Hmmh. But I mean even that also applies in reverse. Also the “pronouns people” don’t say it’s their biggest problem. At least the ones I’ve ever met. So Greens post has the same logical shortcomings as I have.

dude, chill. it’s like 2am. that’s a good time to chirp like a cricket… 😆

It’s clear that you’re not trying to make a point here.

You didn’t comment here to discuss but just to throw your hate for pronouns onto other people

Ask yourself if you actually want to create positive change. You clearly have an opinion on the matter. Regardless of your opinion being reasonable or not, you already ruined your chance to get your point across by being a total ass

You will never convince anyone by being an asshole. So don’t be one.

And if you just want to express your frustrations then go to your therapist.

I don’t know why I’m bothering typing this, but…

You do realize that language evolves and changes, what sounds odd to us may not in 20 years and what sounds normal now may have sounded odd 20 years ago.

Yes there are some rules, but also those rules are subject to change too.

Saying stuff like this 40 years ago would sound absurd: Google it, search it up, tweet it, download it, upload it, post it.

Language changes, thou cannest changeth with it or thee will eventually and indubitably sound like a right silly nincompoop, knave!

What makes you think people care when they are accidentally misgendered? It’s not the accidental misgendering that is the problem.

Nobody is “forced to use pronouns” at present but this stance misses the point. It looks at the harms of misgendering as a situation that doesn’t cause other inequities and harms.

For the average social interaction where you are on equal terms but can walk away being misgendered is something a lot of us hate but live with like any small annoyance. It is like stubbing your toe. Not fun but whatever it’s fine that’s just “someone being a prick”. But if deliberate misgendering is allowed to happen over a long period in a workplace setting it is not something we get to walk away from. If we have to regularly interact with that person or lose our ability to feed and house ourselves then we are forced to have mental health problems because someone essentially doesn’t like being told what to do. Having to deal with panic attacks at work because you had to be locked in a room with someone hitting every trauma trigger you have exposed to the world or else you have to find a new and maybe worse job is a barrier to participation in society.

If it’s in a medical setting where we have to balance our health outcomes knowing that if we don’t comply with the misgendering our care is impacted because a doctor holds our lives or the relief from pain in their hands. A lot of trans people become shy and don’t seek help early and often because they equate doctors visits with a sense of powerlessness and shame knowing that they can’t stand up for themselves. In that instance it’s not just “someone being a dick” you are placing someone’s complete physical wellbeing before someone’s egotistical need to be “right” about you.

If a trans person in a social club and misgendering isn’t checked by a majority it can mean that they might not have a choice on whether or not to go. The world becomes a smaller place when you have gender related trauma.

Deliberate misgendering in a professional setting isn’t just “someone showing you they are a prick” the burden always falls upon trans people disproportionately because our participation in society often forces us to compromise directly on our health and there are real traumas and weaknesses that underlie our transness. If someone was openly making rape jokes around someone you knew had sexual assault trauma you’d step in right? Why not the same for someone with gender related traumas?

What Peterson is railing against is protections for participation in regular society through professional setting misgendering cases.

No one is being forced.

For fuck’s sake.

Peterson just lied about the bill.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qbnamx/no-the-trans-rights-bill-doesnt-criminalize-free-speech

No one is stopping him or anyone else from being a bigoted asshole. Asking people to stop doing it and telling them why is not forcing them.

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It was made a law, it’s also a law in many parts of the US. It’s not about preventing random people from being pricks, it’s about discouraging harassment from employers, school administrations, and government officials. They’re prohibited from persistently misgendering you in the same way they’re prohibited from calling you slurs. I struggle to imagine a scenario where life would be improved by removing those sensible guard rails on civil society.

No, I’m saying bigots and assholes care. You can be sane and be a bigot and/or an asshole. And there a huge number of such people.

And if you mean that people who know what their gender is are loony and would prefer it if people didn’t get it wrong, you are probably loony yourself.

Es geht nur um das Geschlecht, also er/sie/es. Mann kann das gleiche auf deutsch machen, die Fälle haben eigentlich nichts damit zu tun.

Es geht nur darum, wie sich der Person fühlt. Leute mit eine biologische “Zwischen-Zustand” sind ein gutes Beispiel für uns “0815” leute. Sollte ich sie oder er sagen zur eine Person mit weiblichen Büßen und einen Penis? Die leute (und auch andere die sich als nicht Standard fühlen) wollen einfach selber einschneiden wie man sie adressiert.

(Entschuldigung wegen meinen Grammatik-Fehlern, mein Deutsch wird ständig schlimmer)

Yep, pretty much what UNY0N said. It is about the gender, not the pronouns per se. It is an English thing that they have gendered pronouns when mostly all other stuff in the language is (assumed not) gendered. Such meticulus discussion of pronouns detached from gender makes me wonder what your reaction would be if someone held a door open for you and then called you Fraulein. Would you feel misgendered then?

Okay, then you use whichever English pronoun you wish to use. Again, pretty simple. I really don’t think this is something you couldn’t have figured out for yourself just by spending time around English speakers or even just watching English-language media or listening to English-language music.

And what are all the other definitions? Words can have more than one, like “they” does.

Yup, either singular or plural. It’s clear from context because you always refer to them in a previous clause. The user did this, they… The class did this, they…

The user must do this before first use, if he or she fails to… Ugh

The user must do this before first use, if they fail to…😘👌

They has been used like this for a long, long time.

Bring back Victorian era slang!! and I always say that!

have you tried having these conversations?

they don’t go so well IRL than they do in your head. the conservation you want in your head requires two willing and thoughtful parties… often there is only one person with that mindset… or sometimes none.

I had at trans friend who I did talk about this stuff with a few years ago… but now they are a radicalized nutcase and they are more focused on being ‘pronoun’ police and making every topic about ‘their suffering’ etc. oftentimes sane people become crazy people.

Even then, whether “them” references a group or an individual is left unclear–as I noted. E.g., “you” vs “y’all.” Exclusively using they/them is mildly less precise, but people acting like it’s the end of the English language is silly.

As I also explicitly stated, acting like it’s not slightly imprecise is facile. It could be worse, at least English doesn’t have gendered nouns like Spanish, Italian, etc. 😁

Yeah, and like in my own example, it’s easily clarified by simply saying Jane’s parents were concerned that Jane may harm theirself.

Over and beyond gendered pronouns, the overwhelming amount of confusing sentences I read aren’t confusing because of genderless pronouns. They’re confusing because they’re poorly written.

You sound like you live on Terf Island

I’ve never heard this before. Would you have an example? Because if so, I’m about to get a lot less grammatically correct.

Right. And at the same time, language is an evolving practice. New words are created all the time. Maybe, this issue was worth it to change the rules.

Why did they teach you this. Your singular teacher. What were they thinking?

Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.

1. Hey, it’s prescriptivists again, ruining everyone’s day
2. Look what’s actually recent (if three centuries count as recent, but definitely more recent than seven centuries ago)

My child dresses itself.

“Ma, I’m a boy!”

I adore how callous that sentence sounds.

Fascinating! I didn’t know there was an article about this.

This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.

That’s more than official enough for me!

Oh yeah, that one is absolutely terrible and I will die on that hill. Figuratively speaking.

No one uses literally to mean figuratively. They use it to emphasize regardless of if what they’re emphasizing includes figurative language. Nearly every word that means something similar to “in actual fact” undergoes this semantic drift (actually, really, etc).

“She literally exploded at me.” is similar in meaning to “She totally exploded at me.” Not so much to “She figuratively exploded at me.”

Colloquialization. Get enough people using a new word, or existing word in a new way, and it will eventually be added to the dictionary.

I accepted the inevitable downfall of mankind when “unfriend” was added in 2009.

It must not be specifically gated on time. My instruction was rural East Coast. I’ve learned however just from the article posted in this thread that a singular third person has been in use for centuries, even recognized as such an official contexts.

Someone higher up this thread linked an article that singular they has been in use since the 14th century

The exclusion of the oxford comma is a really good example of grammar that’s a bit outdated. It’s far clearer to use it. Dropping it used to make sense when we used typewriters and ink, but in a digital world it makes no sense.

I already mentioned that we can get grammatical “they” with non-definite/unknown referents (your first and third examples), and in the second example Shakespeare is clearly referring to all mothers with “them”, so none of these are counterexamples to my generalization above. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find many examples with a specific, definite antecedent (though it is possible, of course - grammaticality is a spectrum, after all).

This distinction, as well as the fact that modern speakers are showing various innovative uses of “they”, has been well known for decades in the linguistic literature.

It kinda grinds my gears when people intentionally (or maybe just ignorantly in this case) misconstrue linguistic data to support their political positions, and that includes all of the boneheads acting like singular “they” isn’t a thing at all for their own nefarious purposes as well.

It doesn’t matter that English hasn’t had specific singular “they” until Gen Z. That’s just a fact of history and language, and has (or at least should have) nothing to do with the rights of non-binary people.

Stop using bullshit linguistic data to try to justify your political positions! All of you! This is how we get Hindu nationalists justifying their oppression of Muslims with ridiculous claims that Sanskrit is the original human language. Language is just language!

Edit: I just went and read your other thread, and it does appear that you’re just being disingenuous at this point, or at least doubling down after being proved incorrect. Your own source pointed out that Shakespeare would not have used “they” with specific individuals. Thymos is completely (and demonstrably) correct.

Sometimes I do so because the gender is irrelevant

This seems to be part of the pathway of change that has led to the widespread adoption of specific singular “they” among younger speakers, and there’s some empirical evidence supporting this.

What I don’t get is, how can knowing the gender suddenly make it difficult to use a neutral term, if it worked before?

This is just one of those arbitrary rules that often exist in language, like how in many languages neuter/inanimate nouns can’t act as the subject of a sentence due to what’s called an “animacy restriction”.

For this specific phenomenon (the “older” ungrammaticality of definite singular they vs. the “younger” grammaticality of it), this recent paper argues that this is due to a difference in obligatoriness of morphosyntactic gender features. The paper is a bit technical if you don’t have a linguistic background, but the basic argument is that in older varieties of English, gender features must be obligatorily expressed in the morphosyntactic derivation if they are known, while in younger varieties, this expression seems to be optional, and therefore free variation between he/they and she/they is allowed by the grammar.

So, “It’s John’s. They need to come get it” is ungrammatical for older speakers for not obligatorily expressing the gender feature once it’s known, while it’s perfectly fine for younger speakers for whom expressing that feature seems to be optional in the grammar.

Maybe this analogy will help: Let’s say you meet someone, and you ask them “Do you have a cat?”. Note that you’ve used the singular here, though it’s acting number-neutral in this context. If they respond “I have two”, then it will immediately become ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular and ask “Does your cat like fish?”

Once you have access to the information that there’s more than one cat, then the arbitrary rules of English grammar require that knowledge to immediately be reflected in the morphosyntactic structure of your sentences from then on. And this makes no independent, logical sense, because there are tons of languages out there that don’t have plurality distinctions. But, English does, and so to speak grammatical English (for now), you have to use plural morphology to refer to more than one entity.

It’s the same for “older” speakers of English - just like it’s ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular once you know that there’s a “plural number feature” in the linguistic context, for older speakers of English it’s ungrammatical for them to continue to use the gender-neutral “they” once they know that there’s a “masculine gender feature” in the linguistic context.

Also, it’s important to note that this term “ungrammatical” is descriptive, not prescriptive - it’s not saying that it’s not “proper” or “correct” according to some arbitrary standard that someone decided on in the 1800s, but rather that’s literally not how those speakers’ mental grammars work. While it may seem illogical (and even regressive from a modern political perspective), every natural human language is composed of arbitrary rules that often seem illogical. Like how the past tense of “go” is the completely unrelated past tense of the older English verb “to wend”, “went”. Or how the past tense of the verb “can” isn’t “could” anymore – that’s reserved for modal usage now in most English dialects – it’s the completely awkward phrase “was able to”.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t, or shouldn’t, try to accommodate non-binary people of course, as is unfortunately often argued, but it does mean that, contrary to what I commonly see people say on the internet, doing so for these speakers does require a constant, concerted effort to consciously override their mental grammars.

That’s not relevant to our conversation here - we’re not talking about how language should be used (which linguistics, as an empirical/rationalist science, has nothing to say about), we’re talking about how it is used.

I didn’t ask you about what other people assumed about you.

I asked you if you found it challenging to know which gender you are. Is it a challenge or do you just know?