Post by aza in Gender All the Things! comments

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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.

flyingcloudsoffish3 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.

itch.io

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