While gender-neutral languages are awesome, the fact that we are speaking a gendered language means we are often communicating gender. Having to communicate gender is the cost of speaking English.
If you refuse to use a trans person’s neopronouns, you will be intelligible as denying their gender. If you internally respect them, but externally misgender them or complain about their pronouns, then your internal intentions are unintelligible. Language is a two-way street. You have a responsibility to make yourself understood, by using the pronouns that match your intentions.
Also, consider that a neopronoun may be perfectly intelligible to everyone as-is. You certainly understand the meaning of Legend’s hex code, #LEG3ND, right? It’s intelligible. When it comes to neopronouns like Legend’s, I think you may be mistaken.; this might not be about intelligibility. In Legend’s case, at least, you understand neopronouns perfectly well. You simply disagree.
English has a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. Calling someone a they/them isn’t denying their gender. There is no reason not to use they/them. Gender isn’t built into the language like it is in some even weirder languages (A chair doesn’t have a gender in English).
I understand it perfectly well, but yes, I do disagree. Not about their gender identity, but about how pronouns work. The way I see it, the whole point with pronouns is to use a widely applicable shorthand to refer to something or someone. If everyone wants to be unique and have their own pronouns, then we might as well not use any pronouns and just refer to everybody by their name.
Edit: Oh yeah and as gendered pronouns are an attempt to communicate gender, then no, I have very little idea what sort of gender the pronoun “legend” is supposed to communicate. I understand the word but not what it means in this context.
Well, no. In the context of gendered pronouns being available and the norm of the language, intentionally using they/them instead of someone’s identified pronouns is a disrespect. You are not bending the whole of the most widely-spoken language on Earth by yourself and even if you could, starting with the effective erasure of minority gender identity would be terrible form.
Right, but as I understand it you made a claim that using they/them as a singular gender neutral pronoun was bending the language, which isn’t correct. Unless you meant something else?
I was saying was that insisting on using they/them pronouns on someone who has requested otherwise would be a disrespect. The “bending the language” I referred to was in overwriting all preferred alternative pronouns with they/them, as the commentor was proposing doing that.
Isn’t it even more audacious to think that everyone should start referring to every queer person by their custom pronouns? Neopronouns are already an attempt to bend the language, and I’m just saying that it’s bending that language in the exact wrong direction because it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, instead just building on top of that.
It’s as audacious as requesting to be referred to by a shortening of your name, or a nickname, or a changed name. To be honest, it’s less audacious than asking that someone use your name instead of some generic identifier.
No language is being bent, in 99.9% of cases the pronouns being used have always existed in English, the remaining 0.1% are the ‘custom pronouns’ you’re thinking of and are an edge case that is effectively a non-issue to accommodate. I have a queer friend group and live in an extremely queer-friendly city and I literally know just one person who prefers a non-standard pronoun and am happy to accommodate that.
Though I’m pretty queer, I somewhat agree? If I could, I’d go back in time and change first names to demarcate gender identity in a consistent way so we could just use they/them, as you say.
That said, none of us can go back in time, and though we may have the same goal, a goal is not a plan. I’ve yet to see a better method than neopronouns of forcing people (who would usually rather not) to think about gender in new ways, and thus allow people to present how they wish under our language restricted social context.
Think of it like tossing in an outlier to more effectively pull the average somewhere. Every xey/xem pulls us closer as a society to giving a shit about this, and that’s the first step to making progress. Even if it seems to be pissing. A buncha people off in the process
Why would we need first names to demarcate gender identity in a consistent way in order to use they/them for everyone? In my native language we have some names that are more ambivalent about gender than others and we’re doing just fine with a single genderless third person singular pronoun.
I suspect that a lot of cis people would be pissed about being referred to as they/them as well, but they can suck it up. I said this in a different comment here, but I can see that being useful with people who are stuck on that he/she framework. But I still think of this as an unnecessary one step back to take two steps forward, when it could just be taking one step forward.
Is it not just as audacious to expect everyone to fit themselves to the pronouns you want to use? How would you feel about others arbitrarily deciding to use a different pronoun for you?
My whole point here has been that pronouns should have nothing to do with gender, so somebody using a different pronoun to refer to me would not affect me beyond mild annoyance at somebody lying about me by spreading information about my gender if the gendered pronoun isn’t the right one. On the other hand a pronoun that doesn’t carry information about gender can’t misgender a person.
When you have the choice to do something, and you don’t do that thing, you’re communicating that you don’t want to do that thing.
When you have the choice to gender someone correctly, and you don’t gender them, you’re communicating that you don’t want to gender them.
This is called de-gendering and many people will take your willful refusal to do the kind thing as a form of relative cruelty. Because kindness and cruelty are relative.
Also pronouns are usually shorter than names, so using neopronouns saves time over names.
I am bad at remembering names. Remembering a set of pronouns is at least as hard as remembering a name. Pronouns help when I can’t remember names. Having to remember custom pronouns defeats the purpose of pronouns.
All that being said, I’ve never met someone IRL who hasn’t picked one of the three most common pronouns sets (he, her, or they), so I see this as largely hypothetical. The internet does tend to be a space for people to test their more extreme beliefs.
I would argue that using they/them is gendering someone correctly. They are gender-agnostic pronouns and can refer to any gender, combination of genders, or lack thereof. They are only potentially insulting in that they are less specific-- which is the entire point of a pronoun. I think if it’s clear from other interactions that you accept someone’s gender identity, it’s pretty dumb to be criticized for not being as specific as someone would want you to be when using a term that’s supposed to be general.
It’s insulting when it’s going out of your way to do it. If you only ever used they/them for everyone, it’d just be the norm. But if you call everyone who wants he, she, or they by exactly what they prefer, and neopronouns also as they, you’re treating them differently.
Fwiw I both agree that fundamentally neopronouns aren’t helping with overall gender perception but also that if someone prefers them I’ll do my best to accomodate because it doesn’t hurt me to do so.
I’ve never actually met someone irl who uses neopronouns, so I haven’t been able to test how I would actually respond. I tend to use they/them pretty often, including as a replacement for he/she, so I would probably use that unless there was a very strong preference not to. If I did refuse to use a neopronoun for some reason, I’m still not sure that that would qualify as treating them more differently than I would be if I used the neopronouns-- either I would be breaking their preferences or my understanding/usage of the language, there would be no way to behave entirely the same as the situation itself is different. It would certainly be kinder of me to use the neopronouns and for that reason I probably would, but I would not actually believe that to be more correct than using “they”, so I’m not really sure.
Do neopronouns typically convey a specific gender identity? It would make more sense to use them if they did, but afaik there is no consistent mapping of neopronoun to gender identity, which makes the argument for using neopronouns instead of “they” kind of moot-- if they do not signify gender then you would not be affirming someone’s gender by using them, only their language preferences.
Personally I don’t believe language preference is something that must be accommodated in the same way that identity is-- for example I have met cis people who acknowledge that they are cis mechanically but for ideological reasons refuse to be called cis. This makes no sense to me; if the definition of a term is valid then the term itself is. Same goes for pronouns, if they/them is valid (which it always is, since it’s gender and plurality agnostic) then I don’t think it makes sense to deny its use or mandate the use of another term. It’s nice to accommodate someone’s pronoun preferences, but I would not consider it bigoted to use non-preferred terms which validate someone’s identity.
You would argue it, be right on a technicality the same way a bigot can refer to a binary trans person as them to communicate their refusal to accept their identity.
You can talk all you want about why you do something but if I consistently hear my preferred pronouns not being used by you I’m left to make an assumption about your character.
Right, but afaik neopronouns don’t have a specific gender they refer to, so using neopronouns instead of they/them isn’t any different regarding accommodating your gender identity, it’s only different in terms of accommodating your preferences for the language used to describe that gender. It is a signal of potential gender identity denial, but it’s such a low-power signal that any other signal should easily overpower it. It should be clear from someone’s other behaviors what they believe.
It should be clear from someone’s other behaviors what they believe.
You don’t get to decide how someone interprets your message. I do not use neopronouns but I’m going to tell you right now it’s the height of hypocrisy dictate which pronouns should be ignored.
I swear to god people will write paragraphs about why its okay for them to not use someone’s preferred pronouns instead of just changing a word in their lexicon for that person.
God forbid we accommodate the people we interact with.
Addendum: Of course, you could easily say that the purpose of a pronoun is also to denote gender, and that refusing to do so by being more vague is an insult; but I don’t think it’s a good direction to take the language to make gender more embedded in our language. Specifying gender should be optional for when it is necessary, not an obligation to be made whenever you refer to someone. They are more than just their gender identity, and needing to refer to it whenever you refer to them (other than by name) is counterproductive to maintaining that separation, and is also semantically simpler.
Yeah no, I don’t want to have to juggle as many pronouns as there are gender identities, because gender is a spectrum and that would result in almost as many pronouns as there are people. Remembering peoples names is bad enough for me already. I don’t want to gender anyone unless it’s actually relevant to the discussion. It adds unnecessary complexity and increases the probability of accidentally misgendering people drastically. IMO people should be free to express themselves, but in ways that don’t require others to actively participate in that expression. You know, clothes and stuff that can actually achieve the kind of variety that gender expression necessitates. Profile pictures, usernames, banner images and profile bios online.
I do sympathize with people trying to break the mold of cishet normative gendered pronouns, but long term I think neopronouns are not a scalable solution and doesn’t affect the underlying problem of gendered language (unless one adopts the accelerationist position that people will make so many gendered pronouns that the concept looses meaning that way, but that might be a long shot).
I have the precise opposite opinion, I think society needs to take more responsibility for how we gender others, and not just in language.
We have some ability to control our perceptions. That ability can be trained, and we can learn techniques to do it better. So there’s no excuse for perceiving a trans woman as “non-passing”. The passing is a thing happening inside everyone else’s brain, not in her body! So we need to take responsibility for our own minds and perceive her as female-presenting. And if we can’t, that’s a harmful skill issue we need to fix.
Pronouns are one of the techniques we can use to hack our perceptions. We can use language to manipulate our minds. That’s why neopronouns were invented. That’s the benefit of them.
Apologies on the ninja edits on my previous comment (the latter paragraph is new).
Gender isn’t biological, so the passing is not happening in their body anyways. Gender is social. If they present themselves as female, then sure, they’re female presenting. If someone presents themselves as something more bespoke, then they do just that. Usually it’s just a vibe to me. I don’t see why it would need to be anything more than that, or why I should change the words I use to refer to them.
Though at the same time I concede that it’s probably different for people who have always been changing the way they speak depending on the gender of the person being referred to, and I suppose you’re right in that neopronouns have a use in shaking up that framework. Still, I maintain that in the long term ungendered language would be preferable.
While gender-neutral languages are awesome, the fact that we are speaking a gendered language means we are often communicating gender. Having to communicate gender is the cost of speaking English.
If you refuse to use a trans person’s neopronouns, you will be intelligible as denying their gender. If you internally respect them, but externally misgender them or complain about their pronouns, then your internal intentions are unintelligible. Language is a two-way street. You have a responsibility to make yourself understood, by using the pronouns that match your intentions.
Also, consider that a neopronoun may be perfectly intelligible to everyone as-is. You certainly understand the meaning of Legend’s hex code, #LEG3ND, right? It’s intelligible. When it comes to neopronouns like Legend’s, I think you may be mistaken.; this might not be about intelligibility. In Legend’s case, at least, you understand neopronouns perfectly well. You simply disagree.
English has a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. Calling someone a they/them isn’t denying their gender. There is no reason not to use they/them. Gender isn’t built into the language like it is in some even weirder languages (A chair doesn’t have a gender in English).
I understand it perfectly well, but yes, I do disagree. Not about their gender identity, but about how pronouns work. The way I see it, the whole point with pronouns is to use a widely applicable shorthand to refer to something or someone. If everyone wants to be unique and have their own pronouns, then we might as well not use any pronouns and just refer to everybody by their name.
Edit: Oh yeah and as gendered pronouns are an attempt to communicate gender, then no, I have very little idea what sort of gender the pronoun “legend” is supposed to communicate. I understand the word but not what it means in this context.
Well, no. In the context of gendered pronouns being available and the norm of the language, intentionally using they/them instead of someone’s identified pronouns is a disrespect. You are not bending the whole of the most widely-spoken language on Earth by yourself and even if you could, starting with the effective erasure of minority gender identity would be terrible form.
Are you of the belief that singular “they” is not historically common?
It is historically common. We’re talking about using they/them when pronouns other than they/them are requested.
Right, but as I understand it you made a claim that using they/them as a singular gender neutral pronoun was bending the language, which isn’t correct. Unless you meant something else?
I was saying was that insisting on using they/them pronouns on someone who has requested otherwise would be a disrespect. The “bending the language” I referred to was in overwriting all preferred alternative pronouns with they/them, as the commentor was proposing doing that.
Oh, I see.
Isn’t it even more audacious to think that everyone should start referring to every queer person by their custom pronouns? Neopronouns are already an attempt to bend the language, and I’m just saying that it’s bending that language in the exact wrong direction because it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, instead just building on top of that.
It’s as audacious as requesting to be referred to by a shortening of your name, or a nickname, or a changed name. To be honest, it’s less audacious than asking that someone use your name instead of some generic identifier.
No language is being bent, in 99.9% of cases the pronouns being used have always existed in English, the remaining 0.1% are the ‘custom pronouns’ you’re thinking of and are an edge case that is effectively a non-issue to accommodate. I have a queer friend group and live in an extremely queer-friendly city and I literally know just one person who prefers a non-standard pronoun and am happy to accommodate that.
Well that’s disappointing.
Though I’m pretty queer, I somewhat agree? If I could, I’d go back in time and change first names to demarcate gender identity in a consistent way so we could just use they/them, as you say.
That said, none of us can go back in time, and though we may have the same goal, a goal is not a plan. I’ve yet to see a better method than neopronouns of forcing people (who would usually rather not) to think about gender in new ways, and thus allow people to present how they wish under our language restricted social context.
Think of it like tossing in an outlier to more effectively pull the average somewhere. Every xey/xem pulls us closer as a society to giving a shit about this, and that’s the first step to making progress. Even if it seems to be pissing. A buncha people off in the process
Why would we need first names to demarcate gender identity in a consistent way in order to use they/them for everyone? In my native language we have some names that are more ambivalent about gender than others and we’re doing just fine with a single genderless third person singular pronoun.
I suspect that a lot of cis people would be pissed about being referred to as they/them as well, but they can suck it up. I said this in a different comment here, but I can see that being useful with people who are stuck on that he/she framework. But I still think of this as an unnecessary one step back to take two steps forward, when it could just be taking one step forward.
We wouldn’t. My point is that neither of us can change the past.
Is it not just as audacious to expect everyone to fit themselves to the pronouns you want to use? How would you feel about others arbitrarily deciding to use a different pronoun for you?
My whole point here has been that pronouns should have nothing to do with gender, so somebody using a different pronoun to refer to me would not affect me beyond mild annoyance at somebody lying about me by spreading information about my gender if the gendered pronoun isn’t the right one. On the other hand a pronoun that doesn’t carry information about gender can’t misgender a person.
When you have the choice to do something, and you don’t do that thing, you’re communicating that you don’t want to do that thing.
When you have the choice to gender someone correctly, and you don’t gender them, you’re communicating that you don’t want to gender them.
This is called de-gendering and many people will take your willful refusal to do the kind thing as a form of relative cruelty. Because kindness and cruelty are relative.
Also pronouns are usually shorter than names, so using neopronouns saves time over names.
I am bad at remembering names. Remembering a set of pronouns is at least as hard as remembering a name. Pronouns help when I can’t remember names. Having to remember custom pronouns defeats the purpose of pronouns.
All that being said, I’ve never met someone IRL who hasn’t picked one of the three most common pronouns sets (he, her, or they), so I see this as largely hypothetical. The internet does tend to be a space for people to test their more extreme beliefs.
I would argue that using they/them is gendering someone correctly. They are gender-agnostic pronouns and can refer to any gender, combination of genders, or lack thereof. They are only potentially insulting in that they are less specific-- which is the entire point of a pronoun. I think if it’s clear from other interactions that you accept someone’s gender identity, it’s pretty dumb to be criticized for not being as specific as someone would want you to be when using a term that’s supposed to be general.
It’s insulting when it’s going out of your way to do it. If you only ever used they/them for everyone, it’d just be the norm. But if you call everyone who wants he, she, or they by exactly what they prefer, and neopronouns also as they, you’re treating them differently.
Fwiw I both agree that fundamentally neopronouns aren’t helping with overall gender perception but also that if someone prefers them I’ll do my best to accomodate because it doesn’t hurt me to do so.
I’ve never actually met someone irl who uses neopronouns, so I haven’t been able to test how I would actually respond. I tend to use they/them pretty often, including as a replacement for he/she, so I would probably use that unless there was a very strong preference not to. If I did refuse to use a neopronoun for some reason, I’m still not sure that that would qualify as treating them more differently than I would be if I used the neopronouns-- either I would be breaking their preferences or my understanding/usage of the language, there would be no way to behave entirely the same as the situation itself is different. It would certainly be kinder of me to use the neopronouns and for that reason I probably would, but I would not actually believe that to be more correct than using “they”, so I’m not really sure.
Do neopronouns typically convey a specific gender identity? It would make more sense to use them if they did, but afaik there is no consistent mapping of neopronoun to gender identity, which makes the argument for using neopronouns instead of “they” kind of moot-- if they do not signify gender then you would not be affirming someone’s gender by using them, only their language preferences.
Personally I don’t believe language preference is something that must be accommodated in the same way that identity is-- for example I have met cis people who acknowledge that they are cis mechanically but for ideological reasons refuse to be called cis. This makes no sense to me; if the definition of a term is valid then the term itself is. Same goes for pronouns, if they/them is valid (which it always is, since it’s gender and plurality agnostic) then I don’t think it makes sense to deny its use or mandate the use of another term. It’s nice to accommodate someone’s pronoun preferences, but I would not consider it bigoted to use non-preferred terms which validate someone’s identity.
You would argue it, be right on a technicality the same way a bigot can refer to a binary trans person as them to communicate their refusal to accept their identity.
You can talk all you want about why you do something but if I consistently hear my preferred pronouns not being used by you I’m left to make an assumption about your character.
Right, but afaik neopronouns don’t have a specific gender they refer to, so using neopronouns instead of they/them isn’t any different regarding accommodating your gender identity, it’s only different in terms of accommodating your preferences for the language used to describe that gender. It is a signal of potential gender identity denial, but it’s such a low-power signal that any other signal should easily overpower it. It should be clear from someone’s other behaviors what they believe.
You don’t get to decide how someone interprets your message. I do not use neopronouns but I’m going to tell you right now it’s the height of hypocrisy dictate which pronouns should be ignored.
I swear to god people will write paragraphs about why its okay for them to not use someone’s preferred pronouns instead of just changing a word in their lexicon for that person.
God forbid we accommodate the people we interact with.
Addendum: Of course, you could easily say that the purpose of a pronoun is also to denote gender, and that refusing to do so by being more vague is an insult; but I don’t think it’s a good direction to take the language to make gender more embedded in our language. Specifying gender should be optional for when it is necessary, not an obligation to be made whenever you refer to someone. They are more than just their gender identity, and needing to refer to it whenever you refer to them (other than by name) is counterproductive to maintaining that separation, and is also semantically simpler.
Yeah no, I don’t want to have to juggle as many pronouns as there are gender identities, because gender is a spectrum and that would result in almost as many pronouns as there are people. Remembering peoples names is bad enough for me already. I don’t want to gender anyone unless it’s actually relevant to the discussion. It adds unnecessary complexity and increases the probability of accidentally misgendering people drastically. IMO people should be free to express themselves, but in ways that don’t require others to actively participate in that expression. You know, clothes and stuff that can actually achieve the kind of variety that gender expression necessitates. Profile pictures, usernames, banner images and profile bios online.
I do sympathize with people trying to break the mold of cishet normative gendered pronouns, but long term I think neopronouns are not a scalable solution and doesn’t affect the underlying problem of gendered language (unless one adopts the accelerationist position that people will make so many gendered pronouns that the concept looses meaning that way, but that might be a long shot).
I have the precise opposite opinion, I think society needs to take more responsibility for how we gender others, and not just in language.
We have some ability to control our perceptions. That ability can be trained, and we can learn techniques to do it better. So there’s no excuse for perceiving a trans woman as “non-passing”. The passing is a thing happening inside everyone else’s brain, not in her body! So we need to take responsibility for our own minds and perceive her as female-presenting. And if we can’t, that’s a harmful skill issue we need to fix.
Pronouns are one of the techniques we can use to hack our perceptions. We can use language to manipulate our minds. That’s why neopronouns were invented. That’s the benefit of them.
Apologies on the ninja edits on my previous comment (the latter paragraph is new).
Gender isn’t biological, so the passing is not happening in their body anyways. Gender is social. If they present themselves as female, then sure, they’re female presenting. If someone presents themselves as something more bespoke, then they do just that. Usually it’s just a vibe to me. I don’t see why it would need to be anything more than that, or why I should change the words I use to refer to them.
Though at the same time I concede that it’s probably different for people who have always been changing the way they speak depending on the gender of the person being referred to, and I suppose you’re right in that neopronouns have a use in shaking up that framework. Still, I maintain that in the long term ungendered language would be preferable.
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