I recently encountered a birth announcement that said something to the effect of “We made a human! For those of you who care, the baby has a penis.”
@twoinanddone-You do understand that those are two different situations correct? A transgender person vs. twins. (And why your last sentence does not apply to both equally.)
Actually, doctors and nurses have been declaring a certain percentage of newborns boys or girls erroneously for time immemorial. Babies with external male genitalia and internal female organs, for example, and babies with ambiguous genitalia, and so on. Now generally called intersex.
A few years ago I read an article about how people are dealing with intersex babies now. Some parents are trying to let the child come to their own determination over time. Surgical alteration used to be more common.
I understood the genderfluid medallion person cited upthread was getting mad when someone supposedly used a wrong pronoun. I believe the story, but it’s silly and I hope not representative of most people who call themselves genderfluid.
Interesting posts. But I think Kate McKinnon’s Justin Bieber seems like a female comedian trying to look and act like 20 something guy. Closer to my mom or sister trying to imitate one of my brothers. Not close.
The Intersex Society of North America recommends giving the intersex newborn a gender assignment, based on the best assessment of what the child will feel as they grow up. They sharply disapprove any kind of normalizing surgery on babies, saying tartly that “it just takes tissue away that they patient may want later.”
It must be heartbreaking to be the parent of an adult intersex person, if you are the one who with love and the best intentions approved newborn surgery on your child that later turned out to be the wrong surgery.
Indeed, @“Cardinal Fang” I’ve also read about dreadful cases where a male infant suffered a severe injury to the penis, sometimes during circumcision, and the decision was made to surgically alter the child to make him a “girl”!
Like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
Horrific.
I remember reading, in grade school, a book by the doctor in the David Reimer case, talking about the wonderful result of taking this baby boy, whose circumcision had been horribly botched, and raising him as a girl. (I don’t know why this book was in our grade school library but it was and I read it. Maybe it was jr high.) According to this book, treating the child as a girl, doing surgery to make his body more like a girl’s by castrating him and further mutilating his penis, he’d be a girl. I believed the story, and accepted the idea that if a boy was raised from birth to be a girl, he’d be a girl.
It was only when I was a young mother that I stumbled on Reimer’s own story. Throughout his childhood, his parents and doctors kept his true birth story from him and forced him into stereotypical girls’ clothing and girls’ pursuits, but he never accepted his gender identity as a girl, and when he got older, he transitioned back to his birth gender.
Wow. Another reason to add to the long list of reasons not to circumcise.
Romani: Neutral is they. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s sure not the norm.
Honestly, people get upset over the weirdest things IMO. I wonder if this is what it was like when women wanted to be called by their names instead of Mr. Husband’s first name. Oh no, you’d have to remember TWO names per couple!"
“They” is plural. Anyone calling him or herself “they” brings to mind the movie “Sybil”. Or the biblical reference, “Legion”.
About married couples, no, it isn’t complicated (I used my original name for a couple of decades until the government decided it was too long for driver’s license purposes - long story).
All you need to do is remember the bride’s original name, not an issue at all if you have known her long, and not an issue at all if you slip up. Everyone slips up anyway from time to time, and calls her “Mrs. X”. Ask me how I know. And who cares?
Most rational people do not get upset at this in the least.
“Massmomm: Of course, but my point is that we shouldn’t just assume everyone needs to make their pronouns clear. It really is okay to assume until told otherwise.”
Exactly. Worked since time began.
"Twoinanddone: I’m not mismatching singular and plurals. I’m just not going to use ‘they’ when it’s properly him.
But I’m used to people using the wrong names and genders and we just deal with it. My mother calls the dog ‘him’ all the time and she is a girl. She (dog) doesn’t take offense as long as the treats keep coming. I have a brother who changed from John to Jack and, well, I just can’t. I spent the day yesterday with old college friends and one has switched from Kathy to Kathleen, and I try but just can’t do it consistently. I tend to call her by her maiden name which hasn’t been her last name for 40 years. "
I still can’t consistently call my brother by his full name. He grew up with a diminutive, and though I’m the only one of the family of origin still left, I just can’t seem to call him by the given name he prefers as an adult. I’m not being rude. That’s who he is to me.
Weirdly I think everyone calls my brother the equivalent of Bill vs William, but his wife calls him Billy. To me Billy is a kid’s name, not a grownup’s name. I don’t know if he cares one way or another.
My H introduced himself to me by his full name, so that is what I called him. I later found out that his entire family called him by a nickname, as in Bill for William. I’m sure they ascribed it to what they viewed as my general east coast pinko commie intellectual snobbery. =))
My sister on the other hand decided at some point that she wanted to be called by her full name, rather than the nickname we had always used. The family just can’t do it. 
Her friends do. She doesn’t seem to mind, or perhaps she is just resigned, LOL.
ETA: I think this sort of thing is usually minor compared to the sensitivity of a trans person on the subject. Its about how they are in relation to the whole world at a very deep level.
“You” is both singular and plural. It works. Occasionally it is ambiguous. Ditto for the evolving usage of “they,” which is where I think our common usage is headed.
Those of us who are bugged by the use of a formerly singular pronoun to also mean plural, will eventually die out or get used to it.
Language does evolve and pretty rapidly at that. The Gay 90’s were not so long ago.
Who doesn’t understand “ppl” “B4” or “ur”? Though only used informally now, perhaps they will become accepted usage in the future, along with “they” as a singular pronoun.
The subjective pronouns are: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, what, who.
So, one can prefer to be ‘who’ as in ‘who’s on first’.
Or…a who in Whosville.
Happy to call you whatever who would like to be called. I’d be happy if 50% of the folks I encounter could remember and pronounce my first name. If they can’t, oh well, life goes on.
I predict it will never be politically incorrect to identify as a male or female. Less than 3% of the population if that does not identify with one or the other genders whether or not it is their birth gender. Not allowing children to identify with either gender or trying to raise them to in an androgenous environment sounds like a precursor to a lot of emotional issues down the road in my opinion.
Very interesting article in the Atlantic…
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/
It was merely illustrative of how impossible it seems to change a family dynamic/identity, especially after decades.
I think the underlying point is why colleges feel a need to focus on that subset of the population during orientation. It is highly likely that far larger subsets of native Chinese or Spanish speakers are in the audience, but speakers don’t open their discussions in those languages. At my kid’s school, the only place one would begin such a discussion that way would be in LGBTQ group meetings. Similarly, I expect the international club might open in various dialects. But in the general orientation, no.