For some reason every conversation about this simple rule gets way too toxic
There’s definitely some additional nuance (like a pronouns in bio/username situation) but this should cover the broad needs of anyone who is approaching this with good faith.
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How to choose the correct pronouns
I followed this one chart and was instantly promoted to CFO.
We really did great work designing this fantastic flowchart.
AND HOLY SHIT does it get toxic. for some reason there’s no will for even this basic level of nuance. currently watching an entire anti-blahaj hate crusade over a simple misunderstanding where the left and the right conclusions of the chart got conflated as though they are the same thing.
then i tried to help clarify and got called insults.
just… so sad :(
I think one of the issues is that several of the people involved in that crusade were also banned from blahaj.
People tend to not disclose their conflict of interest.
That’s a very probably true analysis :(
Relevant meme post of what brought on a lot of those bans for onlookers.
Dare I ask?
Ah yeah. I banned her. Not because she defaults to they/them, but because she was victim blaming queer folk as the cause of their own oppression, and using a lot of thinly veiled insults against gender diverse folk
And for what it's worth, I'm almost certainly a similar age to her
Aren't you afraid of just creating an echo chamber where no criticism is possible at all?
You can disagree with their idea of what the effect is of people being (perceived as) overly sensitive to pronouns, but isn't it a topic that should be discussed in the queer space, and shouldn't there be room for such points of view?
If they'd be personally attacking people, i can get giving them a temp ban a few times and see if they learn how to behave, but perma banning fellow queers from your queer discussion space because their opinions don't match yours really doesn't sound like a good basis for a heatlhy space to talk about queer issues.
And great that you're similar in age survived being young and queer better, does that invalidate their experience?
In a world where we are being erased, attacked, harassed and turned in to political footballs, where every major social media platform has explicitly green lit attacks and harassment on us, concerns over “echo chambers” aren’t even on my list.
Bigotry is bigotry. It has no place here. The user in question wasn’t banned for defaulting to they/them. She was banned because she was actively blaming the victims of transphobia for the transphobia they received. She isn’t gender diverse herself, she is a cis woman who decided that the people asking for their pronouns to be respected are the real cause of the bigotry we face.
On top of that, she also threw a lot of comments that made it clear what she really things of gender diverse folk. “ attention seeking brats”. “ Younger queers need faux outrage to feel important”, “ if some chud gets all hissy about their pronouns”. “ As a cis lesbian who’s gender nonconforming, I’ve spent years putting up with their pronoun based faux “oppression” temper tantrums out of an effort to be “accepting” only to watch larger society completely flip on us”
tl;dr - a cis woman victim blaming gender diverse folk and gatekeeping them at the same time got banned.
No, age doesn’t invalidate alternative perspectives. That was the very point I was making. The user in question was using her age as an “elder queer” to invalidate the younger queer folk. She clearly included me in the “young queer” category in some of her coments. I pointed out my age to highlight that being an “elder queer” that has been exposed to awful shit isn’t an excuse to invalidate folks.
They way i read it their point, it was about people being aggressive in having their pronouns being respected, even in situations where there's clearly no malice or when their pronouns just aren't known. I have no clue if that's actually happening, but if it is, i can imagine that's not very benificial to the cause.
But yeah, they do seem to generalize too much, and then blame everything on the next generation. why don't you just ban them for a week, and send them a message that while there might be something to their point, generalizing the heck out of it and blaiming the new generation for everything isn't the solution either, and not the best way to approach this discussion.
Maybe a bit of empathy an genuine feedback can make them a good faith contributor that has similar experiences in their life?
Yes, that’s what she’s angry about, but it’s not why she was banned.
Because then she just comes back and slips under the radar, and I have no way of knowing if anything is changed, unless I follow up on it. If she wants to access the instance, she can approach me and we can talk about what it will take. It’s permanent in the sense that it won’t automatically expire, not in the sense that it can’t be removed.
You are more than welcome to make that attempt and have that discussion, however, in my experience, mods and admins reaching out after bans to try and have these conversations don’t change opinions, they just further inflame the sense of injustice the person is feeling.
I don’t have the resources or will to try and manually talk around every person who throws around bigotry for what they believe are genuine reasons, nor to expose the rest of the community to gatekeeping whilst they “work through it”. And honestly, most folk who feel as strongly as she does aren’t open to being talked around in any case.
Important detail: the person who posted that question isn't the one who got banned, it was one of the commenters
see my comment history if you are truly interested. fair warning: it’s fucken bad.
![email protected] I guess
Also, if you mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, apologize and respect their wishes.
We’re humans after all, and mistakes happens. No one is asking you to be perfect. People just want you to be a decent person.
If only there were gender neutral pronouns in my language 😭
In German it feels completely random.
A table is masculine. A castle is feminine. A sausage is feminine. A boy is masculine. A girl is neutral. A fire is neutral. ...
Not sure if there's any meaningful rule behind.
Actually, Mädchen (meaning "girl" in German) is a diminutive. It comes from Magd (an old word for "maid" or "young woman") with the -chen suffix, which is a common diminutive in German.
The -chen suffix makes words grammatically neuter, which is why Mädchen takes das instead of die, even though it refers to a female person.
I'm not German but the same applies to the Dutch word for girl, and we've the same rule for neutral. By the way, 'magd' in Dutch means virgin (maagd to be precise), which sounds incredibly inappropriate to be going around calling someone; little virgin (/¯ ಠ_ಠ)/¯
Sorry if you already know this, but it sounds from the wording of your post that you might not know that "maid" or "maiden" means virgin also.
No need to be sorry. I didn't realise, in Dutch I don't think that connotation stuck for the equivalent, meid. That simply means girl.
"my maiden aunt" means an aunt who never married (and it's presumed to be virginal because what other option is there /s)
So yeah
There's a similar — though very localised — thing in English with "themself."
The singular form is used, but it's far less common than the plural form "themselves." I often hear "themselves" used to refer to one non-binary person and it always sounds weird.
I guess we have to work with what we have. Is there an alternative in Arabic, like neopronouns?
Isn't there a dual case (as in, specifically for two of something) in Arabic? Or is that primarily a formal thing?
As far as I know there isn't any rule to learn. Grammatical gender is a wild mixture of several things, sometimes it has something to do with the ending of words and sometimes with attributes of the things, if it has like agency, is an inanimate object, or is an abstract concept. Sometimes it's completely arbitrary and sometimes there are rules to it like with group of people. But there is no way of telling, you got to memorize it. In any way, grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender. And I'm pretty sure that's not it's origin. Though, we try to link it to biological gender in case of people. But even that has exceptions, and it doesn't really work with group of people etc.
Unlike for girl, das Mädchen, which is a diminutive (of die Maid, a virgin young woman) as it is ending with -chen and thus, is of neutral gender, I doubt if rules for the other examples do exist:
Oh sorry I went out and commented the same thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Doesn't matter, as you elaborated more deeply on why das Mädchen has neuter gender.
BTW: The use of (das) Fräulein (miss), again a diminutive; 'little woman', in German, to refer to an unmarried woman has come out of fashion since ~50 years and now may be perceived as insulting as well.
Mädchen is no longer perceived as a diminutive of Maid or Magd, as both terms are more used in a historic context, and thus, it stands on its own.
My only issue is when apparently someone can choose that "they", a gender neutral pronoun, doesn't apply to someone. I saw it in a recent Elliot Page post. Someone was getting ripped to shreds for talking about Elliot and saying "they". "No it's him! You're trying to minimize his identity!" was basically the response. But the person was talking about Elliots work pre and post transition and you could tell they were taking great care to not offend, and yet it was still offensive apparently. Which was then made even funnier when others chimed in to point out that Elliot specifically asks to be referred to as "They/Him".
My whole point is that some people need to cool it when it comes to gender neutral pronouns. Lest we forget, "I'm a dude, he's a dude, she's a dude, we're all dudes!"
Use their name, if you know it.
They/them it is!
yuss!
Well my language does not have a neutral pronoun so this just does not work.
Turkish has 1 gender neutral pronoun, the only pronoun in the whole language
Only one pronoun???
yes, O but if you wanna say that something belongs to someone you say onun so technically two but -un and -in are just suffixes that means that makes the word the owner of an item so it usually doesn’t count (by pronoun I mean personal pronoun btw)
yeah this chart is only for english unfortunately
Most languages don't have gendered pronouns, actually. It's really mostly random romance languages, and nearly all of them have a neuter option.
That nobody wants to use for me or other people >:(
The thing with the neuter option at least in my langauge is that it is just not used on people. It would be even ruder to refer to someone by the neuter pronoun that to use the wrong gebdered one.
Technically a neutral one is using 2nd person plural for the formal voice. But even that has to be followed by a gender specific form of a verb.
Akin to "it", I suppose.
I am a huge fan of the pronoun "one".
Kinda yeah.
As in one does not simply walk into Mordor?
That kinda only works for us in second person. You just leave out the pronoun.
"One" works first person (in place of "I"), second person (in place of "you") or third person (in place of "he/she/they"). It's ambiguous, but that's a feature of a pronoun, not a bug.
Yeah I am speaking for my language. The issue arises because verbs change depending on gender. So there are almost always 3 different verb forms.
oh i thought most languages only had gendered.
also idk about having a gender neutral option in most. afaik the creation of neutral pronouns in languages that have never had them (other than male being the neutral equivalent) is seen basically the same as neopronouns, which means its very hard for people to start using them.
for example, i'm from brazil and i have never seen anyone use neutral pronouns seriously. i wouldn't be surprised if the other languages in the same situation are going through the same thing
though i guess through jokes people might get used to them and start using them seriously, so things could become better in the future.
Yeah, it's an English-speaking majority platform, so English chart it is. Can't remember non-English pronouns being relevant in any recent discussion. This one solves the (most) relevant problem (for most users).
That said, we have a similar problem with language limitations here and all "solutions" sound ridiculous.
What's your language, if it's okay to ask?
Why would it not be ok to ask? It's slovenian.
I think some people might consider it too personal/identifying?
Anyway, the Slovenian pronoun system sounds fascinating. Changing how you refer to people in so many different ways is pure nonsense, but it's also poetic, especially when synthesis is involved. I'll have to study it sometime.
The most poetic thing about the language is the dual form anyway.
It's a safe question to ask, if they don't like it they won't answer. A person's language is hardly ever identifying
I mean with Slovenian being a rather small one it can be quite identifing yet at the same time not.
People who live their entire lives on the internet have no idea how humans actually react to things in real life. They've been trained to assume that literally anything they do or say could be considered offensive to someone
The phrase is more of an indication of a lack of hostility on their part. Even something neutral like "what country is that" could come across as a bit confrontational, in English. It would almost be like asking the question with an assumption that you can't answer because it wasn't correct when clearly it is and they would just like to find out more.
Theres a fair amount of performative politeness you have to go through to take the edges off of English. It's not just fake-ness, as it can sometimes come across to non-native speakers. As I'm sure you know already, English is the a very information efficient amalgamation of 3 different languages. For example, some people find poetry and literature far more rich and descriptive in other languages. Due to it being particularly efficient at information exchange, it can also come across very blunt too.
Just thought you deserved a proper answer, with context, as you were kind enough to give one yourself.
I see. But I think this was a bit too polite. In my opinion the better way to take off the edge would be to ask and then add 'if you don't mind me asking' or If I may ask what country that is. Adding 'if it's okay to ask' seems almost like he asked me for my address or something that it's not okay to ask people about.
That's the same thing though.
Mine has! It translates to "this" and is used only as insult tho.
I mean we have the same being that, it, this. You just dont use those to refer to people though. It is ruder than misgendering.
I'd say default should be to offer your own name/pronouns to encourage someone to share rather than asking.
Super fair! I guess I would categorize or lump that in as a tactful and warm way of “asking” but I absolutely am with you for that suggestion. 🤗
Nope, the allt right hate they too now. Make a new apologist flow chart that are regime approved mate
shoot my bad 🙇♀️
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
owie! :3 owie! :3 ouch :3 oof! :3
I read this in frank reynold's voice
Ask them, "why do you care so much about what genitals you think I have?"
There's a lot of transphobes that use they/them to not acknowledge the pronouns of trans people, but also to skirt around anti-misgendering rules of social media. I call it "passive-aggressive misgendering".
Definitely :( and it’s a super hurtful thing.
But! of course! that only happens when the offending person knows the pronouns and uses they/them anyway (right side of the flowchart). I see you are already getting downvotes from people who are so riled up they assumed for ya you meant both cases. Ugh.
Thanks for being normal ❤️
Do you feel the same about names?
Based If yes. If no, cringe.
Do you know the names of everyone you interact with? Every grocer, barman, stranger?
Then you might just be a dick. If someone has their pronouns clearly visible, it isn't that hard to use them.
Or call them that human over there? I do that sometimes as a joke.
Last time I did that I got corrected by a furry.
Avoiding pronouns altogether until clarification is obtained can certainly be a strategy too!
What's your stance on snap nicknames for identification purposes?
i don’t know what that means
"What's up with mophead over there?"
"Have you seen big-ears lately?"
A snap nickname is any vaguely descriptive (and mildly rude) nickname given to someone.
unrelated idk just do what makes people comfortable
This is so rubbish. Almost everyone is a he or she, so just use that. On the very very very rare instance you get it wrong, say sorry and use the correct one from then on. Unless you forget, the appologise again when corrected. Yes I am imply it is on the person who got called the wrong pronoun to correct the one who made the mistake.
Wouldn't it be much easier to use the grammatically well established singular they/them. That way you never run into an issue. Surely you'd do that when you encounter a name that can be used as both a female and a male name (Jessie, Les etc)
I mean, historically it's well established, but you can't deny that language has evolved in many places (at least in America) that they/them feels plural. I'm not saying they/them shouldn't be gender neutral singular pronouns, but in the dialect I was raised, it only feels correct in indeterminate situations, like "whoever stole my bike, I hope they get arrested."
Obviously language can continue to evolve where singular-they feels correct in any scenario, but if you're talking about "much easier" then that includes the random rules people collectively hallucinate.
This implies you can not tell the person's gender, which for most people is perfectly obvious. So often can cause offence. I realize not using they/them can also cause offence, but just much less often.
I just exclusively do this. You get to piss off transphobes and the least socially capable among the trans community, while being perfectly reasonable to everyone that just wants to be whatever they want/are.
If were going from whats «grammatically well established» i would argue he/she is a lot more established
Tbh just saying they is easier, took a few weeks/months to train myself to do it and now I'm just cringing whenever I hear something that's like "he or she could be doing this thing" when "they" is just more efficient anyway. They're just as established. I think "they" is an older term but I'd have to look into the etymology on that.
So I'm not sure how reliable it is given the age of the data but it looks like there's some indication that "they" fell in use up to the late 1900s but before ~1860 it was actually more common than now. I'm now curious if there's any more info on this.
He/She is fine for when you know the gender of someone. When you don't they is really well established - it was used by Chaucer. So they if you don't know because they might go by something else, they for someone with a name like Leslie who could be a he or a she outside of any discussion about trans identities.
I've never met a person in real life who got upset because someone used the wrong pronoun once. Assuming people's gender is fine, as long as you don't double down on your assumption when someone corrects you
I tend to agree, but I do get where the other viewpoint comes from. I'm from a country where I don't believe this is a major point of contention, as long as we're respectful with each other I don't think people feel the need to make a big deal out of this, but I'm aware I'm speaking from a bubble here, others may disagree.
I do work in an international company with many anglophones from the UK and USA, and it's a much bigger point there, to the point certain expressions are banned, e.g. addressing a group as guys. I speculate that it's a bit of a cultural thing, and a language thing. As others mention, a lot of languages are Ill suited to naturally use gender neutrality. English is quite malleable that way.
I have a really hard time recognizing people's gender so I usually go along with the same pronouns others use and then inevitably feel really bad about it because of how often it's wrong. In languages without an accepted they/them equivalent I just flip flop but in English I really don't understand the need to use he/she unless it's ambiguous whether there are one or more people being spoken about.
And then i use they and they get offended that i didnt use their preffered pronoun(true both for stupid conservatives and for some trans people who just have to try to ruin 10 years of progress in gender neutral pronouns)
Calling someone they/them when you don't know their pronouns is fine, and them being upset doesn't ruin anything for anyone else. Neither you nor they are harming "10 years of progress in gender neutral pronouns" as you put it. What a strange narrative.
This is the way: Introduce yourself with your own pronouns, before assuming any for the other. This will trigger them to respond in kind and then you know.
This is the why: Calling someone they/them when you don't know or forgot, is ok but not best....because if someone is passing, and is called they/them, which aren't their pronouns, can raise suspicions that the person is nb, or trans, putting them in an unsafe position. If you call everyone they/them, that you think looks trans enough to have questionable pronouns, and label cis people as their gender, then this is othering. And unfortunately this is how it plays out in real life, hardly anyone "they/thems" everyone....99 percent quick scan and assign pronouns. And if they can't, they assign they/them othering many people.
If I don't get pronouns back on introduction, then I gender people based on how they look. if someone is obviously fem presenting or at least trying to, then those are the pronouns I use, and vice versa. And if someone looks androgynous guess what I use they/them.
As a binary trans woman I'd rather you guess than use they/them. Those aren't my pronouns and it's obvious that they're not.
Labels have meaning as do the pronouns that go with them
I like my gender alot, I worked hard and still do to get and keep myself passing. I would rather not to have my gender neutered by some everyone's included tucute bullshit.
They/theming everyone misgenders most people.
And the 10 years that this shit narrative has been pushed has been the false narrative that gender doesn't exist. Gender abolition is not a good thing, and idgaf about hurting the feelings of identities that have co-opted a medical condition and turned it into a fashion statement of who can have more colors in their hair, piercings in their face, dumpier clothing, and shit takes on gender theory while loudly proclaiming to be the experts shouting down actual transex people accusing them falsely of transphobia.
This is why the right loves to pushback against us. Pretty soon I'm not going to have access to life-saving medication because men with beards can claim womanhood and normalize the bulge. Or that men's rooms need tampons. That trans men can be lesbians, and that men can get pregnant. Absolutely delusional and made this community a cesspool of support for shit causes that obfuscated the need for our protection pushing binary transex persons out of the trans umbrella.
I hate "he or she" so much. JUST SAY THEY. It sounds so clunky.
And then there are some languages where using pronouns for the secondary person is considered rude/weird in some conditions and you are supposed to use the name directly.
That's fun stuff.
I don’t understand why this is so difficult for some people. It’s not like a whole lot has changed right?. Most everyone have already been using they/them for quite some time. The only different being is now, it’s best not to assume gender and default to they/them until asked otherwise.
The way I see it is If these people are able to make the incredibly mind-bogglingly difficult transition from who they once were, to who they are now- including not just facing, but overcoming the emotional, physical, and social challenges- in comparison, it’s should take very little effort for anyone to transition their use of pronouns to properly accommodate them.
For singular when speaking about someone who is cis? I think you might be in a bubble.
It's been done for centuries
From what I know, Shakespeare did that, so it might be you who is in a bubble.
I told a friend that you had said this, and they want to know what you mean by “bubble.”
If the above example of a gender neutral sentence made sense to you- then it’s safe to say that using they/them in the singular is common enough that it would be considered a completely natural part of our lexicon.
People don't walk around with "cis" tattooed on their foreheads.
Can we just start misgendering republicans?
no that is the tool of the enemy we have no need of it
My solution, get rid of gendered pronouns. Make “He/Him” gender neutral and get rid of all others. Why do I need to know the gender of a coworker I have only ever talked to in email? And why, when referring to this person, do I need to let everybody else know that I know their gender by using the correct pronoun? It’s dumb and pointless.
It’s like when I was a kid and it was very important that we knew which teachers were married and which weren’t so we could use “Ms” or “Mrs”. It’s irrelevant to every conversation.
???why not just use they/them like we have been for centuries lmao. your plan would cause so many problems.
don’t make me tap the tom scott video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46ehrFk-gLk
https://www.tomscott.com/gender-neutral-pronouns/
Maybe you misunderstood my actual comment. I’m saying we should use he/him as the general neutral pronoun. That Tom Scott video is saying the same thing as me, just with a different solution.
You said my plan would cause “so many problems”, and outside of the obvious transition problem, I still see no problems.
and NO they/them doesn't "refer to multiple." the tom scott video abjectly disagrees with you on that, so don't twist things. even Shakespeare used they/them to refer to singular people.
honestly this conversation is pointless and boring so i'll end it here.
I agree. Also thanks for letting the video.
"If someone dropped their wallet would you tell them?"
Perfectly normal and already understood.
Just a quick heads up but, linguistically speaking, you are mistaken with what you said about “they/them”.
It doesn’t refer to multiple people?
It does, and it also refers to individuals, and it has for hundreds of years
To quote from Cambridge University’s (founded 1209 ce in England) English dictionary:
We use they and them to refer back to the indefinite pronouns someone, anyone, everyone when we do not know the number or gender.
I actually prefer it as the neutral singular, but everyone decided that was dehumanizing. To me it feels natural because if you don't know an animal's or a baby's gender, you call it it.
People didn’t so much “decide” that, as it was used that way by bigots specifically because it was historically only used for animals and objects. They used it as a slur to hurt folks in our community, and like any attempt to reclaim a slur, even though the reclamation is an act of power, there are going to be people who were targetted by the slur who struggle with the concept of reclamation.
And your main point, degender the male pronouns, it wouldn't work. "Man" used to mean people, male men and female men and child men – boys and girls – had different words, some of which are still around. That's why people say there's nothing gendered in "chairman" (which 50 years ago was logically equal to "chairperson", unless you count other species as people).