nonbinary gender pronouns

All the examples in the OED entry are of the first sort. xp Tom D. OTM

we want hon fap

ye want yon fap

ye want yon fap, hen

my first ever evening in Glasgow was spent at a gig where a local spent the entire show bellowing "Y'ARIGHT HEN?" at my pal, an expression of perturbation for her mental well-being prompted her trying to listen to & look at the band instead of answering his other enquiries

HEN FAQ

*prompted BY her, bah

"maybe i'm really dense but i have no clue what it is about twins that makes this extra difficult" . because saying "they" might refer to both twins or just one of them. that's all he's saying.

My wife has found this difficult to adapt to as well as an english major although there are obviously times when people naturally say this to refer to only one person. It's just extending that usage.

gendering of articles and stuff in languages is right, not sexually dimorphic. the last paper I wrote for college was on the disappearance of gendered articles in English (they were there at some point).

but this would apply to two siblings who aren't twins.... right? am i crazy?

the twins thing is such a forced problem im struggling to see the problem meself tbh

hi my twins saw a creepy clown and they were scared

they the two of them or they the one thats using they

huh what a weird reaction didnt u hear me theres a creepy clown out there scaring kids

is the clown only targetting twins or kids using they

what, no listen i think youre getting bogged down here

i just need clarity on who exactly was scared here

can i request another 911 operator please

another message board i'm on (and maybe this one too but i've so far managed to avoid that thread) is having a heated pronoun argument on the topic of sam smith

anyone who is so committed to gendered pronouns that you will have an argument over sam smith involving them has problems i am not equipped to deal with

at this point any THEORETICAL discussion about pronouns is not a discussion i am interested in having

I haven’t read this whole thread

But it might be fun to note that I have two identical twin gender neutral siblings; they both announced their gender on the same day two and a half years ago

I love them both very much they are amazing intelligent academic types

a tangential issue: as a closeted gay kid I found myself instinctively using nonbinary pronouns (they/their/them) to hide my own identity.

not proud of that in retrospect

people have a hard time letting go of what they always imagined was a simple and obvious set of categories. the first step to resolving this is their realizing that that imaginary simplicity was a misleading illusion. expecting them to jump straight to pronoun switching before their grasping how inadequate their old narrow categories were skips a necessary step, and until it is accomplished they'll fight to retain their accustomed ways, because learning new stuff is hard.

though "y'all" can be singular

this is offensive

singular y'all is formal, like for if you're talking to the pope

.lol

yall holiness

aka "the royal y'all"

hoagies are for them and her and him, but most importantly, me

"e" —Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

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.)

In German, the moon is masculine and the sun is feminine.

In French (and Romanian and likely other Romance languages), the most common slang term for 'dick' is feminine, whereas 'vagina' is masculine.

The arbitrariness of the sign covers grammatical gender as well. For the most part.

l'all

Sie'all

I hope it's OK to use this thread to mention that I do not understand, nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of, the preference in some circles for "folx" over "folks"

Isn’t that just a jocular variant spelling like saying “that sux” or “comix”

The contexts I consistently see it deployed in suggest not but I could be wrong

This thread made me think the Danish version through, and I think I finally got it! It's a bit tricky in Danish, since 'de' both means 'they' but was also the formal way to talk to people you didn't know, like 'vous' in French. So it could also go: 'How are they?' 'I'm fine, but come on, we've known each other for years!' Etc. But we would get used to it.

The nonbinary pronoun 'they' has been added to the dictionary. https://t.co/tadl1VdfB0

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) September 17, 2019

In French (and Romanian and likely other Romance languages), the most common slang term for 'dick' is feminine, whereas 'vagina' is masculine.

The French words "moustache" and "barbe" for "moustache" and "beard" are also feminine. "Soins" ("care") is masculine, while "guerre" (war) is feminine. I'm not sure gendering of nouns is based on gender stereotypes at all; tbh, it would be much easier to learn if it were.

Yeah, I heard that David Sedaris story about learning genders in French. It's actually much simpler than he makes it out to be. Abstract concepts are typically feminine (la masculinité), definite objects are masculine (le vagin).

Obv there are lots of exceptions but it's not really hard to grasp

The idea that linguistically we're taught that the feminine gender is associated with the abstract and the masculine gender is associated with the concrete sounds like Kristeva could have a field day on this topic if she already hasn't

except i don't think that's true at all? there are plenty of definite objects that are feminine in French - la chaise, la lampe, la chaussette etc - and plenty of masculine abstract concepts - le futur, le bien-être, etc

Pacifisme, socialisme, capitalisme, etc = all masculine. If anything, it's more useful to look at the endings of words. Words with "té" and "tion" endings tend to be feminine, ones with "age" and "isme" tend to be masculine, but there are still exceptions.

Oh no, for sure, it's not a hard-and-fast rule but it's usually my fall-back when I'm having to guess a gender on the fly in conversation and the noun itself doesn't end in a decisively gendered way

There's a case to be made that guitars are more abstract than pianos, actually.

best thought of as being related to word ending than to anything else it seems

Fwiw I know it seems odd when your mother tongue is English but it's best not to think about this stuff at all when learning a 'gendered' language. 99.9% of the time it scans as neutral to native speakers, just like in English. Which isn't to say that it can't and doesn't get political in some cases, but when it comes to objects and ideas, 'gender' is all over the place, really – to such an extent that it probably shouldn't be called gender at all (although it is true that 'isme', 'ion' and other such suffixes often give you a clue as to whether said word is masculine or feminine in French).

It's mostly the way we talk about human beings that matters (cue Heidegger arguing that 'Mädchen' aka 'young girl' or 'maiden' is grammatically neutral in German because she isn't a fully-fledged human yet), and that's where pushback becomes une nécessité. In 19th century France, 'madame le maire' meant the mayor's wife; then the female mayor; now 'la' maire is quite common and 'mairesse' is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged in Quebec. This incidentally reminds me of an exchange I had with LL a while back: she balked at my use of the term 'poetess' in English, whereas in French quite a few (although not all) women poets would insist on being described as such (and tbf this is also the case in certain English-speaking feminist circles). Conversely, I'm still uncomfortable with the widespread use of 'female' in English because it just sounds… zoological?

Anyhow, this is all too simplistic, no doubt, but I think it's best to focus on how we describe each other regardless of language, in which case I'd like to add that French (to say nothing of Romanian) is indeed fucking terrible at expressing the experiences of nonbinary people, and at some point it will have to evolve.

My favourite is "sénatrice" as in news stories about "Sénateur Bernie Sanders et Sénatrice Elizabeth Warren".

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

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

just want to insert this: taiwanese singer jolin tsai did a massively popular pro-trans/genderqueer song last year, which contains this lyric:

你是你或者妳，都行

which translates beautifully to:

“you‘re you (male) or you (female), both are okay”

so, using these specific second-person gendered pronouns (which are common in taiwan) to make a point which sounds nongendered but has a pretty clear meaning.

why is listing multiple pronouns the norm

like, is anyone she/him or they/her

is anyone she/him

zooey deschanel and m. ward

some people do want to indicate that they can be called both gendered and neutral pronouns, I don't think anyone's pronominal gender varies based on part of speech. listing two or more declensions is useful if you use neopronouns

i deserved that xp

like, is anyone she/him or they/her

― mookieproof

i've seen the latter, yes

zooey d and m ward more like shee/it amirite

all my friends are they/she's

'call me anything except 'he''