nonbinary gender pronouns

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''

Japanese has a wonderful array of gendered and no gendered pronouns which can be used in all kinds of ways to indicate gender, position relative to others in the conversation, mood and other things.

In the first person you have the masculine and slightly thuggish 「俺、Ore」、「僕、boku」which is used casually by men and boys and has been a somewhat tomboyish signifier for girls but I hear more and more young women using it. 「私、watashi」is pretty neutral but also not often used in spite of the fact it is the one generally taught to foreigners learning the language.

https://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2009/papers/Ponamareva.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-quakers.html

The Quakers thus declared themselves to be, like God, “no respecter of persons.” So they thee-ed and thou-ed their fellow human beings without distinction as a form of egalitarian social protest. And like today’s proponents of gender-inclusive pronouns, they faced ridicule and persecution as a result.

But there is also an important difference between the Quakers and today’s pronoun protesters. While modern activists argue that equality demands displays of equal respect toward others, the Quakers demonstrated conscientious disrespect toward everyone. Theirs was an equality of extreme humility and universally low status. Even the famously tolerant founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, couldn’t stand the Quakers and complained of the “familiarity, anger, scorn and contempt” inherent in their use of “thee” and “thou.”

zooey d and m ward more like shee/it amirite
― Famous Anus (rip van wanko)

there should be a godwin's law analogue: anyone criticizing the use of singular "they" will reflexively use singular "they" somewhere in their comment. it's uncanny how often it works

are there gender neutral terms for mother/father brother/sister aunt/uncle other than 'parent' 'sibling'?

I like parent, sibling, nibling. I call my two gn siblings "my sibs" with a certain amount of enthusiasm.

what's a nibling? personal pronouns are important because everyone needs to use them; i don't really see words for familial relations in the same need category at all. they show a relationship. if you want to sever your relationship, that's up to you. one cannot sever one's pronominal relationship to oneself.

LL, many relationship-showing words are inherently gendered, e.g. niece, nephew, aunt, uncle. There is no standard non-gendered equivalent for these words, so it's impossible to reflect a relationship without gendering a person who is simply not of that gender.

"Nibling" is an ungendered niece/nephew child-of-siblings word.

Have heard a few for siblings-of-parent but don't much like any of them. Any other suggestions?

the siblings of your parents are your 0th cousins once removed. (your siblings are your 0th cousins.)

oooooh duh
i forgot about that bc i don't have siblings and my aunts/uncles are not a part of my life bc we haven't spoken in years

silly mistake
nevermind! sorry

your siblings are your 0th cousins

whoa

they's all kin

Huh, I didn't know the current usage of 'sibling' was so recent.

1903, modern revival of Old English sibling (“relative, a relation, kinsman”), equivalent to sib +‎ -ling. Compare Middle English sib, sibbe (“relative; kinsman”), German Sippe. The term apparently meant merely kin or relative until the 20th century when its necessity for the study of genetics led to its specialized use. For example, the OED has a 1903 citation in which "sibling" must be defined for those who don't know the intended meaning.

The word 'sib' or 'sibling' is coming into use in genetics in the English-speaking world, as an equivalent of the convenient German term 'Geschwister' [E.&C. Paul, "Human Heredity," 1930]

Iceland came up with an official patronym for nonbinary folks this year (-bur):

https://www.icelandreview.com/news/icelandic-names-will-no-longer-be-gendered/

so parents still have to petition to give a girl a "boy" name and vice versa unless they identify the child as gender-neutral? weird progressive/regressive juxtaposition there.

No, all first names are available to everyone now irrespective of gender "claimed" on birth certificate, but your choice on your birth certificate determines the suffix you must use for your surname (-son, -dottir, or -bur).

"Nibling" is an ungendered niece/nephew child-of-siblings word.

I feel like it's a significant enough thing to have a non-gendered term for, but Nibling makes me think of gifs of cute rodents eating carrots, or cute rodents eating carrots in Viking helmets singing Wagner

Family words are so confusing for me — tbh I wish we could all just go by our first names instead of foregrounding the family relation. Pronouns are necessary syntactically but to constantly refer to someone as their familial relation is different and not syntactically necessary.

https://twt-thumbs.washtimes.com/media/image/2018/10/12/election_2018_utah_senate_fact_check_24824_c0-233-5568-3479_s885x516.jpg?9568f5f5f6044ba51ec7d024630fbd9c34c30ce5

well said, friend

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/05/teens-argentina-are-leading-charge-gender-neutral-language/

In Spanish, a language in which all nouns are assigned a gender, the word for soldiers is masculine: “Los soldados de Perón.”

The lyrics Mira sang were different: “Les soldades.”

To most Spanish speakers, the “e” in both words would sound jarring — and grammatically incorrect.

But here, teenagers are rewriting the rules of the language to eliminate gender. In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine “o” or the feminine “a” with the gender-neutral “e” in certain words — in order to change what they see as a deeply gendered culture.

this whole entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Universal_Friend

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/amia-srinivasan/he-she-one-they-ho-hus-hum-ita

Ethics requires that we embrace a practice of naming that makes people’s passage through the world more bearable. But ethics is not exhausted by such a practice. A true ethical relation requires that we see the other, just as we see ourselves, as ultimately beyond names and categories: not because (as liberals like to say) we are ‘all human’ or ‘all persons’, but because each of us exists, finally, beyond the reach of mere words. We all know this instinctively in our own case: that feeling of exceeding, bursting beyond, all the words that can be truly applied to us. What does it take for us recognise that this is true, too, of everyone else: of him and her, of them, of you?

Reading this now..

is this ... meta-woke?

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.