There’s definitely some additional nuance (like a pronouns in bio/username situation) but this should cover the broad needs of anyone who is approaching this with good faith.
How to choose the correct pronouns
I followed this one chart and was instantly promoted to CFO.
We really did great work designing this fantastic flowchart.
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Use their name, if you know it.
They/them it is!
yuss!
Or call them that human over there? I do that sometimes as a joke.
Last time I did that I got corrected by a furry.
Lmao
wait a second, I don’t think that’s a furry…
Scalies?
Avoiding pronouns altogether until clarification is obtained can certainly be a strategy too!
What’s your stance on snap nicknames for identification purposes?
i don’t know what that means
“What’s up with mophead over there?”
“Have you seen big-ears lately?”
A snap nickname is any vaguely descriptive (and mildly rude) nickname given to someone.
unrelated idk just do what makes people comfortable
Well my language does not have a neutral pronoun so this just does not work.
Turkish has 1 gender neutral pronoun, the only pronoun in the whole language
Yeah, it’s an English-speaking majority platform, so English chart it is. Can’t remember non-English pronouns being relevant in any recent discussion. This one solves the (most) relevant problem (for most users).
That said, we have a similar problem with language limitations here and all “solutions” sound ridiculous.
yeah this chart is only for english unfortunately
Most languages don’t have gendered pronouns, actually. It’s really mostly random romance languages, and nearly all of them have a neuter option.
oh i thought most languages only had gendered.
also idk about having a gender neutral option in most. afaik the creation of neutral pronouns in languages that have never had them (other than male being the neutral equivalent) is seen basically the same as neopronouns, which means its very hard for people to start using them.
for example, i’m from brazil and i have never seen anyone use neutral pronouns seriously. i wouldn’t be surprised if the other languages in the same situation are going through the same thing
though i guess through jokes people might get used to them and start using them seriously, so things could become better in the future.
“random” romance languages
watch yo tone anglo-saxon
That nobody wants to use for me or other people >:(
What’s your language, if it’s okay to ask?
Why would it not be om to ask? It’s slovenian.
People who live their entire lives on the internet have no idea how humans actually react to things in real life. They’ve been trained to assume that literally anything they do or say could be considered offensive to someone
I think some people might consider it too personal/identifying?
Anyway, the Slovenian pronoun system sounds fascinating. Changing how you refer to people in so many different ways is pure nonsense, but it’s also poetic, especially when synthesis is involved. I’ll have to study it sometime.
It’s a safe question to ask, if they don’t like it they won’t answer. A person’s language is hardly ever identifying
Nope, the allt right hate they too now. Make a new apologist flow chart that are regime approved mate
shoot my bad 🙇♀️
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
I read this in frank reynold’s voice
owie! :3 owie! :3 ouch :3 oof! :3
🤨❓
There’s a lot of transphobes that use they/them to not acknowledge the pronouns of trans people, but also to skirt around anti-misgendering rules of social media. I call it “passive-aggressive misgendering”.
Definitely :( and it’s a super hurtful thing.
But! of course! that only happens when the offending person knows the pronouns and uses they/them anyway (right side of the flowchart). I see you are already getting downvotes from people who are so riled up they assumed for ya you meant both cases. Ugh.
Thanks for being normal ❤️
My solution, get rid of gendered pronouns. Make “He/Him” gender neutral and get rid of all others. Why do I need to know the gender of a coworker I have only ever talked to in email? And why, when referring to this person, do I need to let everybody else know that I know their gender by using the correct pronoun? It’s dumb and pointless.
It’s like when I was a kid and it was very important that we knew which teachers were married and which weren’t so we could use “Ms” or “Mrs”. It’s irrelevant to every conversation.
use “Ms or Mrs”
- It was Miss for unmarried women before Ms was coined and popularised for “none of your business whether I’m married or not” so Ms was acceptable regardless
- Doesn’t Mrs look like it’s missing a possessive apostrophe, a Mr’s woman?
And your main point, degender the male pronouns, it wouldn’t work. “Man” used to mean people, male men and female men and child men – boys and girls – had different words, some of which are still around. That’s why people say there’s nothing gendered in “chairman” (which 50 years ago was logically equal to “chairperson”, unless you count other species as people).
make he/him gender neutral
???why not just use they/them like we have been for centuries lmao. your plan would cause so many problems.
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Just a quick heads up but, linguistically speaking, you are mistaken with what you said about “they/them”.
It doesn’t refer to multiple people?
don’t make me tap the tom scott video
Maybe you misunderstood my actual comment. I’m saying we should use he/him as the general neutral pronoun. That Tom Scott video is saying the same thing as me, just with a different solution.
You said my plan would cause “so many problems”, and outside of the obvious transition problem, I still see no problems.
- problem 1: why are you choosing he/him to be gender neutral and not she/her? it gives the impression that grammatical maleness is default and you are going to get pushback for that, whether your intentions are sexist or not.
- problem 2: making he/him gender neutral strips the identity from male and masculine people.
- problem 3: you’re suggesting a massive overhaul when there’s literally already a word in place.
and NO they/them doesn’t “refer to multiple.” the tom scott video abjectly disagrees with you on that, so don’t twist things. even Shakespeare used they/them to refer to singular people.
honestly this conversation is pointless and boring so i’ll end it here.
I agree. Also thanks for letting the video.
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“If someone dropped their wallet would you tell them?”
Perfectly normal and already understood.
I actually prefer it as the neutral singular, but everyone decided that was dehumanizing. To me it feels natural because if you don’t know an animal’s or a baby’s gender, you call it it.
People didn’t so much “decide” that, as it was used that way by bigots specifically because it was historically only used for animals and objects. They used it as a slur to hurt folks in our community, and like any attempt to reclaim a slur, even though the reclamation is an act of power, there are going to be people who were targetted by the slur who struggle with the concept of reclamation.
Also, if you mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, apologize and respect their wishes.
We’re humans after all, and mistakes happens. No one is asking you to be perfect. People just want you to be a decent person.
AND HOLY SHIT does it get toxic. for some reason there’s no will for even this basic level of nuance. currently watching an entire anti-blahaj hate crusade over a simple misunderstanding where the left and the right conclusions of the chart got conflated as though they are the same thing.
then i tried to help clarify and got called insults.
just… so sad :(
I think one of the issues is that several of the people involved in that crusade were also banned from blahaj.
People tend to not disclose their conflict of interest.
That’s a very probably true analysis :(
Relevant meme post of what brought on a lot of those bans for onlookers.
Could you please tell the context behing that post?
first three paragraphs of this history post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/12094663
Dare I ask?
Edit 3: I’ve been trying to talk to her most of the day. It’s not proving fruitful. I’m holding out hope for her but she’s just continuing to tantrum.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37755294
Short version: elder queer
makes postreplies to a post on beehaw asking if it’s actually okay to stick with they/them pronouns for everyone because OOP’w autistic brain discards gender as irrelevant information (like how you cant remember your dreams or what you had for breakfast last week), so she tends to forget people’s pronouns. This caused OOP to accidentally misgender someone who thought she knew their pronouns, and she’s worried about hurting other people’s feelings. OP angrily insists that they/them is how you address people you don’t know the gender of, full stop, and then goes on a rant about how kids these days are little babies etc. Then a mod saw that post, interpreted this as gatekeeping who gets to be nb, and banned her from all of blahaj.zone.To be clear, she is being an ass there throwing a big tantrum over getting banned. I think she will calm down soon. This seems like the
BTW, I also have this problem, Ive just learned to do a better job of hiding it because for some fucking reason when transphobes (and traumatized trans friends) hear me ask “I forgot X’s gender, what was it again?” they hear “Oh no, the trans-genderism and the pronouns is so confusing, they should stick with calling themselves by their peepee and vajoojay like the founding fathers intended” and then i wake up the next day with no friends. So I’ve just learned to not ask for help and correct myself when i fuck up. It was also hard to learn that the apology has to be through your immediate actions by immediately correcting yourself and moving on; it is so easy to panic and apologize like you just ran over their cat, but dramatic apology + autistic RBF = what looks like passive aggressive sarcasm.
I get why this happens, and I can’t be mad at trans people for being traumatized by all the transphobes. After the 3rd or 4th time you find out someone you thought was your friend secretly wants to call you a slur, you start getting paranoid. And more importantly for this subject, if someone told me that our mutual friend X misgendered someone, I am immediately blocking X’s number, passing the word on to my friends, and shunning X for the rest of their life, no questions asked because that’s how transphobes should be treated.
Edit: forgot she said she is a lesbian. Changed the pronouns
Edit 2: thank you kind commenter for pointing out that OP was one of the commenters on the beehaw post, not the poster. Read the comments, she came across as an old yelling about how kids these days are too soft. Edited my summary to reflect this.
Ah yeah. I banned her. Not because she defaults to they/them, but because she was victim blaming queer folk as the cause of their own oppression, and using a lot of thinly veiled insults against gender diverse folk
And for what it’s worth, I’m almost certainly a similar age to her
Yeah, the more I try to talk with her, the more obvious it is that she’s not willing to stop projecting. I hope she sleeps on this and realizes she’s being closeminded.
Important detail: the person who posted that question isn’t the one who got banned, it was one of the commenters
Ah, missed that.
Edit: they just replied to my comment on their post. They’re still ranting about the baby gays being soft. Smh
see my comment history if you are truly interested. fair warning: it’s fucken bad.
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I’ve never met a person in real life who got upset because someone used the wrong pronoun once. Assuming people’s gender is fine, as long as you don’t double down on your assumption when someone corrects you
Wouldn’t it be much easier to use the grammatically well established singular they/them. That way you never run into an issue. Surely you’d do that when you encounter a name that can be used as both a female and a male name (Jessie, Les etc)
This implies you can not tell the person’s gender, which for most people is perfectly obvious. So often can cause offence. I realize not using they/them can also cause offence, but just much less often.
grammatically well established singular they/them
I mean, historically it’s well established, but you can’t deny that language has evolved in many places (at least in America) that they/them feels plural. I’m not saying they/them shouldn’t be gender neutral singular pronouns, but in the dialect I was raised, it only feels correct in indeterminate situations, like “whoever stole my bike, I hope they get arrested.”
Obviously language can continue to evolve where singular-they feels correct in any scenario, but if you’re talking about “much easier” then that includes the random rules people collectively hallucinate.
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He/She is fine for when you know the gender of someone. When you don’t they is really well established - it was used by Chaucer. So they if you don’t know because they might go by something else, they for someone with a name like Leslie who could be a he or a she outside of any discussion about trans identities.
Tbh just saying they is easier, took a few weeks/months to train myself to do it and now I’m just cringing whenever I hear something that’s like “he or she could be doing this thing” when “they” is just more efficient anyway. They’re just as established. I think “they” is an older term but I’d have to look into the etymology on that.
So I’m not sure how reliable it is given the age of the data but it looks like there’s some indication that “they” fell in use up to the late 1900s but before ~1860 it was actually more common than now. I’m now curious if there’s any more info on this.
I have a really hard time recognizing people’s gender so I usually go along with the same pronouns others use and then inevitably feel really bad about it because of how often it’s wrong. In languages without an accepted they/them equivalent I just flip flop but in English I really don’t understand the need to use he/she unless it’s ambiguous whether there are one or more people being spoken about.
I tend to agree, but I do get where the other viewpoint comes from. I’m from a country where I don’t believe this is a major point of contention, as long as we’re respectful with each other I don’t think people feel the need to make a big deal out of this, but I’m aware I’m speaking from a bubble here, others may disagree.
I do work in an international company with many anglophones from the UK and USA, and it’s a much bigger point there, to the point certain expressions are banned, e.g. addressing a group as guys. I speculate that it’s a bit of a cultural thing, and a language thing. As others mention, a lot of languages are Ill suited to naturally use gender neutrality. English is quite malleable that way.
If only there were gender neutral pronouns in my language 😭
My only issue is when apparently someone can choose that “they”, a gender neutral pronoun, doesn’t apply to someone. I saw it in a recent Elliot Page post. Someone was getting ripped to shreds for talking about Elliot and saying “they”. “No it’s him! You’re trying to minimize his identity!” was basically the response. But the person was talking about Elliots work pre and post transition and you could tell they were taking great care to not offend, and yet it was still offensive apparently. Which was then made even funnier when others chimed in to point out that Elliot specifically asks to be referred to as “They/Him”.
My whole point is that some people need to cool it when it comes to gender neutral pronouns. Lest we forget, “I’m a dude, he’s a dude, she’s a dude, we’re all dudes!”
In arabic we don’t even have neuter or non-gendered anythings, a table is a he or she.
Not even objects are safe 😔
In German it feels completely random.
A table is masculine. A castle is feminine. A sausage is feminine. A boy is masculine. A girl is neutral. A fire is neutral. …
Not sure if there’s any meaningful rule behind.
Actually, Mädchen (meaning “girl” in German) is a diminutive. It comes from Magd (an old word for “maid” or “young woman”) with the -chen suffix, which is a common diminutive in German.
The -chen suffix makes words grammatically neuter, which is why Mädchen takes das instead of die, even though it refers to a female person.
I’m not German but the same applies to the Dutch word for girl, and we’ve the same rule for neutral. By the way, ‘magd’ in Dutch means virgin (maagd to be precise), which sounds incredibly inappropriate to be going around calling someone; little virgin (/¯ ಠ_ಠ)/¯
Sorry if you already know this, but it sounds from the wording of your post that you might not know that “maid” or “maiden” means virgin also.
“my maiden aunt” means an aunt who never married (and it’s presumed to be virginal because what other option is there /s)
So yeah
Some non binary people use the pronoun “they” in arabic, but unlike english it is exclusively meant for plural. And in arabic, verbs also are conjugated with amount, So you just can’t say “They ate” in a singular form, you have to explicitly mark “ate” in plural.
It’d be like saying “they ate(plural verb)”. It sounds very weird but there’s not much better.
There’s a similar — though very localised — thing in English with “themself.”
The singular form is used, but it’s far less common than the plural form “themselves.” I often hear “themselves” used to refer to one non-binary person and it always sounds weird.
I guess we have to work with what we have. Is there an alternative in Arabic, like neopronouns?
Your comment made me try to think of one, and all I got was a headache.
In arabic everything is gendered. Even the most simple pronoun “I” changes the form of the sentence based on your gender (ie masculine: “ana ju’an” fem: “ana ju’ana”
Even the numbers and verbs are gendered. To try to add a new gender would be rethinking the entire language.
But in Arabic masculine pronouns are considered normal. Even with feminine objects like the sun, you can use a masculine pronoun “hua kabir” He (it) is big. So most enbies I know of just use masculine pronouns. There may be an alternative I don’t know of. It’s an interesting yet complex topic.
Isn’t there a dual case (as in, specifically for two of something) in Arabic? Or is that primarily a formal thing?
There is. It’s absolutely necessary, no exceptions at all. It’s one of the only languages that really use it. It just adds to the complexity lol
As far as I know there isn’t any rule to learn. Grammatical gender is a wild mixture of several things, sometimes it has something to do with the ending of words and sometimes with attributes of the things, if it has like agency, is an inanimate object, or is an abstract concept. Sometimes it’s completely arbitrary and sometimes there are rules to it like with group of people. But there is no way of telling, you got to memorize it. In any way, grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender. And I’m pretty sure that’s not it’s origin. Though, we try to link it to biological gender in case of people. But even that has exceptions, and it doesn’t really work with group of people etc.
Unlike for girl, das Mädchen, which is a diminutive (of die Maid, a virgin young woman) as it is ending with -chen and thus, is of neutral gender, I doubt if rules for the other examples do exist:
- Die Wurst (the sausage), female – der Durst (the thirst), male
- Die Burg (the castle), female – der Zwerg (the dwarf), der Berg (the mountain), male
Oh sorry I went out and commented the same thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Doesn’t matter, as you elaborated more deeply on why das Mädchen has neuter gender.
BTW: The use of (das) Fräulein (miss), again a diminutive; ‘little woman’, in German, to refer to an unmarried woman has come out of fashion since ~50 years and now may be perceived as insulting as well.
Mädchen is no longer perceived as a diminutive of Maid or Magd, as both terms are more used in a historic context, and thus, it stands on its own.
I’d say default should be to offer your own name/pronouns to encourage someone to share rather than asking.
Super fair! I guess I would categorize or lump that in as a tactful and warm way of “asking” but I absolutely am with you for that suggestion. 🤗
Ask them, “why do you care so much about what genitals you think I have?”
And then there are some languages where using pronouns for the secondary person is considered rude/weird in some conditions and you are supposed to use the name directly.
That’s fun stuff.
