The Trans History of the Wild West(atlasobscura.com) |
The Trans History of the Wild West(atlasobscura.com) |
But yes, it is also useful to be able to abandon those labels altogether, or not have them define one's identity.
Ehm, does that actually work however? I see what you say happening, but does it bring the desired goal?
I also kind of find it stroking with a way to broad of a brush to say that "society" puts "hostile labels" on groups. This isn't always the case. I'm part of society, but I for sure aint doing that, and I don't really want to be put in the same box with people who do.
If I say: "I bumped into a stranger on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me" - generally (in normal spoken conversation, not here when we're paying attention) people don't care. Using singular "they" for strangers is pretty common, and hundreds and hundreds of years old.
The problem comes when we give someone a name. If I say: "I bumped into Julie on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me", people might think it sounds odd (if they're not used to it).
It's as if we have an order/hierarchy in which we expect to learn information about people. Like, by the time we know someone's name, we assume we should already have been told their gender, and we confused if hasn't happened yet.
[0] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
There are some proposed non-binary or gender neutral pronouns but none of them seem to be in use much.
Based on that, I propose we push for ‘it’ as a sole singular pronoun (and keep ‘they’ for plural, as knowing if someone is referring to one or many is far more useful in almost all contexts than knowing whether they are referring to a man or a woman (or ship, or country, etc.), and those few contexts where it is relevant should be easy enough to glean from other information.
If you think that could never work, I'd point out that Mandarin managed without gender-specific pronouns until contact with Europeans, and even now they are only distinguishable in written form.[1]
Alternatively, there's Stallman's proposal for ‘person’, ‘per’ and ‘pers’.[2] I'm doubtful of any proposal that involves creating new words (see ‘xe’, Spivak pronouns, etc. ), but everything else Stallman says seems to come to pass so maybe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Decline_of_g...
I might not even be willing to refer to a dog as "it" in most circumstances.
Honestly though, I'm with you that it's a linguistic gap English needs to fill. Similarly, the second person plural pronoun need to be accepted as "y'all"- and I say that as someone not even from the southern USA.
Somehow the deliberate proposals often seem not to succeed.
"I replied to always4getpass, and told them that the generic pronoun seems pretty normal, I hope they agree."
Frankly, I think even people offended at being forced to use the former usage will relent. Refusing to accommodate (rightly or wrongly) is confrontational, and being confrontational is exhausting. It's already quite natural to use singular they when using a passive, impersonal voice, and using a passive voice is what people will invariably resort to when they're exhausted.
1: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...
TL;DR it's been commonly used this way for centuries, all the way back to Shakespeare and even earlier.
There are alternatives, xe/xer/xem, but you can't wish new English words into existence even if they might be useful. You end up sounding sillier trying to use the new made-up words than if you just resign yourself to "they".
And can I add that this comments thread here is peak HN. There's a fascinating article about an interesting part of history I'd never heard of before, and yet all but one of the comments here are nitpicking over word choice. And I'm not helping any either.
[1] Nonbinary -> NB -> enby
See also: nibbling.
"Well officer, I saw them walk from their car up to the door then they turned and looked around, that's when I saw them pull the ski mask down, draw their gun and enter the bank"
---
Manager: What was the customer doing when you told them to leave?
Clerk: Well I had been trying to help them with their project but they kept stepping into my personal space, then he places his hand on me and that's when I decided they'd crossed a line and needed to leave
---
Most people wouldn't even bat an eye swapping they out for he/she in conversation in person.
I think it does, albeit slowly and not necessarily without backlash. The alternative to having LGBT people assert their own identity is to have their identity asserted for them, by people who may not understand them or who may be hostile to them, and that sort of thing never goes well.
And the desired goal is to remove the stigma of LGBT existence and have it be accepted as being normal. One way to facilitate that normalization is for LGBT people to simply not be hidden, and to participate in society, and the most obvious way to do that is as part of a culture that can be easily recognized by an outgroup.
It's progress for people to simply complain about there being too much gay representation in the media, rather than for it to be illegal to represent it as anything but an illness (as was the case under the Hayes code.)
>I'm part of society, but I for sure aint doing that, and I don't really want to be put in the same box with people who do.
This seems to trip a lot of people up when discussions about the intersections of race, gender and culture come up. It's difficult to argue that, for instance, toxic aspects of masculinity can exist without people interpreting that as a claim that all masculinity is toxic and that, therefore, all men are toxic. Likewise, discussing rape culture leads to people dismissing the concept entirely because they, themselves, are not rapists. Yet both are criticisms of group dynamics, systems of power and identity politics, not of individuals or of all members of a class.
Individuals can differ in the way they respond to the influences of society, but its influence still exists. Speaking at the level of abstractions rather than individuals is important because those abstractions are what form people's concepts of normality, decency and justice, and because people act both as individuals and as conformist (or non-conformist) members of a group. Men who don't display toxic masculinity are still participants in the culture of masculinity, and men who don't rape are still participants in rape culture. Women participate in both as well.
Likewise, it's entirely possible to correctly claim that society puts hostile labels on LGBT groups, and for that not to apply to you personally. If so, that's fine, but not relevant, and there's no need to be defensive about the premise.
Some people might even take it as a potential clue that Julie could be non-binary, because of how much we expect gender-matched pronouns at that point. (Not saying they should, just that they might.)
It seems like "they" is used 'correctly' for a singular subject when the subject has been previously referred to, but hasn't been given a proper name. But I'm sure a linguist has studied this in further detail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria#Epidemiology
This usage of 'they' would then be further restricted to the subset of people with gender dysphoria who identify as neither male nor female.
In German we have "sie" which is both third-person singular female, third-person plural, and when written "Sie" also a formal second-person singular/plural. It works just fine.
Also, as someone currently leaving in a place rich with Scousers I would put forward ‘yous’ as a second-person plural pronoun that rolls off the tongue a bit better (and, I would conjecture, makes more intuitive sense for learners of English).
So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.
Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.
It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be.
(It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)
Whereas always marking what continent you're all living on, or what race you all are, usually doesn't convey any information. So it seems entirely unsurprising that languages tend not to build this in. Many do build in markers for what species, because again this was useful information, since most of our ancestors spent a long time farming.
What evidence, beyond "this seems reasonable" is there for this argument?
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit.
My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.
None that I'm aware of have anything resembling our modern idea of race built in. For the obvious reason that approximately nobody in said village had been 100 miles, nevermind to another continent. If a language had such a feature, the next generation would probably never have heard it used, and thus would not know what it meant. (I wonder whether any languages have grammatical markers for slavery or caste? That would be the closest thing I could imagine, divisions that many people would have talked about every day for millennia, in some places.)
Forgetting features seems to happen much quicker than acquiring them. Post-1066 English lost a lot of complication which German retained (including grammatical gender of nouns, IIRC). As you say, singular you is much younger than that, but importantly it's about forgetting a distinction we used to make. I'm not an expert on why this happened, but I didn't think it was some great shift in what needed to be communicated, just a mutation/simplification.
What do you mean? You mean that racist societies might be expected to distinguish between races with noun classes? Seems to me this might well have happened in some language at some time, or at least a variation on it: distinguishing between those inside the clan, and those outside.
It looks like the sex distinction is the one most commonly reflected in language, which strikes me as empirical evidence that it's generally the most valuable one.
> Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine and neuter; or animate and inanimate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Gender_of_p...
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Languages_with_noun...