nonbinary gender pronouns

Agree "they" has long been an acceptable gender-neutral pronoun, but there are still situations in which it is ambiguous or confusing (and in which it wouldn't likely previously have been used as a singular). E.g. I was recently with friends who have a non-binary teen and there were a lot of times when I couldn't tell whether the parents were discussing the teen or the teen plus one or more other people (e.g. a friend). A relatively harmless but mildly confusing example: after the parents picked me up at the train I heard them say "They asked us to pick up food for them on the way home." I wrongfully assumed they were referring to the teen having a friend or friends over. I mostly just use the teen's name though and it's basically all good.

When we use "you" when addressing two people it is uncertain as to whether we are talking to one or both

This is why English has words like "youse" and "y'all" (though "y'all" can be singular, thus creating the need for "all y'all").

guys i think we sorted it out!

yes we should all just speak scouse

Which is why we have 'youse' in Scotland, eh Jim?

guys

was this really necessary

(though "y'all" can be singular, thus creating the need for "all y'all").

haha yeah ... all y'all being another good usage to avoid the dudes/guys problem where previously it had been "acceptable" to use in a gender neutral way, but now it's not

this is how I break it down to an extent - trans and non-binary people are some of the most marginalised people in our societies. any accommodation we can make to make their lives easier, however small, should be investigated and employed, notwithstanding the edge cases which may make our lives marginally more ‘difficult’

yeah I agree w that

again I'm not making out like this is a huge problem or unbearable burden, I just a) didn't understand/hadn't thought about why they/them was the most common usage (this was quickly answered in this thread - thx all!) and b) like to puzzle out grammar/language stuff and this came up recently

“I'm intrigued by the pronoun they came up with ("hen" as opposed to "han" or "hon")” doesn’t this make hen faps confusing?

I am pretty good about pronouns and they/them these days, but it is proving very difficult to break myself of "guys". It's really in there as my go-to plural when addressing a group (of any gender).

xp

Which is why we have 'youse' in Scotland, eh Jim?

― The Inner Mounting Phlegm (Tom D.), Friday, September 13, 2019 2:03 PM (seven minutes ago)

aye, i use youse

but most speakers of british english don't have such a term

won’t be saying fkn “guys” because not from the west end

maybe i'm really dense but i have no clue what it is about twins that makes this extra difficult.

anyway tho, sure, in the abstract 'they/them' may seem stranger than the attempts to create new, exclusively singular pronounces like ze, etc., which wouldn't present even these fairly minor hurdles of clarification. but the very fact that they/them's become so widespread suggests that these pronouns work very well for a ton of nb folks. and that they, at least, hit these singular/plural confusion points, likely much more often than cis people do, and are able to surmount them. so as a cis dude i feel like i can roll with that.

won’t be saying fkn “guys” because not from the west end

― prorogue mahone (||||||||), Friday, September 13, 2019 2:12 PM (two minutes ago)

troops

Also always defaulting to they/them/neutral options is easier so you don't assume the gender of someone's partner/spouse. I have found it also annoys people who are really into being "not gay" and that it always fun.

since (a) singular they is a kludge, (b) but it can surely be fully naturalized given time since language dgaf, (c) point-by-point dialectics about whether it's juuuust right or whether there might not be soooomething else that serves better seems idle, (d) as does moral scorn directed at doddering dinosaurs like shakey who are trying to be cool but just aren't quite sure, (e) although obviously deliberate misgenderers can and should be hounded from all forae.

i think really misgivings about the kludginess of proposed alternatives stem from the sense that language is basically being de-naturalized, which there are evident reasons for (it is in concert with the coercive binary gender system being denaturalized so it can be seen as coercive / so that a possibility of permitting the recognized exercise of autonomy over one's gender is freed up), but also understandable bridling at, since speakers rely on a presupposition of 'fit' between their language and the way the world is articulated.

doddering dinosaurs like shakey

tried to be clear that this thread was well intentioned but

yes that's why i portrayed you as a kindly huggy dinosaur

such little arms, such big love

doyouthinktheysaurus

I didn't see nothin

sorry i came in with guns blazing shakey, i've just heard the "aagh my precious grammar" argument (which is not what you were saying but you can understand how i made the mistake) from a lot of secret bigots

no apology necessary c'mon now

My preference would be to use singular they/them for everyone

but yeah while some people choose neologistic pronouns (for reasons I am essentially uninformed about) they/them is accessible to every native speaker and really only sounds weird if you are thinking about it harder than you would in an ordinary circumstance

maybe a non-English speaker can answer this - is there a push against the gendered nouns of other languages (thinking French here with it's la/le/les)?

that kind of thing always struck me as a step beyond the gendered pronouns/possessive pronounes in English, in terms of embedding gender binaries into the language.

In Chinese 'he' 'she' and 'it' sound exactly the same, though they do use different characters.

you will see people write lxs or l@s en castellano for that purpose from time to time

How does this work in gendered languages?

xp. which is fine orthographically but doesn't change the spoken language. like i like latinx fine too but how do you say it? LAH-TEEN-ECCIES?

it would be impossible to unpick. adjectives have to agree. and what are you gonna do, get rid of the feminine forms? that seems like a bad move!

it's pronounced latine-ecks

this is in common usage at my kids' school (which is like 80% latinx)

xp

I'm not a native Spanish speaker and not clued into this discourse in el mundo hispanohablante but like…the grammatical gender of improper nouns doesn't remotely register as pertinent to this issue to me. "La noche" and "el día" have different grammatical genders but it's not like they're sexually dimorphic, the night isn't subject to gender-based oppression.

yeah. I say it that way too. Same with Mx. xpost

as a dumb nerd I'm always gonna regret that latinx took over latin@

against using english x for cultural nationalist reasons personally as a latinx individual. i guess i can deal with it

"La noche" and "el día" have different grammatical genders but it's not like they're sexually dimorphic

really? Even though the presumed reason that they're gendered goes back to classical gender stereotypes that are millenia old (moon/women/menstruation/darkness/artemis and men/the sun/light/apollo for example)?

xp

i like the @ sign in place of o, used to see it used a lot by chilean and spanish left a few years back.

xp ok well like what about "la silla" and "el cuchillo", the genders of common nouns aren't metaphors they're just particles usually determined by the word-ending

I remember tripping out on the gendered noun thing after being introduced to it in high school French - some of the designations were clearly meant to reinforce gender stereotypes (granted, others seemed really random, like the word for "chair" being gendered at all for ex.)

xp

In Chinese 'he' 'she' and 'it' sound exactly the same, though they do use different characters.

It's not that they sound the same (i.e. they're homophones), but they literally are the same word. However, written Chinese can indicate gender, but I *think* that's a relatively new development (possibly with the simplification movement?), but at this point it marks the feminine form and recasts the traditional form as masculine (not too different from "man" standing in for "human" in English).

Ok, good to know, have noticed people seem a little confused when writing 'ta', that may explain why.

does traditional chinese not have three different 'ta'?

the grammatical gender of improper nouns

some radical types do care about this — i remember once i had a german teacher, a while before the contemporary cultural moment, who said someone in the department had caused trouble because they insisted on degendering all nouns' articles, for feminist reasons, but this conflicted with the department's responsibility to do language instruction for the german 101 kids or whatever.

Ah ha:

Following the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement in 1919, and to accommodate the translation of Western literature, written vernacular Chinese developed separate pronouns for gender-differentiated speech, and to address animals, deities, and inanimate objects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns

The same thing holds for second-person pronouns as well.

yous and y'all are good, why not theys

It's a very good essay on language and politics and better than Sharkey's concern trolling.

I was just kidding, it seemed like an overreach to start with pronouns and blast through to “why is language dealing with the ineffable anyway?” Spose I’d better read it now.