I wish we just used “they” always. I am fine with people not wanting certain pronouns but I find it very tedious to track different pronouns in my head. Especially in a professional setting gender shouldn’t matter at all.
I have found ways to almost always write and talk with gender neutral pronouns, without sounding too weird. After working with colleagues that use gender neutral pronouns, I find myself being careful not to assume any gender specific pronouns, which means in most cases just not using them.
As an Australian, we seemed to develop a culture of calling everyone 'mate' regardless of gender etc. Helps since I can't ever remember a persons name, even after they've said it directly to my face.
I've got no issue with people wanting to use different pronouns, though usually I try to keep it neutral in conversation anyway. "They/their" is extremely easy to use without much thought.
I'm pretty sure this is one of those things that's true in the Northern half* of the country that people think applies everywhere, like crocodiles and jellyfish that kill you. I've lived in SA and Vic all my life and all my friends would just be insulted if I called them cunt instead of mate.
* "Northern Half" of course meaning above the Barassi Line and probably adding the NT, not the real geographic north.
Yeah, is there really interesting distinction. I was educated in a very conservative part of the country and they/them was the default Standard English practice. It wasn't about gender but it was about familiarity.
My pet peeve about using "they" is it seems to imply an undue politeness or superiority. Plurality is an ancient metaphor for power, and many languages today have the same form for a plural "you" and a polite "you". Another example is the royal "we".
Did you know you is actually the plural and the singular is thou?
My problem with any of this switching around is that since it's used by a very small minority in a very forced way, until it becomes mainstream in the way 'you' has become mainstream, it's confusing af.
I've had multiple instances when a they was mentioned in a decision and I had to ask, " wait I thought we only had one designer on this ticket who else got added... Oh you're using singular they.. got it"
We used to have that in English with the formal "you" and informal "thou", but politeness lead to the near-exclusive use of "you" until "thou" became archaic. And now that it's archaic, people think it must have been formal. Funny little circular journey.
I wish everyone was just named James. I had a good friend named James and it’s much easier to call everyone that than to learn a bunch of individual names.
The whole point of pronouns is to reduce cognitive overhead. If pronouns become something you have to remember for each person then you might as well drop them from the language and use names all the time.
It makes sense to me that individuals should have names. Pronouns tend to be much less information dense, and are used as shorthand. It doesn't make sense to me that pronouns should capture gender, as opposed to hair color, height, or age.
The property that pronouns capture is essentially arbitrary. That's why Romance languages assign gender to stuff like telephones and sandwiches.
The point of gendered pronouns is that sentences very often have two nouns: a subject and object. If you have only a single pronoun, then any sentence can only use a pronoun to unambiguously refer to one of those. If you have two pronouns and you randomly and evenly distribute them across various subjects, then it's fairly likely that the subject and object will get difference ones and you can now unambiguously use pronouns for both.
Since a very large fraction of human speech pertains to other humans and since human sex is a roughly 50/50 distribution, it makes some sense that we used gender as our mostly arbitrary thing to assign a pair of pronouns too. We could have used, say handedness instead, but with only ~10% of people being left-handed, the odds of a sentence being about a righty and a lefty is much smaller.
Pronouns are basically like special variables in a REPL that let you refer to the most recent expression. It's nice if you can refer back to a couple of them.
Why even use articles or pronouns, a better way would be to unambiguously mark every word with whether they're the object subject or whatever role it is in the sentence. Maybe tack on more flags as you need them for more information as needed
Hence why forcing my team to learn Hungarian has really been a no brainer and will really start to pay dividends in the next decade when we finally reach a working professional proficiency
Well, it certainly is a much stronger disambiguater than those other signals. Dividing a population in half is a pretty powerful technique.
Though now that I think about it age is also potent - you get the same rough division w.r.t relative age (younger vs older than the speaker), and you can divide the population roughly into quarters with ease and accuracy. Do miss and ma'am count as pronouns here? They code for age as well as gender
Hair color and height dont really have the same sort of dividing power broadly speaking.
Still, your line of thought there about what a pronoun should capture is intriguing.
I don't disagree with you in principle, but this take ignores the boots-on-the-ground reality for trans and nonbinary people.
Trans and nonbinary people are using this as a shibboleth to determine whether they can feel safe around you. You are not someone who wishes nonbinary or trans people harm, but unfortunately, there is a large segment of the population that does. The act of using someone's preferred pronouns is an act of saying "you are safe with me, I do not wish you harm." This is not a default or automatic assumption they can make, as it likely is for you.
Many trans and nonbinary people, through no fault of their own, have PTSD from how they've been treated by others. Even those that have not experienced hatred or violence directly are no doubt aware of the statistics.[0] You're correct that, in many cases, this is a mental health problem. It's an accommodation for a colleague or friend that needs your help, for now.
I have trans relatives and colleagues, and several I knew before they came out / transitioned. They've been understanding and patient when I have made mistakes, just as any normal person would be. It's not about hating people - in either direction. It's about treating people with kindness and respect and reminding those who are scared that you are on their side.
Yeah, I have trans friends and former colleagues, and can confirm all of this. I'd love to live in a world where it wasn't controversial or dangerous, but we are not in that world yet.
At least it got flagged! But since I can't reply to it and put some effort into typing a reply, I hope you don't mind me dropping it below.
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What? I agree that for my tastes a lot of people take gender very seriously. But it seems wild to me to think this is somehow a new phenomenon.
For millennia in many societies one's society-assigned gender determined a great deal about one's status, including what work you could do, what work you could do, and what sort of violence against you was acceptable. And in a lot of times and places, misgendering somebody was used as a deliberate insult and could even be seen as "fighting words", legitimate legal cause for violence.
The only thing that has changed lately is a bit of individual freedom in picking that role for one's self. For those people, many consider it rude to ignore their choices, partly because of the history of gender, but partly because those people are targets of bigotry and violence. There's a whole list! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_for_bein...
All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them, just like all legal codes do. If you're going to be rude, people may, gasp, say something about it. You trying to establish a different coercive moral code against that isn't somehow better. And getting all het up about it in this specific case, instead of all the other codes of politeness, suggests it's not really "coercive" morality you care about.
Personally, it seems to me that trans folks have a pretty hard role in life. They always did, but now at least they're getting to be open about it. I'm glad to support them in that; calling them how they want to be called seems like literally the least I could do. Indeed, as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.
It looks like you posted a strident reply and then replaced it with something anodyne. Given that people have already replied, that strikes me as both rude and confusing. Just so everybody knows the edit history, here is your original comment:
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>At least it got flagged!
Ah yes, censorship is good when it is an opinion you do not share, right? That I was flagged is wrong on the part of hacker news, and whoever got that ball rolling.
>All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them
Coercion is good too. Are you sure you're not the baddie here? Are you really sure?
>as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.
Another popular strawman. I stated explicitly "live how you want" and yet you assert that I'm against difference or outcasts. You lied.
>trans folks have a pretty hard role in life
I'm speaking specifically of custom pronouns. If you cut off your junk and wear a dress, I think its rude not to call you "she". It is a shitty kind of idea that encourages people to introduce new error modes into their relationships, and the bitter irony is you think you're doing people a favor by doing that.
>Anyone who doesn't have the capacity to accept being called any pronoun has a mental health problem.
By this metric the vast majority of humanity has a mental health problem, and you're an exception. Most cis, het men do not like to be called she or a girl.
Yeah, that's pretty special. Personally as a cis nerd, I find the neurotypical obsession with gender roles pretty weird. I think we would be healthier if there were less of it, and like that we seem to be heading that way. But I don't think that makes everybody mentally ill.
Worth drawing a distinction between gender roles, which are mostly "socially constructed", and gender identity, which is someone's inherent sense of their gender (with a strong biological component).
Gender identity is an essential part of what makes us human. Some people have a stronger sense of it than others. To the extent that mental illness describes an actual objective thing, having a gender identity does not make someone mentally ill, because it doesn't by itself disrupt one's healthy functioning in society. It is when that gender identity is invalidated by others that it can affect people's mental health (just like calling someone a slur or insulting them can affect their mental health). It is still not an illness, though.
I don't want to involve myself in this argument but I will say that I can not see their original post. It displays as just "[flagged]" for me. I don't know if that's the app I'm using or what, but I cannot see the post.
Really? I see the "[flagged]", and the post, it's just slightly dimmer and I had to manually open it. I'm using no special extensions or anything, just a normal browser.
I’m curious to learn: if “they” is being added to style guides as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender, is “it” the same or is there a somewhat different meaning behind the usage?
"It" is not generally used in English to refer to people, and generally carries a dehumanizing or even pejorative connotation when used to refer to a person (it's not unheard of to see "it" used as a slur against binary trans people, for example-- using "it" in place of preferred pronouns).
Use "it" if someone specifically requests that "it" be used to refer to them. Don't if they do not.
"They" has been used as a singular pronoun as far back as the late 1300s, but for the case where you didn't know the gender of the person or the gender was not relevant. Using it for someone whose gender is gender is known but is not male or female is much newer.
Here's an article with details [1].
The problem of what pronoun to use for someone who is neither male or female is not new, of course. That article says:
> There have always been people who didn’t conform to an expected gender expression, or who seemed to be neither male nor female. But we’ve struggled to find the right language to describe these people—and in particular, the right pronouns. In the 17th century, English laws concerning inheritance sometimes referred to people who didn’t fit a gender binary using the pronoun it, which, while dehumanizing, was conceived of as being the most grammatically fit answer to gendered pronouns around then
I'll add that while the OED dates the singular they to the mid-14th century (betw. 1335-1361), use as to avoid gendering an individual is found from ca. 1450; the OED also gives earlier attestations for them (1429) and their (1398) of the same usage.
>Hasn’t it always been the case that you could use “they” as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender?
Yes, since Shakespearean times.
For example: "I saw someone walking down the street the other day, they were carrying a guitar" -> a normal use of they as the 3rd person singular pronoun.
No, and it’s frustrating for people who had it hammered into their reading and writing habits all through school. I can’t read a singular “they” without mentally tripping on it.
> No, and it’s frustrating for people who had it hammered into their reading and writing habits all through school. I can’t read a singular “they” without mentally tripping on it.
If you mean "no" in the sense that this specific sentence isn't true:
> Hasn’t it always been the case that you could use “they” as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender?
then you are mistaken, as sibling comments point out. Certainly there is a history of teaching people not to use singular 'they' (I don't know how long, but I was certainly taught it), but people have actually been using singular 'they' for a long, long time, and usage trumps fiat at least in English.
I once saw someone who goes by “it” explain that it liked “it” because it has a sort of ungendered quality to it, whereas “they” is instead gender-neutral. It explained that we use “they” to refer to humans because we assume humans are gendered, and the implied gender is the quality that makes “they” (or for that matter “he” or “she”) implicitly refer to a human. But it rejects the notion humans must be gendered, or that humans without gender are not human.
I'm not sure I agree with that argument, but it got me to think. It blends the linguistic and the philosophical.
Grammatically, “they” and “it” are the same gender, they differ in number.
Semantically, the difference in their singular use (prior to very recent evolutions) is that they was rarely used for specific known humams, and it was never uses for humans (but frequently for living things with sex and to whom grammatical gender corresponding to sex could also be used, in cases where the sex was unknown or unimportant, similar to the use of “they” for humans.)
So, while I find the idea of “they” as gender neutral but “it” as emphatically ungendered conceptuallt interesting, I don't really think it reflects historical usage differences.
OTOH, I suppose there could be debate about different presumptions of social gender vs grammatical gender here, too.
Should we overhaul all languages that use gendered language? I speak French and often think in French (le/la, etc), obviously I speak English, but a lot of modern English comes with heritage from cultures, languages, hell even concepts of thought (yes thinking in differently languages gives unique perspectives of the world).
Of all the most useful projects to humanity (diverting asteroids, developing free energy, curing cancers, solving childhood poverty, etc) in any top-3 list I'd put "having a single common language that is super-simple to learn and master and which everybody is taught from childhood".
Let's not change English or French then, but leave them as "classical" languages, but teach kids the new easy/expressive/explicit one. No gendered nouns, no phrasal verbs, no reported speech markers, etc.
Completing this initiative makes all the other ones easier to complete. And it's not like it's much more complicated than the other complicated things we donate to and try to push forward every year.
No - please do not use "it" as a catch-all pronoun for an unknown person. "It" is generally a dehumanizing term for a transgender person - though a minority use it as a pronoun (in those cases, go for it).
I’m not asking if they’re interchangeable. Just if “it” differs from “they” in some way in the above context where it sounds like that’s the individual’s preferred pronoun?
Yes, calling someone “it” has been a ridiculously offensive thing to do in my life experience.
It would be such a shame if groups that pride themselves on inclusivity had a socially acceptable reason to exclude lower-class and neurodivergent people...
It's really not that hard to keep a mental lookup table for each person and their custom pronouns and declensions.
Another pretty elegant solution I've found if there's too much confusion amongst our team is to suggest people switch to learning Hungarian which doesn't have gendered pronouns. A few years of intense study is a small price to pay so that we can avoid the catastrophic mistakes of accidentally calling someone who's not in the room the wrong gender
Unfortunately I tried that. After 3 years of Hungarian classes, I had a peer that demanded I speak to them in Klingon because they identified as hypermasculine. Now I have to start over again.
No, it's fine as is. I think you have は and が backwards but neither of them imply ドイツ語 is "doing something" even though it's the subject of the sentence. It's a pro-drop language so meanings that don't make sense are just excluded.
I was split between で or は, forgot all about が. Funnily enough I think omitting the particle altogether would have made more sense.
Edit: After further reading は seems to work fine. In this case I think both work but が places greater emphasis on the german language being the thing not understood. で however was totally incorrect :P. But due to the tacit nature of informal Japanese I think the context already informed the reader who doesn't understand what.
が marks the subject, and the subject of わかる is the thing that's being understood, not the thing that's doing the understanding.
(Maybe you meant subject in the non-grammatical way? It's confusing.)
Either way, は is fine in this sentence to the best of my understanding.
It marks ドイツ語 as the subject, and thus the thing being understood.
Bullshit. Why is a word that explicitly removes all identity connotations randomly dehumanization? Its one of the most neutral ways of indicating another, In the same way that "comrade" is.
> explicitly removes all identity connotations randomly dehumanization
It's not randomly dehumanization, the neuter gender that the pronoun system preserves has always communicated inanimacy (read: nonhuman-ness) against the masc/fem animate genders. Etymologically, this distinction has been more primitive than the masc/fem distinction. One feature of the neuter gender is the use of the object form in languages that distinguish it from the subject form, hence he/him, she/her, but it/it.
I sympathize with questioning but this is pretty harsh. The explanation is fairly simple. “It” is how we refer to most inanimate objects and “subhuman” creatures in the English language. Debates on how appropriate it is to be addressed in this way or desire to be addressed in this way aside, it’s certainly not random or a stretch to imagine why some might be uneasy with the idea if they feel it somehow associates the person with the aforementioned categories.
No, 'it' is not the same as 'they' here. To refer to a person of unknown pronouns, they/them/their/theirs/themself should be used. However, if one's pronouns are specified to be either they/them/their/theirs/themself or it/it/its/its/itself, use those preferred.
You are way out of line here, you don't get to decide how other people present themselves online and tying their persona to their gender or sexual identity is an outright stereotype/slur.
