> If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem.
It's a pretty big cognitive load though, to remember what everyone finds or doesn't find offensive. This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person? That's the complexity I don't want.
We have externalized what used to be an internal issues
Offense is a you problem, not a me problem. We have abandoned the axiom of "sticks and stones" and replaced it with "words are violence" or even worse "silence is violence"
Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
> Offense is a you problem, not a me problem. We have abandoned the axiom of "sticks and stones"
I think you miss the point of "sticks and stones". The point is not that it's ok to say whatever you want to anyone else. The point of "sticks and stones" is not to let other people bring down your self-esteem.
Other people will intentionally try to denigrate you. They'll call you "stupid". They'll call you "ugly". Or they may call you a racial slur. That's all unacceptable. That's a "me" problem for the speaker. The point of "sticks and stones", on the other hand, is to resist internalizing these external insults and degradations. It's to put on a virtual suit of armor to protect you from verbal attacks — and let's be clear, they're real attacks.
You don't just "accidentally" beat someone with physical sticks and stones, right? The intention is to hurt, to break their bones, as it were. That's the analogy, with intentionally hurtful words.
> Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
That’s absolutely not true though - you only have to affirm/support/validate people’s identities and emotional states when their identity/emotions aligns with the zeitgeist; if those things contradict the zeitgeist, then affirmation/support/validation is somewhere between optional and evil.
Most definitely not. Of course people need to work on themselves to avoid being offended.
But if you communicate with other people, it's because you want to achieve something. Probably not offending the target (or else fuck you I guess ;-)). So, usually, offense gets in the way, so you should care about not offending your target. And beyond this, as human beings, we usually care not to hurt other human beings.
It's a we problem.
> no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
Do you have example of this? Of course you are expected to show some empathy/sympathy, but I've never seem people impose unrealistic expectations.
How about the push to rename words in technology that have been in use for decades, like changing the default git repo from master to main.
or the parent comment I replied to originally -- "This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person? " for which there is not even any social indicators of this, and for a given person could change at any given time from week to week or day to day. A person that changes their pronouns daily seems to me to have an unrealistic expectation that people will be able to keep track of that.
> Some people adopted main, some people kept master
Some people used “trunk” since well before Git existed. If ever there was an example of how the umbrage at renaming things was baselessly manufactured, master -> main has to be right up there.
Have you come across anyone who changed their pronouns daily and expected you to keep track of it?
It annoys me how often this discussion gets bogged down in weird hypothetical scenarios. In my experience, people who use nonstandard pronouns (or pronouns that you might not guess from their appearance) are completely reasonable about it. They only ask that you make a genuine effort to remember the correct pronoun choice – which is not very much to ask. It's certainly no more work than, say, remembering the correct pronunciation of their name.
I might add that almost anyone will be ok with singular 'they', if you're ever unsure, as it is gender neutral.
I have met people like this. And heard someone correct someone else for using it wrong. In fact, when during introductions, this person said their pronoun so loudly that I forgot their name (partly because it made no sense to put two pronouns after a name, so it spent a lot of time trying to parse the grammar, as I had just recently moved to a very Progressive city and it was the first time I had encountered it personally).
There is another group I am in that has name tags and there are stickers with pronouns I've never even heard of (something like ver/ver, xe,xer, etc.).
I cant imagine ever getting to the point where I care enough what people call me to make a big deal out of it. I work with people that have been saying my name comedically wrong for months now and I couldn't care less. I have a couple other people that think my last name is my first name and call me by that. Its hilarious. Imagine getting upset or aggressive with someone just because they don't remember the pronouns you made up. That's a you problem, not a me problem.
I don't know the name's of 75% of the people I work with (I work with a 100+ people a week) and I really have no time or inclination to make the effort. If someone makes up pronouns that don't correspond to their image they are going to get mad at me because I am pretty much incapable of remembering their name let alone their pronouns. If I remember, cool I will use them but I'm really not going to spend hours practicing. Its not an intentional insult, I want everyone to be happy, I just don't have the effort or inclination in me to expend on it.
So many ifs in this thread! It sounds like no-one has ever got really angry with you in reality for using the wrong pronouns, right? I’ve never experienced anything other than a polite correction. The person you’re replying to also doesn’t describe any such experience. They said (1) that someone they met loudly emphasized their preferred pronouns and (2) that they went to an event where some people put neopronouns on their name badges.
Those don’t sound like people who are changing their preferred pronouns daily, unless I’m misunderstanding. You’re just talking about people who use non-standard or difficult-to-guess pronouns.
The more times I read through your story the less there is to it. Someone introduced themselves, said their pronouns, and you didn’t remember their name. Ok, so what?
Neopronouns are an interesting case, but my previous comment about ‘they’ applies. It’s gender neutral, so use ‘they’ if you forget which more specific pronoun is applicable.
To some extent this is a hill I’m willing to die on. Singular they is pretty entrenched usage now, and as it implies nothing about its referent’s gender, I don’t see how someone could legitimately object to being referred to in that way.
However, if someone tells me that they don’t want me to refer to them using singular they (something which has never once actually happened to me outside of arguments on the internet!), then I would respect their wishes.
If you live in an English speaking country, listen closely for a week or two. You’ll probably find that people around you are already (without conscious intention) using singular they to refer to individuals of known gender.
I also wonder if you might not be undermining your own line of argument elsewhere in the thread. If you get to be fussy about being referred to using singular they (which is certainly unobjectionable from a grammatical and semantic point of view in modern English), then presumably everyone else gets to be picky about their pronouns too.
The singular they is entrenched when you don't know who the person was ("I hope they realize they left their umbrella here and come back and get it.") It is not entrenched at all for referring to an individual who is standing right there.
I recall being contacted by a distressed neighbor who had been referred to as "they" in a thread on NextDoor. She has a name that could be male or female (it's short for different things), but her photo was unmistakably female. She was offended that someone referred to her as "they" and asked me if her photo looked at all male.
I would also imagine that someone who is presenting as a particular gender and wishes to be referred to as that gender could also be offended to be referred to as "they" because it could imply that the person is in-between, and not successfully presenting as their desired gender.
Lastly, people who are unaware of the changes in pronoun usage (older people, people who don't interact with people in liberal enclaves) may be confused by usage of they. They may think you're talking about multiple people, for example.
It is in fact quite common (at least in some parts) to use singular they for people of known gender. I hear it all the time here in London. Here’s an abstract that covers some of the patterns of variation: https://www.colorado.edu/event/cuny2019/sites/default/files/... There’s even an example in Shakespeare: “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend.” It would clearly be ok to use ‘his’ here, but we find ‘their’ nonetheless.
> could also be offended to be referred to as "they" because it could imply that the person is in-between
‘They’ is gender neutral; its use implies nothing about a person’s gender. If someone gets offended anyway then the simplest solution is obvious - use their preferred pronoun. But taking offense at singular they doesn’t seem to be something common, at least in my experience. It’s certainly the option that’s least likely to cause serious offense if you can’t remember (or were never told) a person’s preferred pronouns.
If we’re ok with cis people being fussy about being referred to using singular they, then presumably we must also allow trans or non-binary people to be fussy about their own preferred pronouns.
> [older people] may be confused
Confused != offended. But singular they has such a long history that I think such confusion is rather unlikely in practice. (Are older people confused by the Shakespeare quote above?)
> taking offense at singular they doesn’t seem to be something common
That's probably because most people don't refer to people as "they" except when specifically asked to. If people went around using "they" as the standard pronoun when referring to known people, there would be much more offense.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that point. I often hear 'they' used in that way and have not see anyone take offense to it. Nor can I see any logical reason why people should take offense. There are plenty of languages where pronouns are gender neutral (e.g. spoken Chinese). People who speak these languages seem to do ok without constantly explicitly referencing each other's gender. There's a huge difference, both logically and emotionally, between misgendering someone and simply not making reference to their gender.
By the way, I am totally fine with not using singular they to refer to people who are genuinely offended by it. I just have not actually encountered any such person outside the class of 'argumentative people on the internet'. For this reason I think that 'use singular they if unsure' is good, though not infallible, advice.
> There's a huge difference, both logically and emotionally, between misgendering someone and simply not making reference to their gender.
Referring to someone as a "they" would be considered misgendering to a lot of people. It is not "not making reference to their gender" because the vast majority of people who want to be referred to as "they" are not cisgender. Referring to someone in this way suggests that you think they are not cisgender.
> I just have not actually encountered any such person outside the class of 'argumentative people on the internet'.
The neighbor who approached me after having been referred to as "they" was not an argumentative person on the internet. She was someone (who lives in a very liberal area, BTW) who was perplexed and offended to have been referred to that way.
I see what you mean, but I think it's slightly the wrong analysis on a linguistic level. 'They' doesn't generally introduce a presupposition of non-binarity (either semantically or via pragmatic inference). If it did, it would be hard to account for the innumerable examples of 'they' being used with unambiguously masculine and feminine quantificational antecedents.
For this reason I think that people who are offended by being referred to by 'they' are wrong to be offended. I think they're wrong in a way that, say, a trans woman is not wrong to be offended if someone insists on using 'he'. In the former case, the person may feel that they are being misgendered – but only on the basis of a dodgy linguistic analysis. Of course, we should accommodate people's pronoun preferences, regardless of whether we agree with their underlying logic in any given case.
The story about your neighbor doesn't really make sense to me. Surely it occurred to her that the other forum poster might not have cared much what her gender was, or have paid much attention to her photo, or simply didn't care to take a guess even if she appeared clearly female. To interpret this as intentional misgendering seems a bit nuts. If she was simply worried about whether she appeared clearly feminine in the photo, then that's an understandable anxiety, but one that has little to do with singular they. (If singular they were off limits then I guess the poster might have used 'he' instead, which hardly seems better.)
> For this reason I think that people who are offended by being referred to by 'they' are wrong to be offended
My understanding is that these days, we are not allowed to opine on whether others are wrong to feel offended. In modern parlance, I'd say that you don't understand why they're offended. It seems you're trying very hard not to, considering that this term is not the preferred term of reference for practically anyone who is cisgender.
Are we not? I’m doing it right now and no-one has come to arrest me yet.
If the best you can do is tell me that I have to accede to the ineffable and indefinite reasons for your neighbor taking offense, then I suppose the discussion is over. (Of course I do accede in practice - I’m not going to refer to her as ‘they’ just to be a dick.)
If you really believe that people are entitled to be arbitrarily offended by pronouns, then you can have no objection to trans or non-binary people being arbitrarily fussy about their use. I mean, I’m “woke” by HN standards and am all in favor of respecting people’s pronoun preferences. But even I don’t believe that the subject is entirely in the realm of subjective feelings of offense and beyond rational discourse.
The point in this case was simply that singular they isn't a recent phenomenon. This is relevant when considering the (probably incorrect) claim that singular they is confusing for older generations.
In any case, my mention of Shakespeare was an aside and not crucial to the overall argument of my post. So it is arguably you who are missing the point.
Nice example. So the photo should be enough to infer the gender, and the person somehow expected that, failing it, was offended. Very nice. Imagine how a blind person must feel, in this social minefield? Thats exactly a problem we have. Given unspecific voices and unusual names, we are left pretty much out in the cold regarding how to address someone. We cant just look at the body or clothing.
I would not call anyone the N-word but would ask for a brown paper bag if I needed it at the grocery store. I have personally never met someone that is offended by the use of eg. colors as a concept but yet some people are trying to remove them from language.
You can name a branch master on git to your hearts content. We still have branches named master. We still have stuff we refer to as "whitelist" even though that was never an accurate descriptor for it in the first place.
This shit isn't banned. Nobody stops you from using them.
Companies now have "inclusive language" policies. There are dashboards that track team compliance and people that cheer this stuff on.
Master branch gets renamed to main meanwhile one can freely talk about how they used their MasterCard to buy a new Jazzmaster guitar that they keep in their master bedroom with a Master lock on it and they're almost done with the master of their new album showing off their mastery of musical and production that they learned taking lessons on MasterClass. Did I mention there's a cover of Master of Puppets?
It would be unconstitutional in the US to ban it, the question or comment thread is not about being illegal to use the word..
The issue the social pressure against these terms, and the ever changing landscape one political segment of the population has in being forever offended by everything
This entire comment thread should be a master class in logical fallcies as every reply shifts the goal posts back and forth....
Which i suspect is the end goal as that way no one actually have to address the underlying issues of compelled / socially enforced speech and the ongoing attacks on free expression on top of the ever shrinking mental health of the population has society coddles people into believing everyone else has to manage an individuals mental health instead of having to harden your own mind and come to terms with the fact the life is rarely fair, kind, nor do people (nor should) about your "feelings"
> This shit isn't banned. Nobody stops you from using them.
Speak for yourself. I had a PR rejected because I named a variable `blacklist` and was unaware that it's now considered a social faux pas. Of course, changing it to `blocklist` was simple enough, but wasted a couple hours because I had to ping the person again after finding out the PR was rejected, fixing it, retesting the code to make sure it didn't break stuff, pushing the changes, waiting for those tests to rerun, and then finally waiting for the person to re-review the code.
It feels a bit hypocritical to make this sort of proclamation on a social media site with extremely strict moderation.
Almost as though this isn't as simple a topic as "stick and stones" and that everyone has different tolerances for what they'll put up with depending on the setting and context.
> I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person?
No? Same grammar regardless of who is near, just need to remember which pronouns to designate which people, which:
- is the intuitive one for most people
- the asked pronoun for the few people who have pronouns that don't match your intuition.
(I also have troubles with remembering names, but pronouns are fine)
And for not implying a gender when speaking of someone for who we don't the gender, it's a constant exercise that also does not depend on the vicinity of a given person.
I work with maybe 100 people on a consistent basis. I probably know 25 of their names. Many of these interactions are random one offs, large meetings, etc. Many of them are foreign (to me) compounding my difficulty with their names. In addition I'm remote so can't associate names and faces, everyone is just white text on a black background. If any portion of this group started requesting I use varied pronouns I would probably lose my job in short order. Not because I don't care but because I am so incredibly busy I simply don't have the mental reserves to do it. Currently I am regularly working weekends and until 4 in the morning. I'm burnt. To expect me to somehow remember people's pronouns is a mission impossible.
I don't remember individual interactions with many of my coworkers at all, they all blur together.
If work wants me to do it then they'll need to reduce my workload by half just so my mind can absorb it.
You situation doesn't seem very healthy regardless of the topic at hand. I hope you'll be able to find a way to get a lighter workload.
Remote too, but I met most people in person at least once, we use avatars, and definitely don't work with 100 people.
That said I know a few trans people, the number of people I know with pronouns that don't match the name is 0. The number of people wanting the equivalent of they in my language is so small I can remember it easily.
Why would you need to know someone's pronouns just to speak to them.
This is what I do not get, these pronouns refer to someone in the 3rd person and do not affect your conversation with them in anyway. They could easily be referring to you in all sorts of derogatory manner, worse than that of the wrong pronoun, "Dickhead Dave". etc. etc.
I myself have a name that's most used with the opposite gender, I am reminded of this atleast on a weekly basis by others in society. Them accidentally referring to me as the wrong gender does not bother me in the slightest, firstly they did not know/it's not out of disrespect and secondly, why should it matter? What is wrong with being a woman if I am a man and vice versa?
Unless someone is publishing something about someone, there is very little need to know this upfront. If interactions are frequent, you can tell them if they didn't already know as your bond would be deeper. And if it's an issue you can tell them.
It's much like the whole idea of cultural misappropriation, a twisted idea that basically encourages segregation/apartheid. It's as simple as don't be a dickhead about someone's culture (don't demean it) is the common sense, age old and correct solution, not that new thing.
They requires effort... or just using they left and right for everyone, who needs pronouns when they exists anyway? Or better yet, avoid using pronouns by using the name over and over.
That is what I do, not he, not she, not it, not especial ones. Only they, they supremacy.
Repeating the name over and over would be cumbersome.
I would agree with always using a genderless pronoun, the gender should almost never matter, but I would probably be in for endless debates if I started to do this now.
I agree that would be an actual progressive agenda. But people wanting me to call them with another pronoun where I can no longer use biological cues is just cementing gender roles. Because if I present as a man but say I am a woman you just also gotta accept that since a woman does not need to conform to some societal gender role. If a guy dresses up like a woman he can still be a he, maybe he just likes skirts and nail polish. If a woman can be whatever she wants what does being a woman even mean except biology. If you want to assume a gender role previously tied to sex it clearly reinforces the idea that gender roles are an actual immutable category. How you can at the same time also hold the belief that biology is not doesn’t make any sense to me.
Maybe it is the just deserved revenge on a society that ties so much to sex and gender roles that logically has no relation to it. I am talking about things like job expectations or assuming competence at random skills, division of domestic responsibilities etc. I cannot believe though that this fixation on gender identity continues forever. It just doesn’t seem like a sensible end state.
> But people wanting me to call them with another pronoun where I can no longer use biological cues is just cementing gender roles
I believe there's more to this. IIUC, for some (most?) trans people, there's actually something, probably related to their biology, that makes them feel as the gender they were not assigned at birth. They have may look like one gender, but feel like the other one: gender dysphoria [1].
These people might be fighting more for solving this issue than for getting rid of the gender roles. Some would actually transition to the other sex for this, though I would expect trans people to also be more familiar (and sensitive?) to these gender identity questions, since they had to think about them.
Would gender dysphoria be less of an issue in a society that would not have such gender-assigned roles? Open question for me.
Now, it would be best if a trans people could directly speak about this, because this stuff is mostly theoretical for me, I haven't experienced it first-hand.
Your understanding is largely right, though I'd expand "look like one gender" to "be perceived and treated as one gender". I regularly confuse the hell out of people with my obviously feminine name and appearance and very deep voice.
> Would gender dysphoria be less of an issue in a society that would not have such gender-assigned roles? Open question for me.
Depends on the person, I think. Many trans people still would. I probably would've just shaved a bunch of body hair off and started wearing skirts and been done with it.
As for pronouns, "he" is just another sound people use to refer to other people. It has no inherent meaning beyond what we ascribe to it. I don't use it because society does ascribe a lot of meaning to it that doesn't apply to me - the same sort of feeling a man would get from being called "she". If genders weren't so much of a thing in society, I can't imagine myself caring nearly as much, though maybe in that world we'd all use the same pronoun anyway.
But there's a whole spectrum of trans people - in the same way you don't really grok dysphoria, I don't really grok e.g. genital dysphoria, so I can't and don't intend to speak for anyone else here.
I have a random question and I really mean no offence by it, I just want to get the opinion of a transexual person on something I have wondered. I know this question is out of left field. My apologies for asking but you are the only trans identifying person in the thread and are answering questions. Please feel very much in your rights to ignore me, I really do mean no offence with the question. I will not take your answer as representative of trans people as a whole.
Do you think people can be trans racial? Should society be accepting of it? For example a white person identify as black and shade their skin to pass? Why or why not?
Again feel free to ignore me, I'm not going to argue with your response I'm just curious about your perspective as you have a very different life experience than me. I am not trans anything its just a random thing I have pondered occasionally and wanted to get a trans persons opinion. I know its a loaded question so again feel free to ignore me.
I take no offense to respectfully asked questions, just as a general principle.
I have no idea, though. I've never considered that before, or even heard of it. It's hard for me to comprehend why anyone would care what race they are, but also holds up the hands of a very obviously white person
I see no reason to not let people do whatever makes them happy, though, even if I don't understand it. That's all I ask of other people for gender, no reason I shouldn't extend that courtesy to other people.
In English, "they" has two main purposes: Theoreticals where sex doesn't matter, and as a gentle nudge to the person you're talking to that you don't really know the person you're talking about. That second one is completely lost when you just use "they" for everyone.
Though I haven't felt the need for this so far, nothing comparable in French, annoying to have to stop to say the equivalent of "he or she, btw?". I guess we could use iel now. Still sounds new and weird to most people but it might become familiar at some point.
I've seen people using -@ as a suffix in Spanish to cover both the -a and -o forms of gendered words. I have no idea how it's pronounced, and it's probably comically inconvenient in actual use, but I have to admit it looks mildly clever.
It's a pretty big cognitive load though, to remember what everyone finds or doesn't find offensive. This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person? That's the complexity I don't want.