional pronouns is chancy at best. So I’m stuck with using “John” 6 times in 3 sentences.
I have only seen it in the context of “we don’t hate trans people, just the ones who ask for too many rights/ask too loudly”
I don’t mean to belittle people using their chosen personal pronouns, but am I the only one for whom these particular ones trigger a mental picture of Discworld vampires?
“Zer darkness of ze mind’s eye!” < thunderclap >
My brain makes weird connections, I guess.
It’s not as bad as that time I had to say that “Rafaella Gabriela and Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla and
Albert Andreas Armadillo found an aardvark, a kangaroo and a rhinoceros, and now that aardvark and that kangaroo and that rhinoceros belong respectively to: Rafaella Gabriela Sarsaparilla, and Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla, and Albert Andreas Armadillo”. Because saying all those nouns over and over can really wear you down.
Feel free to throw a “OK boomer” at me, but I’m willing to use whatever pronouns someone wants, but I also think that the transgender community needs to settle on standards.
I see that we need a pronoun for “not male or female and not they or it”, which I assume is what Xi/Xe/Ze represent. If there are differences there, I’m willing to learn - but I’m old so it will probably take a while. And we do need pronouns, so we don’t have:
which is exhausting to read, much less say. Although in that particular sentence I don’t know that pronouns would allow for clarity in any case.
To be clear, it’s usually not those who identify primarily as trans who tend to insist on the alternate pronouns. Most trans people are still use he or she, while possibly accepting “they.” It’s more the nonbinary (affectionately called enbies, from “NBs”) who may insist on other pronouns. But even the majority of them accept “they.”
Those who do insist on other pronouns tend to resist standardization. They’re the ones exploring the gender spectrum. They have a lot of terms that I don’t even know, which I have to look up. They’re still exploring, and so don’t really want to settle down into labels.
In general, everyone in the wider trans classification (including embies) tend to be forgiving of pronoun slip-ups simply by necessity. You’re not going to get in trouble for using the wrong one unless you insist after being corrected. And they even tolerate forgetting as long as you apologize. (Though they do notice is someone seems to be doing it passive aggressively.)
I actually slipped up once in the YouTube comments when I was tired, and referred to a feminine trans creator who I love (and even support on Patreon) as “he.” I don’t even know if it was autocorrect or if my brain was thinking of her older videos when she would present as male before coming out. But it happens. I got a polite comment telling me that I messed up, so I silently edited my comment.
Nobody is perfect, and no one expects perfection.
ISTM as a cisgendered middle-aged white female that if you try not to screw up, and apologize when you inevitably do screw up sometimes, and don’t get all stressed out about the inevitability of screwing up sometimes due to increasing pronoun complexity, that’s as much as anyone can ask for. Transgender/nonbinary/etc. people should not be assholes to other people who are honestly doing their best not to misgender them, and IME most such people are super understanding and appreciative of honest good-faith attempts to acknowledge their identities and preferences.
Not using pronouns at all when avoidable is a fine solution, and personally I wish that English as a language would just cut this Gordian knot by adopting one non-gender-specific singular third-person pronoun for general use. We don’t indicate gender when we say “I” or “you”, so why do we need to indicate gender when we say “pronoun referring to other individual who is neither me nor you”?
I’m more radical than you and want a pronoun for “singular individual whose gender may be male or female or neither but this pronoun isn’t telling you which”. And I want it to be the default pronoun for everybody, whether they have a traditional binary gender identification or not.
I realize that this is what Acsenray, for example, is trying to accomplish with that “E” pronoun neologism, which I’m not really on board with because it reads to me like someone in an early 20th-century novel saying “he” in cockney dialect, so still looking for alternatives.
And when we have our non-gender-specific default third-person singular pronoun in general use, gender-binary traditionalists can put in their profiles that they prefer the old-fashioned gender-specific “she/her” or “he/him” pronouns for themselves, and the rest of us will make the effort to use them as requested.
You’ve just describing “they” as it is current used by many. There was something I read a while back about a progression of “singular they.” The jist, as I rememeber it
- Singular they is not used.
- Singular they is used in hypotheticals and speaking figuratively. (e.g. "everyone has their floors)
- Singular they is used when gender is unknown.
- Singular they is used when gender is known but non-binary.
- Singular they is used by default, even when gender is known to be binary.
There are already people at level 5. I notice that Matt Parker, of Numberphile and Stand Up Maths fame, uses “they” all the time in his videos for people he knows. And I know for sure these people do not identify as nonbinary. And yet it sounds completely natural, like it’s how he’s always talked.
There was even a recent video where, for a joke, Matt’s voice changed into someone else’s (Grant Sanderson from 3blue1brown). The voice referred to “his videos” where Matt had previously said “their videos.”