Hah - well I wouldn’t know. I know they put a lot of non-coffee stuff in their coffee. I had a hot chocolate there once. It was ok.
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There are people I’ve known for years that I don’t actually know their names, but these aren’t people with which I have a close relationship. I’m also in an environment (a college campus) where some people are very sensitive about their hard earned titles. I’ve become very adapt at conversations where I don’t actually use their names.
I also largely apply this to gender. Honestly most of us who aren’t binary won’t get upset if you refer to us as a binary gender if that is how we’re generally presenting. (I’ve noted before, I usually present as male simply because it’s easiest for me most of the time.) If there’s any question, it’s not that difficult to change a word or two in such a way as to not use gendered pronouns.
Just like that - easy enough. It’s mostly a matter of removing assumptions about others.
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Well, not by me, anyway.
I’m sure they appreciate you avoiding them too.
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Smooches.
This was my reaction to the recent uproar over Target’s bathroom/changing room policy. You mean bigots, reactionary parents, and irrational people are boycotting Target so I don’t have to worry about running into them there? Awesome.
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I accept that nonwhites exist, but I tend to steer clear of them. They get so argumentative.
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This always makes me think of Dennis from Monty Python & The Holy Grail. First of all he’s misgendered, but then it comes down to:
“Well, you didn’t bother to find out, did you?”
King Arthur could have avoided the whole awkwardness/rudeness if he’d just said “Excuse me” instead of making assumptions.
My gender identity is nonbinary. I prefer singular “they” when I can get it. But I (A) am generally pretty laid back and reasonable about things and (B) don’t have the time or energy to educate / argue with people during every single unnecessarily gendered social interaction that happens in daily life. When a Starbucks wage slave calls me “sir” because they are required by company policy to use either “sir” or “ma’am”, I don’t worry about it much. I am bald and have a beard and in the absence of easily read cues to the contrary, I’d make the same assumption. (And our society doesn’t really have easily read markers for nonbinary gender that aren’t extremely flamboyant or very heavily reliant on genetics and build… but that’s another issue.)
Still, I do notice how unnecessarily, arbitrarily, and absurdly gendered so many things are. And I especially do bristle when told I have to choose either one ill-fitting category or another ill-fitting category for mostly irrelevant reasons.
For instance: I can’t write to my state representative unless I claim either to be a priest, a doctor, a “Mr.” or a “Mrs.” or a “Ms.” Is that because the representative will use this information to decide how much my opinion matters? Or is it simply a thoughtless social custom? (In this case, since he’s a Democrat I’m guessing the latter.)
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Great, it’s about time!
My policy is to always - if I would need to know for some reason (which tends to be never) - what sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc somebody might be, I simply ask them rather than assuming anything. Amazingly, this simple protocol alleviates a lot of social problems which would otherwise be created by me jumping to conclusions about people.
As for pronouns, I think they are lazy anyway. I usually refer to people by their proper name instead, and use pronouns for abstract discussions which aren’t about specific people. But, as a concession I use “I” and “me” because referring to myself in what can be construed as 3rd person bothers too many people.
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I have a tendency not to use peoples’ names unless I absolutely have to, which I never noticed until my spouse pointed it out. I think it’s defensive because I am terrible with names. When talking about or to people I’ve worked with for years, I often blank on their names.
Still, there’s usually a way to get around either names or pronouns at least until one is reasonably sure about them. 
…
I’ll also add to this: if you screw up someone’s pronoun but generally try, that’s pretty much always okay. I still occasionally forget and refer to my brother as “she” and then correct myself, particularly when talking about past events when he was presenting as female.
If you mess it up because you made an assumption about a stranger, well, it’s almost okay and we’re pretty much used to it.
But if you intentionally call them the wrong thing because you don’t respect them or their gender identity, or if you spend 30 seconds tripping over it every time to try to make some kind of a point, then you’re being an ass.
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I often don’t remember names either! I don’t remember what people look like, only what they sound like. So until I have spoken with them for a while I have no template to remember them or associate their name with. It can indeed be awkward.
Ah, yes, hi - you are… the human, with the hair and limbs and clothes…
GTFA from me.
That’s a whole other range of social problems!
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Calling another person ‘it’ is “a bad thing” because it inherently negates that person’s value as a human being, regardless to intent.
Considering that historically in the US, dehumanizing others is the most common form of justification and rationalization for the most inhumane and repugnant behavior and policy.
“Well, they’re nothing but savage animals anyway…”
It was a psychological tactic that was used in defense of slavery, and of internment camps, among other atrocities that have happened in our nation’s not-so-perfect history.
Because if you don’t have to think about someone being ‘just like you’, then it’s much easier to exploit them, marginalize them, denigrate them, kill them, etc.
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I strongly disagree. My preferred pronoun is “it”, and one reason for this is that I/we do not identify as being one specific species. I have value as an agency, but that agency does not originate from accidents of birth such species, any more than it does my genitals, skin color, or any other such artefact.
There has definitely been a history of this. But since it is wrong - being human is not particularly special - I am happy to re-use the term. Speciesism, human chauvinism, etc is a far bigger problem than that of how shitty humans are to each other. There is also the hidden supposition here that humans are not even animals at all, which is demonstrably absurd. Being human, just like any other identity or label, IS only what people make of it. This allows humans to reinvent and reinterpret what it means to be human, to become something else. As well as giving humans an “out” from complicity with the global genocide of non-humans.
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That’s fine; there will always be exceptions. Whatever floats your boat and all that.
But refer to most people as “it” though, and the chances are very good that the response is not likely to be very positive… especially if those people happen to belong to any “minority.”
Simply because that’s the term that you personally prefer does not mean that it will be just ‘fine and dandy’ with others.
That’s a personal opinion that it’s “a far bigger problem”, but I agree that our species is, at times, all too similar to the virus that Agent Smith compared us to in the Matrix.
Nitpicking aside, you seemed to have grasped the crux of my point; the sheer lack of empathy, whether its for other species, or for any living thing. But since we were talking about people and why its not such a good idea to use ‘it’ as a gender neutral alternative, let’s stay on topic, shall we?
You are correct:
As a society, we invent our norms and even our concept of ‘worth’; therefore, if we can negate that concept for different or “undesirable” individuals, then we will feel less guilt/responsibility when those individuals are abused or maligned collectively.
That we tend to treat the rest of the planet even worse than we treat each other is a whole other discussion, for another day.
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The problem with gender neutral pronouns comes when someone insists on what J. Bryan Lowder in Slate termed, “bespoke pronouns”. So what are bespoke pronouns? These are novel words such as: “ou”, “ze”, “co”, "zir, and of course the singular “their” to refer a specific individual instead of an individual in the abstract.
I’m sorry, but with the exception of the singular their, these words are… rather novel. Furthermore there’s no rule to them, and so the person that’s demanding their use is really putting an unacceptable load on random people. If someone reads as female gets a female pronoun, no slight is intended, but it’s self-centered to insist on being referred to as “ou”.
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I hate “it” as a pronoun. That is what people who want to insult me would use. I’ll never get used to that one.
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I’m glad this has been added to the dictionary. Perhaps those special snowflakes that freak out about cis being used to describe them will stop screaming about it now.
Also, I sooooo preferred folks ask me about my pronoun if they were unsure. When I was mid transition, I felt it was a lot easier to have someone ask, than guess.
There was a good six to eight month period when I started testosterone where folks weren’t sure if I was male, or a really butch lesbian. Actually, I have never been hit on by so many women, as I was during this period. My husband sure did confuse those poor gals.
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That is certainly a popular way to frame such problems, but since it tends to be put forward only to explain remedies to existing conditions, rather than their causes, I think the perspective is not as beneficial for modelling and working with the root causes.
I like to model it as a cognitive problem. Most simple social activity can be reduced to acting out certain kinds of games, which have their own built-in preconceptions, goals, and expectations. Why they become problematic is that many people adopt them without conscious awareness that they are doing so, or any consideration of what their other social options may be. I would say that what we are dealing with here are simply status games which presuppose that a given individual is somehow “more special” than anybody else, for “reasons”. So they work to rationalize this in how they treat others. Beyond this simple unsubstantiated notion of their own importance, there really is not anything to it. There is no objective reasoning which explains why it matters if more people like person A, or if one dies sooner than person B. It can be modelled as a selfish motivation, a desire, preventing the individual from framing situations clearly and accurately.
I think it is a crucial distinction that some societies do work this way. But I find status games as well as imposed norms and values to be quite anti-social methodologies. Refusal to identify with or be implicated in such systems seems like a good start in putting them in perspective and suggesting a more functional alternative.
I am sorry that this outlook likely comes off as being rather contrarian!
Correct.
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