Post by Beth and Angel Make Games in Gender All the Things! comments

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I love that so much! It really felt like the first year, especially the first six months or so, after my transition were a huge fight for being a girl. Changing my name and gender took another several months and were full of anxiety about whether I had messed up any of the documents (luckily I didn't!).

But after that... gender is just... a thing that exists, you know? Like yeah, I love being referred to as a girl, but in my own head gender doesn't matter, life has so much more going on in it. I never cared I was a dude before my transition, and it took a long time to realize I could be trans and not constantly think about gender lol. I could just be comfortable in who I am.

I LOVE your discovery of being nonbinary AND a girl. That's so perfect! Maybe 2025 will be the year I'm a nonbinary girl too 🧡

And wow, I knew other languages gendered things (I took a few years of Spanish in high school and they also gender things), but didn't know it changed from language to language! I remember thinking, like... a fridge is female? A computer is female? A school is female? What?!?! Some fits our American gender stereotypes, but a lot doesn't, and even back then it was a cognitive dissonance thing.

And oooooohhhhhhhhhhhh I had no idea about a girl being a neutral gender in German and Dutch! That's really frickin fascinating and awesome! And super fitting of us both right now lol

- ✨Beth

itoldyousoso1 year ago

yeah, that game is practially what native speakers of many languages do every day unconsiously and learners of that language curse about when learning it. and it gets worse if your look at other languages or even your own for some words.

french and german. la luna, der mond. (female) the moon, (male) the moon.

oh and there are some languages that use two and some that use three genders for nouns. and it is not about any attributes that will tell the gender. it is just the base form of the noun. it includes the article. like you would call "to talk" as the base form of the verb talking. german "die frau" is base form of (the) woman and the article carries the case of the noun. so you will encounter "der frau" as well. (der is male article, but also a flexed version of die). "die tasche der frau" is the bag of the woman or better that woman's bag.

grammatical gender is just that. grammar. it is a way of delivering the information about the case the noun has. english does not use an infleced case system. in german you need those, since you can order words around in a sentence without changing meaning. you usually cannot do that in english.

and because it is just grammar, you can also have words for persons that have a non grammatical gender and that word will not have the same gender as that person. it is just the grammatical gender of the word

fun fact, while speaking, if you accidentally used the wrong article you sometimes can save it during speech, by switching to a synonym for the word, that has the matching gender.

I had no idea about a girl being a neutral gender in German

it sometimes is called neutral or neuter, but also it can be called literally "used for things" or "thing-like". it is not male,female, neutral. it is male-ish, female-ish, thing-ish.

so you cannot simply use "it" for nonbinary people in german. it would be an insult.

there are some neutral nouns for persons which just shows that grammar gender is just grammar. das genie for example. the genius. and of course das kind. the child. or das mädchen. the girl. das baby. the baby.

so if you refer to a person by a noun that has neuter gender, it is not an insult, if you use the "it" pronoun. which gets complicated, if there are several nouns with different genders you can use and did use in a longer text. trival example is a kid and it's name. (which would be a kid and his name in formal english. there are remnants of grammar gender in english after all). so if you talk about a kid named angela (a female name), but also refer to her as a kid you would refer to her as "it", till you introduce her name in the text.

and if you are not confused enough, some words have more than one correct gender. it depens on dialect or meaning. butter is encountered as female and male. ketchup as neuter and male.

aza1 year ago

Yes! Yes! All that!

And my native language (French) doesn't have a neutral grammatical gender, but then I learned some Dutch and German, as well as English with its "it" pronouns, which all made me really comfortable with the concept of separating actual gender, sex, and pronouns and grammatical gender. I know the use of it/its pronouns for a person, like you mentioned, is really touchy and loaded in English, but I jumped to claim it the minute I realised I was nonbinary (on top of also using they/them and she/her), because this feeling of being completely divorced from any gender at all, even grammatical. It gives me the same gender euphoria that Beth described above. Especially since it is impossible for me to get that in my native language.

In French, I can be a she the same way that Beth is a she (deliberate, conscious, that's our gender), or the same way that a table is a she. And in English, I can be a they the same way that a stranger with an unknown or irrelevant gender is a they, or I can be an it, the same way that a table is an it.

Genderrrrrrrrrrrrr

Beth and Angel Make Games1 year ago

"It" is often an insult in English, too. In fact, a friend of mine uses "it/its" pronouns and says it has a hard time getting people to accept that because they don't want to insult it. But... those are its pronouns! It's a cyclical disagreement lol

And goodness... I love grammar, and this is a lot of really awesome data grammatically! So if I'm hearing this right, if say a hand is given a masculine reference, then even if you say "her hand" it would be masculine. That sounds a lot like how, for a long time, the person who delivered mail was "the mailman" regardless of their gender. The same for like "garbage man" and some others that I can't think of now, since they've mostly been rephrased (although a lot of people still use the old, gendered terms).

I also LOVE the idea of part of the euphoria over a pronoun is because it's NOT EVEN POSSIBLE in other genders. That makes it even more of an act of rebellion, even more special.

itoldyousoso1 year ago(-1)

So if I'm hearing this right, if say a hand is given a masculine reference, then even if you say "her hand" it would be masculine.

i am not sure if i understand. an article is not a pronoun. a pronoun is a word that it used instead of the noun. for the noun. pro noun. you could use the noun instead, like you might hear it in japanese anime, when children or odd characters speak of themselves "in the third person".

the article is part of the bare form of the noun in gendered languages. it is inflected accordingly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection and stays with the word in many situations and in that bare form, article+noun, you will know the gender of that noun.

in german hand (die hand) is feminine, so i shall use foot (der fuss), which is male. the foot of a woman is always male, but you will only see the gender of the word for a body part by the inflection of the person's pronoun. in other words: you do not say "her the foot" "ihr der fuss". you inflect the pronoun. ihre hand. ihr fuss. her (female) hand, her (male) foot.

so the article of the noun foot/hand is telling the gender of the owner* and the gender of the body part. but sadly not in an unambiguous way.

* the owner being the noun - which can have a different gender than the person it is used to refer to.

regarding chosen pronouns:

i disagree that a person can or should chose pronouns. a person might "switch" genders and assume the role of the other gender and thus use that gender's pronouns.

i regard inventing or appropriating pronouns as on the same level as inventing or using a formal title. like king, lord, count, professor, doctor, sir, lady, queen, supreme ruler of the galaxy, president, village idiot. and i consider it socially unacceptable to use a title that was not given by society.

one should not get "identity" by the usage of pronouns. that is not identity. it is grammar. and grammar is supposed to convey meaning. and meaning in language is needed to be understandable by more than one person. what is the meaning of using the pronoun "it" or "they" or "xe"?

in german, selfusing "it" has no meaning, beside being an insult or telling people you have a big ego and want special treatment. even for babies you use gendered terms, once you know the name/sex of the baby. by using "it" one would not convey the meaning of not belonging to either gender. and there are only two, even in german. the third gender is lack of a gender by being unspecified, by having that gender in the bare form, or by being not applicable - which would sound like "it" would be the perfect choice, but unfortunately this is not so. the dehumanizing insult meaning of using "it" for a person is too strong a hurdle to use it. pity. would have been handy as there exists grammar for "it".

the usage of "they" in english for a single person sounds stupid and very wrong in my non native speaker ears. but the hurdle is lower, because there are some long established cases where it would be correct and of course it is not perceived as an insult. but those cases are scenarios where you typically would not even know the number of persons. it does not convey the meaning of unknown gender, it is conveying the meaning of an unknown person. using they for a known person makes no sense. also, if you use it as such, you can easily have a sentence where the reader will not know if you are talking about several persons or someone that approprated that pronoun.

i get why pronouns are important for people, but so are names and meanings of words and grammar. if it is important to someone to tell their chosen gender, they should just do so. and then use established pronouns that are fitting to their name. pronouns are supposed to be shorthand. if you overload them with gender re-affirmation, that shorthand-ness is gone and the meaning changes from simply being a substitute for a noun to a reminder of that person's chosen gender identity. (i was talking about non standard pronouns here)

i would prefer to not focus on gender/sex all the time in texts that have nothing to do with that topic. this is awful in german as well. there are people forcing the topic by using forced/constructed gender terms that are grammatically wrong and misleading. but this is the wrong way! we need to give gender less importance, not more. and citing it all the time, be it by using chosen pronouns or by using arbitrary constructed gender terms does give it a weight it should not have.

we (western free culture) live in a society where all people can do and like all things/persons. be they girly or manly, regardless of gender/sex. focussing on gender all the time is a step backward, not forward.

flyingcloudsoffish24 days ago (8 edits)

Hello. I’m aware it’s been a long time since your comment, but would like to attempt to add a bit of clarity. And simply to throw my opinion onto the internet and hope that it helps someone somewhere who just read the (seemingly not ill-intentioned but definitely maybe hurtful) above comment.

Firstly, thank you for your explanation regarding pronouns as compared to articles. I think you may have misunderstood the comment you were replying to, however. I can’t see any confusion there that needed clarifying.

As for the (current) importance of pronouns:

The main complexity that using they/them for non-gendered people brings (at least for me) is that we almost always use these words with plural grammar. Despite this, they/them has actually been in use in English when describing a single individual in a way that keeps their gender neutral or anonymous for a very long time.

To hopefully give some perspective, Japanese (for example) usually does away with pronouns entirely. There’s no need to say of the sky “it is blue” when you can simply say “(is) blue”. If it’s possible to understand a sentence with no pronouns at all, it’s possible to understand a sentence with non-traditional pronouns.

(Native Japanese speakers, please forgive my simplifications! I know I could explain this better, but I want to keep it short.)

In English, when you deliberately use pronouns for someone that are not the pronouns they’ve requested, you are being intentionally harmful. You are pushing your view of the world onto them and likely implying that you either don’t care about or dislike their existence. Far more so than by using words that sound “wrong” to you but are accepted by others as both correct and affirming.

Importantly, language, like gender, can be fluid! If there’s one thing I’ve come to realise by talking to speakers of many languages, it’s that nothing is static. How we use words changes. Using they/them singularly more often, or starting to use it/its for people who we know are sentient and sensitive, are just new changes. We come to understand concepts that we weren’t familiar with until now, and those concepts require shifts in how we use language. This is how language has always been.

In an ideal future, perhaps we could one day do away with gendered words entirely, if we wanted to.

For now, at least, using gendered (and not-gendered) pronouns when we refer to ourselves and others is a very important part of recognising who we are, of solidifying our rights and of showing solidarity with each other.

(Which isn’t to say that it’s important to everyone! Some people don’t mind or care how you refer to them, and that’s cool too!)

To use a person’s chosen pronouns is to say “you are absolutely the man/woman/enby/etc. you say you are, and I care about you”.

P.S. Obsession over “formal” use of a language is generally an unintentional form of elitism and imperialism.

P.P.S. I’m sure there are things I’ve missed and I’m sure I’ve made generalisations without realising. Please don’t be too harsh if you choose to point these out.

Edit: Changed some things to hopefully be clearer, removed some bits to make this long comment shorter. And I completely forgot to say the most important thing, which is that I love the idea of Gender All the Things and am really looking forward to playing it.

Deleted post19 days ago

Deleted 13 days ago

Beth and Angel Make Games19 days ago

Wow lol, this is a lot and I fundamentally disagree with it right off the bat. But let's start with how you started:

"they" was not used before to describe a single known individual --> Yes it was. I did it myself, 20 years ago. Let's say I'm writing a book report about an author and they go by an initial, like "C S Lewis." I dunno if that's a man or woman, so I'd say "I like their books" or whatever.
actually established gender neutral "he" --> LOL way to step on tabletop discourse unknowingly. Try searching for gendering rulebooks in tabletop and you'll quickly find how hated that use of "he" is as the assumed gender for people.

Also, why are you even taking the space for MY zine to discuss YOUR outdated gender opinions? You're "pushing their view onto others" which, wow, you used "they" as a gender-neutral term for a singular person 2 paragraphs after saying people don't do that. And yes, you used "the person" as the subject there, which is singular. You didn't use "the actually established gender neutral he." So thanks for proving our point for us. Seems like you didn't tell us so.

Anyway, if you reply to this zine again, even if you reply with an apology or compliment, it'll be deleted as soon as I see it. You are not welcome here. This was created for a nonbinary game jam, and you're in here trying to explain away a whole group of people and failing spectacularly at it. That's literally the opposite intent of this zine.

Go be a closed-minded, hateful person elsewhere.

- ✨Beth

flyingcloudsoffish18 days ago

I didn’t claim that they/them was used just to keep the subject’s gender neutral, but that it was used for individuals in a way that did so (whether intentional or not). As of only about 700 years ago. Yes, it usually meant more “any given person” than “this specific person”, but that’s a tiny leap to make in such a long time, and the grammar takes the same form either way. Specifically for those who are non-binary, they/them is attested from the 20th century onwards, which is awesome. It’s at least a decade or so older than I’d thought!

Using he/him as a gender neutral pronoun is generally seen as archaic in modern English, in large part because it enforces sexist ideologies and assumptions. Even without considering genderqueer identities, I strongly recommend against using it that way.

A request isn’t pushing things onto anyone. If it were, it wouldn’t be a request.

In more pragmatic terms, requesting specific pronouns is a way of advocating for equal treatment. There is nothing entitled about asking for the same recognition that cisgender people already receive.

Using he/him and she/her for entirely cis people is also thinking about gender, after all. We’re just so used to these that they require less conscious effort.

I agree with your comment that “grammar does not define your gender, it’s the other way round”, in that the way we were using English before was insufficient to describe the vastness of how people experience gender, and we are finding ways to improve language to better understand each other. It’s great!

As for clarity, again, pronouns don’t exist in a vacuum. In all writing and speech, information tends to be included as and when desired. To be blunt, nobody owes you a description of numbers or masculinity/femininity/neutrality. If you’re really unsure, you can ask.

Language can’t be disentangled from respect and recognition. This has always been the case. It is a fundamentally human tool, not a machine.

If you’re determined to treat it as one, though, maybe oil your machine with appropriate doses of capital letters.

As for how important/non-important it is to focus on gender: on an individual level, that’s not something for you to decide, except for yourself. But it does make me question why you would choose disrespect on the basis of obsolete grammar here instead of finding a space where we can help each other address other issues in constructive ways.

Regardless, seeing as gender is a huge part of human identity, society and the roles we find ourselves in (not to mention whether or not we’re safe in those spaces), taking time to discuss it and consider it is absolutely necessary and not something to be condemned.

P.S. Yikes! Sorry to anyone reading that this got so long. Can you believe I did a lot of editing to make it shorter?

Beth and Angel Make Games19 days ago(+1)

Thank you for taking the time and energy to reply to this. I'm bipolar and when I saw itoldyousoso's comment, I was depressed and didn't have the energy to reply. Then I forgot all about it.

So, yeah, your reply was very appreciated 🧡 And also I just realized I could ban them from these comments, so I did :D

- ✨Beth

flyingcloudsoffish18 days ago(+1)

I am so sorry for dragging you back here in such a negative way, and that things went the way they did. Forgetting about it sounds like the sensible option.

I’d taken itoldyouso’s older comment as hopefully well-meaning but just old-fashioned. I ended up writing another long reply (please feel free not to read it, it’s just more rambling), which was probably pointless, but I’d like to think they could be open to changing their views one day.

Anyway.

I did the same thing with using they/them for authors! And characters sometimes, when talking about books. Though the use of they/them I meant with “very long time” was much older still. It’s really interesting that we had such different examples in mind!

The things you make are fantastic! You’re an inspiration. Thank you.

Beth and Angel Make Games17 days ago(+1)

No need to apologize at all, I think it's noble and awesome when people speak out against hate, and you did a great job with that! I often hear people say that they don't argue with people to change their mind, because trolls won't change their minds. They do it for everyone who comes and reads what the troll says. Maybe they'll change their minds, or at least protect them from the hateful troll. And that's a very wonderful aspiration! 🧡

That's very true, too. Sometimes in books, a character will have a funky name, and they won't specify a gender. "They" is perfect there!

And thank you so, so much for saying so 🧡 That genuinely means so much to me to hear!!!

- ✨Beth

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