Responding to #97
I see it as inclusive… not divisive.
At many colleges there are lots of different campus wide orientation welcoming exercises and events, some of which are aimed at Pell Grant students, survivors of sexual assault, and non native English speakers. Every year there have been threads objecting to this. We’ll probably have at least a couple in the next month.
I have friends whose oldest child is transgendered and now prefers a male name and pronouns. She has twins born female and who remain female, but who have used different names for almost 10 years. They are identical and nicely corrected anyone who called them by the sister’s name so were used to politely correcting adults. However, all know that if they want anything like health insurance or a driver’s license, they must use their legal names (and gender). They do not have a fit when anyone uses their birth names or genders.
Language changes all the time. Like I said, I don’t know anyone who uses those pronouns. At all. But if a gender neutral singular pronoun comes into general usage, I welcome it with open arms.
Even the 100 year old documents that I read are sometimes near unintelligible due to how much language changes and how quickly.
I don’t have a problem with gender pronouns being on a name tag at a meet in greet. Getting upset about that is silly. “Oh no, I have to have “she” on my name tag! Can’t you people see I have boobs?!” What an inconvenience.
Have you not met people who you couldn’t immediately tell? Working with young people, I do all of the time. ALL the time. Isn’t it better than making an awkward mistake, or silently wondering and curbing your language? It’s right there on the tag. Easy.
I’m sure all the Ls, Gs, and Bs find it welcoming as well. My lesbian daughter does.
I found Ms to be a godsend. I would love the equivalent in the way of gender neutral pronouns.
"Have you not met people who you couldn’t immediately tell? Working with young people, I do all of the time. ALL the time. "
Same here. The androgynous look is very common these days.
We have a gender neutral singular pronoun. It’s “they.” Some people don’t like it, but the language has already changed.
Exactly. And Ms. was a completely made up word. It was an old world that was revived and finally went into mainstream usage 300 years after it was coined.
Maybe we should do the same. “Thon” was a gender neutral word used briefly in the mid-19th century. It was a contraction of “that one.” “Alex is coming to dinner. Thon wants the chicken.”
Meh, I’m open to suggestions. It’s just a historical oddity I came across a while ago and have long enjoyed.
It used to bother me to use “they” in the singular, because I was worried folks might think I didn’t understand singular vs plural. Finally I realized this isn’t about me impressing others with my grammar usage. It’s not about me at all.
Mom of a trans teen here with a couple of points-
My kid isn’t one of those trans kids who knew from a very young age that they were in the wrong body. She only started questioning her identity during middle school and spent about a year identifying as ‘they-them’ and agender or gender fluid before deciding that ‘she-her’ made the most sense. I’m bringing that up to say that teens experiment with their identity in a variety of ways, and trying on different gender identities until you find the one that seems to be the best fit is going on more now than it did when we were kids. I have no idea how many of the young people experimenting with gender identity will end up in the long run identifying back with their biological sex vs identifying as completely transgender or staying somewhere in the middle. I think a little grace in both directions goes a long way… I’ll try to remember your pronouns, and you forgive me if I occasionally get it wrong (although if I’m getting it wrong all of the time maybe there’s a little mental block there). I wasn’t a big fan of using ‘they-them’ for a singular person when my friend’s kid came out as gender-fluid a couple of years ago, but I’ve gotten used to it and it seems to be the most common set of pronouns now that the gender-fluid kids are using.
On the flip side - I do hope that story about the kid who was suspended just for using the wrong pronoun for another kid had another part to it that the poster wasn’t privy to. Otherwise, yeah, absolutely ridiculous.
Also - going around a room and asking everyone to introduce themselves by both name and pronouns… I’m actually a little torn on this one. I think it makes a lot of sense and is very inclusive for any sort of group where you are going to be interacting for more than that one meeting. And actually, for the anecdote in the original post, I think it does make sense even though all of the people introducing themselves happened to be cis-gendered because they were acting as a welcoming team to a new group of students, some of whom might have been trans and that’s a great way to show inclusivity from the get-go. In other meetings, though, maybe think through whether this is info that needs to be shared during the brief time of the meeting (e.g., is this meeting more setting up some sort of support network? Or is it purely informational/business?)
My daughter used to chuckle at the show “Boy Band” because she said many of them looked like young lesbians. Can you imagine accidentally misgendering a straight male who looks a little feminine? Talk about being offended!
I think gender fluid makes intuitive sense. Most things fall on a continuum, why shouldn’t gender? Why can’t someone identify as mostly male or predominantly female? Why can’t one be a whole lotta country and a little bit of rock and roll,as it were?
I have also observed, and this is totally anecdotal on my part, some young adults trying on aspects of another gender, perhaps to see what feels right or, more importantly, what feels better.
I don’t think my belief in the person’s purported identity matters. I interact with plenty of cis people whom I find pretentious, fake, flavor-of-the-month, etc. I still call them whatever they want. It’s not my business whether they are being their authentic selves or not. It’s my business to aim to be polite to them. On CC, we call it the “smile and nod.”
One of my close gay friends from school was buddies with me for months before “coming out” to me. Honey, that wasn’t news. No closet could contain him. Our mutual friends would share an eyeroll in private because it was so ridiculous that he believed he was keeping us in the dark (and really, he was silly to worry about coming out to his musical theater friends). But in retrospect, we were doing the right thing by indulging that silliness. It made him feel more in control of his life, and it didn’t hurt us.
Anyone who has seen Kate McKinnon’s dead-on androgynous Justin Bieber can imagine that.
The trouble arises when you’re being rock and roll, I call you country and you get mad at me. If you don’t accept the gender binary, why are you expecting me to accept it for you? If you’re sometimes male and sometimes female, you don’t get to expect me to detect which is when.
Hey I didn’t say anything getting mad if you can’t guess my gender, just that gender fluid makes sense to me.
I honestly don’t think it’s the norm for people to get angry over being misgendered if there were good intentions involved. I’ve had that happen many times and no one’s ever been mad when they corrected me.
I think what happens too often is an intentional misgendering, or someone interpreting is as intentional. Of course, all individuals are different and some people are just touchy, no matter what their gender!
I ran into a person who called herself a “demi-girl.” That to me, frankly, is making a distinction that doesn’t need to be made. So you are a cis-female with some “masculine” aspects to your identity? Aren’t most of us?
Yes, the phenomenon of the “PC police” (where someone is looking for ways to be offended or criticize someone for saying something that they consider offensive, even when it is obvious to others that no offense is intended – not just with respect to transgender persons) rarely occurs in real life.
But it does seem that there is a lot more complaining about “PC police”, often by people who just do not want to be polite to others, or who want to willfully insult others whose existence they do not approve of.
^^^^ This.
I don’t think anyone who is gender fluid would get mad at someone for using a wrong pronoun (unless they told the person which pronoun to use and they purposefully do not use that pronoun .)