Yes, they do.
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I donât understand what problem this solves. If a person identifies female, it is so painful to call her a her? Is it helpful to introduce synthetic words that sound appropriate for aliens? Or will it simply dehumanize trans people?
If memory serves, there have been several efforts to de-genderize English. Some, like the firefighters and wait staff, have been pretty successful. Others, like bizarre pronouns, never seem to catch on.
In Christian circles, there is an ongoing effort to call our species as âhumanityâ and not âman.â To 19th century ears, âmanâ might have sounded proper and inclusive, but not so much any more. As usual, some people ferociously fought against this, as if calling them human was stripping women of their right to be men⌠or something.
EDIT: I wrote before I read - it looks like the linked article more or less agrees.
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My inner grammarian shakes her head when I write âtheyâ for a singular third person pronoun, but I think itâs the best choice, far better than creating a new word. A specific word for trans* folks seems like a tough sell, especially because it isnât always obvious, plus many times it just doesnât matter. âTheyâ works for anyone.
âAt the grocery store, the cashier bagged my groceries, but they had to call someone to help me to my car.â
The bagging and the calling are non-gender-specific activities, and âtheyâ works splendidly.
When I waited tables, I didnât get upset when called a waitress, but I prefer the word âserverâ. It seems to me that unless you are doing an activity with your genitals, gendered language doesnât add anything positive. Itâs similar to âlady copâ or âmale nurseâ and itâs a relic of a far more sexist time in history. That said, I do tend to cut a person some slack on this, unless they are being an asshole.
I came here expecting a touchy-feely circle jerk and was pleasantly disappointed.
Everybody have a like.
I guess being old (and not knowing any transgendered people) has left me a little perplexed at this neuter pronoun. Donât transgender people want to become the sex they feel they truly are? I take it itâs not PC now to refer to a male-to-female transgender person as she?
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Why does your inner grammarian shake her head? âTheyâ has been used as a singular pronoun for half a millennium in English. Yearning for the wit and aplomb of 15th century English, are you?
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Is this really genderless?
Seems more like adding more genders (nowt wrong with that, obviously). I guess itâs just giving transgendered people more options. If they want to identify male or female and use those options, they can, if they want to use these ones, they can do that. The rest of us should just go along with what they want.
(I donât recommend reading the comments, though)
For genderless I use âtheyâ and have done for years, grammarians be damned, because he/she and variations thereof are all so damn clunky - assuming I couldnât just rephrase something to avoid pronouns altogether.
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All attempts to impose new pronouns with a top-down approach are pretty much going to fail, but I have to say these are the worst of them Iâve ever seen. The letter âxâ has a lot of connotations attached to it that I would think they would be trying to avoid. Spivak pronouns (e, em, eir) are much better if they are going to insist on some crazy puritanical witchhunt against âthey.â
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You canât just choose to introduce new language as some sort of official declaration. It has to happen organically - a new term has to take root.
This is why languages like Lojban and Esperanto donât work. Despite being rational, precise, and uncomplicated languages, theyâve never managed to gain any traction with people. Depite doing away with countless flaws of other languages, despite being intended as universal languages, theyâve failed to capture peopleâs interest and consequently they effectively donât matter because next to no one speaks them!
Meanwhile, the language of Klingon is essentially the opposite. It was never intended to be a real spoken language, and it is notorious for its complicated nature and difficulty, but the fact that it resonates so strongly and so persistantly with the more devoted Star Trek fans means that it is actually spoken among those populations.
The best way I can think to sum it up is that I find it hard to imagine a Lojban or Esperanto enthusiast, but I can easily see a Klingon one. People have to accept language - and that means more than just recognizing that it is more logical and better constructed than the competition is.
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When I was a kid, my mom explained to me that in historical documents âall menâ or âmankindâ also included me. It gave me a filter so that I didnât spend my time being irritated, and could concentrate on the larger meaning of history.
Recently, I had a conversation with a woman about my age (middle age, FTW!) and no one had ever told her that. She had gone through school thinking that the constitution didnât apply to her. And, I guess it didnât in the beginning, but it sure should now.
I hope your wife isnât a thespian.
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Itâs because thatâs the way it was presented in school: âtheyâ is plural. I must have been educated by pedants.
This is of course the difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law.
Sometimes the spirit becomes the letter, and everyone agrees.
Other times, the spirit is banished for the sake of clarity, creating itâs own letter.
And other, other times, the spirit persists around a denial that the letter is the letter, etc.
This happens in society as much as it happens in human cognition, whether we accept these spirit/letter combinations often determine our worldly perception.
Saying that neutral pronouns are âfor transgender peopleâ is a little inaccurate. Theyâre more generally for genderqueer/intersex/etc. people who identify as neither male nor female. Transfolk are probably statistically more likely to fall in that category than cisfolk, but itâs not a requirement.
(I know an intersex fellow. He has one testicle and one ovary, and smallish male and female genitals. He IDs as male for convenience and because it suits him better than female, but he really feels more like a third, in-between thing.)
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Naturally. It has been proposed that the structure of the English language makes it easy to conceptualise Klingon, despite their deep differences. This is known as the Worf hypothesis.
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Thatâs fine, but would your friend rather be viewed as normal, or bizarre? Xe can choose the latter, but I donât imagine it will make xyr life any easier.
When I worked at this one restaurant, they insisted we call waiters and waitresses âwaitroids.â It never really caught on with the general public but itâs stuck with me all these years.
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A linguistics jokeâŚsquee!
I always liked âcomedienneâ in conversation. I can never hear the difference⌠which I found funny⌠which made it a good word for a comedian. Although in writing, it is just kinda lame.
You could say the same thing about a gay person debating whether to come out, though.
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Brilliant reply, thanks. You really helped clear a few things up for me!
Surely there canât be that many intersex people though? Enough to warrant changing an entire language?
I think I might be missing a crucial point.
