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> It's also just really bizarre and rude. Imagine referring to a cis woman with a beard as an 'it', or 'he'. I do that sometimes, unintentionally (regardless o

> It's also just really bizarre and rude. Imagine referring to a cis woman with a beard as an 'it', or 'he'. I do that sometimes, unintentionally (regardless of the person in question having a beard or not). It's just that gender in language is most of the time redundant and it only introduces noise into conversation. For most topics, the gender of the persons involved is irrelevant. But many languages force you to choose one, which just creates confusion if this piece of information is crucial or if it's just this bloat that the language forced you to include in your sentence. Oh, and genders are much more prevalent in my native language. English is actually better than most languages in this respect. But let's go a step further and just get rid of it. I've heard the Swedes chose to move to "person/thing" pronouns, as opposed to "male/female/thing". In my native language, verbs change their forms based on subject's gender. And then when you have sentences like "if I were in your shoes, I would verb", my brain tells me to assume the gender of the other speaker when I say verb. I mean, it's only logical: if I were in your shoes, I would be of your gender. But the language works otherwise. It's just stupid. As to people's reactions to my occasional misnamings, most people don't care at all, some are amused. Because, really, this part of language is ridiculous. And making an issue out of it is immature.

sascha_sl 6y ago
Oh C'mon, have some empathy. Of course cis people are just going to be amused to mildly annoyed. Trans people however are in a daily grind to be recognized. From personal experience, it always depends how deliberate a misgendering is, once with subsequent correction stings but is fine, not putting in any effort is quite uncomfortable and deliberately doing the opposite is "fuck off and never talk to me again" territory. The later happens not as infrequently as you might think, so the second might be misunderstood for the the later (and really, it costs nothing to not make people feel like trash). While most people will eventually be recognized - at least if they fit within the binary somewhere and medically transition - a few will not, and almost nobody will on the long way there. To insist it is not a big deal because you can't relate, that is immature.
WorldMaker 6y ago
> Oh, and genders are much more prevalent in my native language. English is actually better than most languages in this respect. But let's go a step further and just get rid of it. I've heard the Swedes chose to move to "person/thing" pronouns, as opposed to "male/female/thing". It's an interesting tangent here: English has been very slowly converging on singular `they` since Shakespearean Middle English. It's interesting that singular `you` (which started after singular `they`) beat singular `they` to the modern English party, but it somewhat makes sense that removing language formality distinctions was quickly more useful in short term language evolution than removing English's few remaining gender-required assumptions.

sascha_sl 6y ago

Oh C'mon, have some empathy. Of course cis people are just going to be amused to mildly annoyed. Trans people however are in a daily grind to be recognized. From personal experience, it always depends how deliberate a misgendering is, once with subsequent correction stings but is fine, not putting in any effort is quite uncomfortable and deliberately doing the opposite is "fuck off and never talk to me again" territory. The later happens not as infrequently as you might think, so the second might be misunderstood for the the later (and really, it costs nothing to not make people feel like trash). While most people will eventually be recognized - at least if they fit within the binary somewhere and medically transition - a few will not, and almost nobody will on the long way there. To insist it is not a big deal because you can't relate, that is immature.

WorldMaker 6y ago

> Oh, and genders are much more prevalent in my native language. English is actually better than most languages in this respect. But let's go a step further and just get rid of it. I've heard the Swedes chose to move to "person/thing" pronouns, as opposed to "male/female/thing". It's an interesting tangent here: English has been very slowly converging on singular `they` since Shakespearean Middle English. It's interesting that singular `you` (which started after singular `they`) beat singular `they` to the modern English party, but it somewhat makes sense that removing language formality distinctions was quickly more useful in short term language evolution than removing English's few remaining gender-required assumptions.