Unlike some newspeak, it’s no skin off my back what you call yourself. So I don’t like it or dislike it. But in general, I don’t want language to be contorted to the point where no one knows what each other are saying anymore.
This case is no exception. The mitigating factor is that I don’t consider brain gender to be important at all, and body gender to be important only with regards to my prospective sexual partners. So really, I am trying to avoid the slippery linguistic slope.
Do YOU have any concise terms to refer to ALL members of a given physical sex, that you would not consider offensive to those of a dissimilar brain gender?
So wait…
In other words, the whole thing is really not a psychological issue, but more of a physiological one?
Also, sometimes people say offensive things because they don’t know better. I think the SDMB would be a better place if people were nice to such people to fight ignorance than displaying hatred toward them.
But that’s not really much of a problem in this discussion right now.
What confuses me is this: is it not tough noogies on you if someone refuses to use these terms to refer to you?
Tough noogies is not the world’s most convincing argument, I fear.
I approach things from a linguistic stance, as language is far more important to me than gender. And I tend to believe that words carry no innate authority, and that no individual has control over what a word means except when the individual is using or parsing the word, and that there’s no such thing as a proper or improper use of a word, but rather there’s more and less effective use of the language.
In that respect, arguing over definitions is pointless. Know what I mean when I use a word, and tell me what you mean when you use a word, and that’s about the best we can do.
For myself, gender is an ethereal concept: I have no more visceral understanding of “gender” than I have of “soul.” I hear other people referring to their own gender or their own soul, and I can respect that it’s an important concept to them, but I can’t understand it beyond that.
“Sex” is something I can understand. The parrot that pooped on my shoulder this morning was female. I can pee standing up. This is a concept that proves useful in my everyday life.
When I use pronouns, when I refer to folks, animals, or objects as male or female, I am accustomed to doing it by physical sex.
Out of respect for folks to whom “gender” is an important concept, I’ll try to use the pronouns, the words that are appropriate to them. At the same time, I’ll understand that there’s no more agreement on the origin of “gender” than there is on the origin of “soul”; I can’t get upset when different people understand the concept differently, because my own understanding of the concept is nil.