3 ms·
But what do you think you're getting in return for the risk of being wrong? What's the reward?
by brian-armstrong 10y ago
But what do you think you're getting in return for the risk of being wrong? What's the reward?
- toast0 10y agoMore natural sentence structure. Writing to avoid gendered pronouns can be awkward.
- umanwizard 10y ago"they/them" works wherever "he/him" does, and is gender-neutral.
- brian-armstrong 10y agoNot really. Just use they/them. It's perfectly ok in modern English
- toast0 10y ago"Brian has updated their status" is really awkward.
- marak830 10y agoI don't find that awkward.
- qbrass 10y ago"Brian thanked Jamie for updating their status."
- marak830 10y agoExactly. I don't understand the hesitation for using they or their. We will never be able to remember all the different pronouns people want to be called (without some sort of system to look it up constantly at least), I believe it's perfectly acceptable.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 10y agoBut it's unclear whose status has been updated.
- vertex-four 10y ago"Brian thanked Jamie for updating his status" is also unclear and needs context. Did Jamie update Brian's status? That's the first thing I parsed from it. If that sentence appeared as a machine-generated message on a social feed, I'd expect to see the actual status duplicated underneath. Thing is... there's already plenty of people going primarily by singular "they" for a pronoun, and it generally works pretty well.
- marak830 10y agoI agree with vertex, even with the male pronoun, it could still be confused( like a lot of things in English, you have to make an educated guess as to the meaning). I hear that a lot from students.
- vertex-four 10y agoNot really. It can get slightly more awkward when you use the gender-neutral pronoun repeatedly in one or two sentences - but only in the sense that it draws attention to the use of it. One of my social networks (a popular network for a niche community, not queer-specific) uses a similar sentence - "X updated their about me section". Nobody's particularly fussed.
- umanwizard 10y agoI don't think it's awkward at all, especially since I know some trans people who didn't change their names after coming out, but requested that people refer to them by different pronouns. Having heard and said things like "Brian has updated her status" enough times, the "their" is hardly awkward at all :)
- mhuffman 10y agoMarket segmentation data at the risk of offending an imperceptibly small amount of people.
- gravypod 10y agoI'd ask what's the risk? A chuckle with a friend that my phone thinks they are a different gender? I can't really imagine people getting upset with a mistake like this.