One might consider it to be dehumanizing, as its use, certainly as I was taught in school, has been, for the most part, relegated to non-humans.
Right, but as I mentioned above, it does get used for babies / small children when gender is unknown (or not particularly relevant).
“Seriously, what’s wrong with the word “it”?”
Seriously, because it is incredibly disrespectful in this context.
PG, I feel quite badly that you just aren’t getting any of this. Posters keep trying, but for whatever reason, you just aren’t able to understand how deeply this affects some people, and how relatively easy it is to accommodate them.
No, I don’t think you get what I and others are saying. First, the odds that society will generally start to use pronouns that fit a minority of the minority are low, if only because people meet people in actual contexts where - and this is important - no one cares about the fluidity of your underlying sexual/gender identity but rather need to refer to you by a pronoun for basic social and business interactions that don’t involve your underlying identification or lack thereof. No one has an issue with someone wanting to be called “xem” or blurffig or whatever.
To make this clearer, I hope, you keep saying that “neither term applies” and you’re saying that these are terms that this specific group needs and yet where is that proof? Is there a survey that says “I’m neither specifically male nor female and I want to be xem or some other word?” Is there evidence that says such people don’t want him or her to be used fluidly? Or evidence that for such people in general - as opposed to any anecdote of your personal experience - that the existing labels used as they want don’t work for them? The most I’ve found online is that how people who so identify choose to be called is a matter of individual preference, not something to be imposed by you or any other group - however well meaning. So no, it isn’t the exact same thing: a trans person generally chooses a gender ID and uses the pronoun that’s long been in existence in our language, while you’re saying that this particular group must be called by this name in the guise of saying “this is their name”. It looks to me like you are imposing on them a word, a choice that btw isolates them from gender identification, fluid or not. Why? What if I don’t identify as male or female and I want to be called by either situationally because that to me signifies that I’m neither? I’ve found a list of pronouns on a non-binary website that runs to 27 different sets not counting they and it. Why is it xem and not jeer or nir?
I’ve also spent a bit of time researching the history of genderless words and what I’ve read is that the movement goes back 150+ years with almost no traction because the words don’t spread from the “bottom up”. I’m not talking about esperanto or the like but about attempts to reform language either to reduce male dominance or for other purposes - including in some cases aesthetics. A word like Ms wasn’t imposed but was adopted because women started to use it and there are a lot of women. That there are a lot of women matters: all subgroups use words that don’t make general usage. One word for that is “argot” and another is “jargon”, meaning the words shared by some group, from scientific to social to religious. In other words, I’m free to introduce any word I want but whether it becomes used in wider society isn’t up to a school diversity website - as witness the 27 I noted and that’s not pretending to be complete.
So I have two points. First, I see no evidence that these are labels that this group actually wants other than perhaps a personal anecdote so I see what you’re saying as imposing identification words from above. Second and just as importantly, you don’t seem to grasp that in casual usage in non-sexual social and business situations, no one cares about your underlying sexual/gender identity and yet your word usage shoves that into those non-sexual situations. That to me is a major reason why these words fail (and multiply): they are useful in specific settings where your sexual identity is important but otherwise aren’t and, using Ms as the counter-example, given the nature of casual social and business situations, what is the advantage to using a word that conveys underlying sexual identity/identification? Ms conveys a meaning that’s non-sexual and that was seen as an advantage by women. How is it an advantage to non-gender id’g person to so label in a business conversation in which no one cares about your lack of gender id?
I expect you’ll disagree.
@Lergnom, what you are still confused about is that no one is imposing a made-up pronoun on an agender person from above–it is the agender individual who decides which pronouns they would like people to use when referring to them. My kid asks people to use “they/them.” Another friend who is agender uses “zhe” (and says "if you’re not sure how to pronounce it just make a buzzing noise and you are fine). No one I am personally aware of chooses to use “it” as it is considered depersonalizing. So the “evidence that these are labels that the group actually wants” is that each individual decides which label they prefer to describe THEMSELVES.
These notices from colleges give examples so a prof won’t be hearing about these pronouns for the first time from their students. But it is still the student who decides which pronoun they’d like to be called by.
Second, in answer to “you don’t seem to grasp that in casual usage in non-sexual social and business situations, no one cares about your underlying sexual/gender identity and yet your word usage shoves that into those non-sexual situations.” What my agender kid would answer is that given the nature of human pronouns, ALL interactions in which a male or female pronoun is used insert gender identity into non-sexual situations. And if you think that doesn’t have impact, look at studies in which identical resumes are sent that only differ by the gender of the applicant with different results of evaluation, hiring and evaluation.
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-job-rather-jennifer
As far as your Ms. example, of course it’s gendered–only women use it.
My kid would rather not be defined by the gender binary and would like to be judged on their own merits.
The problem, though, is a practical one. Any consciously imposed changes in the language (whether they come from individuals—like someone offering their preferred pronoun—or come from organizations—e.g., the Académie française) are very, very unlikely to be successful. Successful, lasting changes in linguistic usage tend to be unconsciously adopted, at least ultimately.
That’s one of the problems with developing new pronouns out of whole cloth (e.g., zhe)—that’s trying for imposing a restructuring of the pronominal system, and it’s vanishingly unlikely that they’re going to embed themselves within the language, and thus will probably end up taking on the status of proper names, at best, if thy even get used at all.
@Lergnom I think you’re confusing non-binary gender with gender fluid. Not all people that identify as a non-binary gender identify as gender fluid; that is just one small group. There are also those who are bigender, agender, etc. These do not “change” on a daily basis (or some other random frequency); their identity is static.
Saying someone who is bigender is gender fluid is like saying that someone who is bisexual flips between gay or straight on a daily basis (or similar random frequency). That’s not how it works.
The proof is in the individuals. They are literally telling you they don’t want to be referred to as he or she (since they are neither). They tell you what they should be referred to as. Nobody chooses for them. What more proof do you need?
And to those asking why we can’t use “it” to refer to someone who is neither, it’s the same as why you can’t refer to an African-American individual as the n-word or why performing in blackface is considered unacceptable. It’s an insult that has a very long history to it. There’s no changing that.
Is there any way 12 year olds can live with being addressed by their default sex pronoun until they sort out their sexuality instead of forcing everyone around them to produce buzzing noises?
@CCDD14 none of the people I am describing are 12–the person I know who uses “zhe” is an adult, and the comment about buzzing noises shows the humor and ease in which zhe approaches the issue.
My 12-year-old is still OK with being my “daughter” and “she” even though she identifies as agender. That could change anytime, though, I realize. (When I’m preoccupied, she’s actually lucky if I don’t call her by her brother’s name or my sister’s name.)
@CCDD14 Gender identity. This is what I think @Hunt was referring to above. Sex and gender are not the same thing. Furthermore, sexuality has nothing to do with either. Sexuality is who you are attracted to. Just clarifying this because this is a common misconception and it’s really important to realize.
And this really has nothing to do with age. I’ve seen numerous interviews with trans individuals who transitioned later in life who’ve said they always knew who they were and wished they’d transitioned earlier. I also have heard similar from many gay (or bisexual) individuals who say they’ve always known.
Pizzagirl, I don’t know why you asked a second time what’s wrong with calling non-binary people “it,” given that the first time you asked that question in this thread I explained that people feel that the application of that pronoun to sentient human beings is incredibly dehumanizing, and has long been used deliberately to insult trans and other gender non-conforming people. Please stop talking about babies when people have already explained that they find “it” dehumanizing and insulting. Come on already,
Hunt, the distinction between sex and gender may be useful in some contexts, but it’s essentially meaningless as a practical matter, given that few people have even had their own exact chromosomal status determined – let alone know what the status is of anyone else they encounter in daily life – and that statutes and court decisions use the terms interchangeably in addressing the rights of trans people and discrimination against them (because any attempt to distinguish between the two legally would be almost impossible, and an intrusive administrative nightmare). Also, 99% of those who insist on the distinction in discussing trans issues are flaming bigots who love to call trans women like me “male” at any and every opportunity, even though in reality there’s no longer anything visibly or functionally or hormonally or chemically “male” about me (assuming there ever was), and I physically resemble a post-menopausal non-trans woman in those attributes far more than anything else.
This is doubtless going to offend some people here, but I want to try to explain in an honest why I don’t feel the same way about agender or gender-fluid people than I do about trans folks.
I will never understand what it is like to feel like you are in the wrong body. However, there is plenty of evidence – other than the self-reported statements of trans individuals – that such dysphoira exists, that it isn’t simply an attention-seeking behavior or something akin to an anorexic’s distorted self-image, but a hard-wired truth about how that person was made. Sure, now that trans issues have moved to the forefront, I would imagine there are some people out there who have, so to speak, jumped on the bandwagon, when maybe they actually could have been pretty content living as butch lesbians if they had never heard that such a thing as transgender people exist. But when you hear the stories of trans kids who quite obviously expressed distress about their assigned gender pretty much as soon as they could speak, it becomes hard to deny that this is a real condition from which real people suffer profoundly. While we may not know all that much about the science behind it, I’ve also heard credible hypotheses for what might lead someone’s brain to have a different gender/sex than his or her body. We might choose to think of it as a physical problem or a mental one, but in either case, the only thing that seems to relieve it is a social and/or physical transition.
In other words, as with the word “Ms.” there is a real need to figure out how to respectfully accommodate trans individuals. This isn’t going to always be easy, as the thread in the forum about students protesting a trans girl’s use of the girl’s locker room suggests – and not just because the people opposed to certain accommodations are hateful bigots, although that may often be the case. But whatever we decide, it isn’t an option – or, at least, neither a compassionate nor informed one – to simply bury our heads in the sand and decide that biology is biology and that’s that.
On the other hand, I have yet to find convincing evidence that those who identify outside the gender binary – other than the very small group of people who are intersex - have any kind of objective “condition” that demands acceptance and acknowledgment. Rather, they seem to be engaging in an extreme rebellion against gender norms and, specifically, against the social practice of identifying people by gender.
That may be an argument worth having - to what extent should we adapt language to make it less gendered? Is it enough to avoid always defaulting to “he,” or do we have to do away with words like “freshman” as well? What about when we talk about God - male pronouns, or no pronouns? Should toys be marketed to kids based on gender stereotypes? How bad is it to give little girls pink blankets and little boys blue ones? But it doesn’t seem to me that there is a category of people who are inherently “non-binary,” so much as there are people who don’t like identifying by a gender because they don’t like associating with (socially constructed) norms that have been built up around it.
Basically, trans people asking for acceptance are saying “this is who I am.” LGB people asking for acceptance are saying “this is who I love.” But what non-binary people seem to be saying to me is “this is what I believe.” Which is fine, but if we’re talking about belief, rather than identity I can reasonably disagree with that belief, and the extent to which I am morally obliged to accommodate it is much more limited.
On the specific issue of pronouns, if non-binary people want to suggest ONE non-gender pronoun to be applied to anyone who wants to identify outside the binary - or eschew gendered language for any other reason – that might have a chance of catching on and becoming naturally integrated into the evolving English language. A wide array of customized pronouns isn’t going to cut it, and just sounds silly. I don’t care how good a sense of humor it shows, I’m just not inclined to take all too seriously someone who asks to use a buzzing noise as their preferred pronoun.
Great post, apprentice prof.
My very close friend’s child is non-binary. That child has suffered terrible misery, including a couple of psychiatric hospitalizations. They decided as a family and with the help of a therapist to unveil a new name on the sixteenth birthday. The new name is gender neutral and was announced with great fanfare. The child also decided that there isn’t a pronoun that fits comfortably now, and the family thought some of the options were ludicrous, so they have openly and politely spread the word that they would like their child to be referred to by name, rather than pronoun, even if it is somewhat awkward at first. It has actually been less awkward than one might think.
“it’s essentially meaningless as a practical matter, given that few people have even had their own exact chromosomal status determined”
True, but 99% of us don’t have any gender disconnect. I mean, I really don’t need to go get my chromosomes checked. I know I’m XX.
"To me, there’s just something frankly Orwellian about acting as if gender designation is, as a rule, so fluid that one can’t possibly make rational assumptions about someone’s identity from widely recognized cues like name, manner of dress, etc. "
Yes. This is what is being objected to.
Neither does a trans person need to get their chromosomes checked. Knowing their karotype has no real relevance to how a trans person leads their life, and it’s certainly nobody else’s business, although finding out that they’re not actually XX or XY may help some people feel that they’re more “real,” and/or may help convince their friends and families that they’re not “delusional.”
I’ve generally assumed that I’m XY, given my anatomy, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find out I’m XX (I’ve only fathered girls, after all) or a XY-XX chimeric mix (which is more common than people generally think).