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Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masc

Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masculine pronouns for himself?

awestroke 5y ago
It doesn't matter
frosted-flakes 5y ago
Definitely not.
Steltek 5y ago
I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load. Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."
- munificent 5y ago
  I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns. You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed across the previously mentioned nouns. So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." The second sentence can use two pronouns because they happen to be unambiguous. With only a single pronoun, that sentence ends up like: "Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk liked Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff's gift." (This is obviously an extreme example for comedic effect.) This is also why Romance languages have noun gender for inanimate objects where actual biological gender isn't meaningful. It's not about genitals, it's about scattering a few pronouns uniformly across the noun space. Of course, one might rightly argue that gender is not a good mechanism to use for your pronoun distribution. We could do something like shells do where we assign pronouns based on recency of the mentioned noun. Or some other system. But my point is that gendered pronouns aren't completely bananas. They serve a pragmatic function.
  - billforsternz 5y ago
    Interesting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?
    - uj8efdkjfdshf 5y ago
      IMO grammatical gender in Indo European languages (of which the Germanic and Romance language families are a part of) reflect how nouns and their references (pronouns, adjectives etc) are semantically linked by modifying the word endings of the latter to better reflect those of the original noun - I like to think of it as the equivalent of type suffixes in assembly language.
    - munificent 5y ago
      Definitely not a personal inspiration, but I can't recall where I first heard the idea. > For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that? I don't speak any Romance languages beyond high school Spanish, but I assume that's the case.
  - frutiger 5y ago
    > So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." Actually in that example, you still don’t need gendered pronouns to resolve ambiguity: “they enjoyed the gift”.
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  It costs me absolutely zero cognitive load. You don't have to worry about that. Now, trying to parse out if "they" is meant to refer to a group or an individual when used in place of s/he, that does take some work.
- loco5niner 5y ago
  Politicizing this topic is what causes the cognitive load.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Persian and Chinese have, if I remember correctly, no gendered pronouns. No effects on gender equality seem observable.
  - dron57 5y ago
    Chinese has gendered pronouns in written form. The characters for he and she are written differently, but they are both pronounced the same way - tā. I assume that in some older form of Chinese the sounds must have been different, but they converged and people get by fine in spoken language.
    - rhernandez35 5y ago
      It's actually the other way around. The 她 form was introduced in the relatively recent 1920s, partially to make it easier to translate Western texts.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
As someone tuned in to queer twitter I can say that if you know someone’s pronouns you should use them, so ideally for Obama you would use he/him. But also we’re all using they/them a lot more for people when we’re not sure and that can bleed in to people even when we do know their pronouns, and generally that’s not a big deal. Only becomes a problem when a trans person has a clear preference for she/her or he/him (or anything else) and a person repeatedly and willfully uses they/them, as that can be used to deny recognition of someone’s gender identity. But it’s generally not a problem if you use they/them for a cis person once, that can just slip out. We’re more sensitive around pronouns for trans people, since they are much more likely to have trauma around that. They/them is cool for someone with unknown pronouns but it’s best to politely ask as soon as possible and begin to use the preferred ones.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  OT: I use they/their by default, unless I know otherwise, but what to do with other common gendered terms such as Mr./Ms./Mrs, Sir/Madam/Ma'am/Miss? These aren't avoidable problems: e.g., in the greeting for a business letter ('Dear ...'), or when getting the attention of a member of restaurant waitstaff whose name I don't know, etc. Someone needs to come up with a plausible set of gender-neutral terms. They/their/them works for she/hers/her/he/his/him circumstances, but the needs are broader than that.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    Mostly I’ve just stopped using gendered terms. In a business letter even if the person is not trans you can’t assume Mr/Mrs/Ms unless you know. If their name is gender neutral or ambiguous I would say “Dear First Last,” though that’s even US/western-centric as not all cultures do it that way. If it’s a really important business letter you should probably find out the persons gender using some other channel. Also if the person has a title like Dr or Professor you can use that. Some people use Mx as a gender neutral but I don’t think that would fly with a more conservative minded person.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
Laremere 5y ago
Just noticed this. I'm puzzled why my comment attracted downvotes. I typically lean towards gender neutral terms in my speech, but this actually wasn't one of those cases. I had originally used "his", but noticed it resulted in he/him/his referring to two different people. "Destin has also peaked [...], as he interviewed Obama during their presidency." vs "Destin has also peaked [...], as he interviewed Obama during his presidency." Obviously, Obama was president and Destin wasn't, but the sentence still reads more weirdly with the grammatical implication that Destin was president.

Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masculine pronouns for himself?

awestroke 5y ago

It doesn't matter

frosted-flakes 5y ago

Definitely not.

Steltek 5y ago

I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load. Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."

munificent 5y ago
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns. You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed across the previously mentioned nouns. So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." The second sentence can use two pronouns because they happen to be unambiguous. With only a single pronoun, that sentence ends up like: "Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk liked Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff's gift." (This is obviously an extreme example for comedic effect.) This is also why Romance languages have noun gender for inanimate objects where actual biological gender isn't meaningful. It's not about genitals, it's about scattering a few pronouns uniformly across the noun space. Of course, one might rightly argue that gender is not a good mechanism to use for your pronoun distribution. We could do something like shells do where we assign pronouns based on recency of the mentioned noun. Or some other system. But my point is that gendered pronouns aren't completely bananas. They serve a pragmatic function.
- billforsternz 5y ago
  Interesting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?
  - uj8efdkjfdshf 5y ago
    IMO grammatical gender in Indo European languages (of which the Germanic and Romance language families are a part of) reflect how nouns and their references (pronouns, adjectives etc) are semantically linked by modifying the word endings of the latter to better reflect those of the original noun - I like to think of it as the equivalent of type suffixes in assembly language.
  - munificent 5y ago
    Definitely not a personal inspiration, but I can't recall where I first heard the idea. > For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that? I don't speak any Romance languages beyond high school Spanish, but I assume that's the case.
- frutiger 5y ago
  > So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." Actually in that example, you still don’t need gendered pronouns to resolve ambiguity: “they enjoyed the gift”.
metalliqaz 5y ago
It costs me absolutely zero cognitive load. You don't have to worry about that. Now, trying to parse out if "they" is meant to refer to a group or an individual when used in place of s/he, that does take some work.
loco5niner 5y ago
Politicizing this topic is what causes the cognitive load.
BurningFrog 5y ago
Persian and Chinese have, if I remember correctly, no gendered pronouns. No effects on gender equality seem observable.
- dron57 5y ago
  Chinese has gendered pronouns in written form. The characters for he and she are written differently, but they are both pronounced the same way - tā. I assume that in some older form of Chinese the sounds must have been different, but they converged and people get by fine in spoken language.
  - rhernandez35 5y ago
    It's actually the other way around. The 她 form was introduced in the relatively recent 1920s, partially to make it easier to translate Western texts.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

As someone tuned in to queer twitter I can say that if you know someone’s pronouns you should use them, so ideally for Obama you would use he/him. But also we’re all using they/them a lot more for people when we’re not sure and that can bleed in to people even when we do know their pronouns, and generally that’s not a big deal. Only becomes a problem when a trans person has a clear preference for she/her or he/him (or anything else) and a person repeatedly and willfully uses they/them, as that can be used to deny recognition of someone’s gender identity. But it’s generally not a problem if you use they/them for a cis person once, that can just slip out. We’re more sensitive around pronouns for trans people, since they are much more likely to have trauma around that. They/them is cool for someone with unknown pronouns but it’s best to politely ask as soon as possible and begin to use the preferred ones.

wolverine876 5y ago
OT: I use they/their by default, unless I know otherwise, but what to do with other common gendered terms such as Mr./Ms./Mrs, Sir/Madam/Ma'am/Miss? These aren't avoidable problems: e.g., in the greeting for a business letter ('Dear ...'), or when getting the attention of a member of restaurant waitstaff whose name I don't know, etc. Someone needs to come up with a plausible set of gender-neutral terms. They/their/them works for she/hers/her/he/his/him circumstances, but the needs are broader than that.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Mostly I’ve just stopped using gendered terms. In a business letter even if the person is not trans you can’t assume Mr/Mrs/Ms unless you know. If their name is gender neutral or ambiguous I would say “Dear First Last,” though that’s even US/western-centric as not all cultures do it that way. If it’s a really important business letter you should probably find out the persons gender using some other channel. Also if the person has a title like Dr or Professor you can use that. Some people use Mx as a gender neutral but I don’t think that would fly with a more conservative minded person.
  - wolverine876 5y ago

Laremere 5y ago

Just noticed this. I'm puzzled why my comment attracted downvotes. I typically lean towards gender neutral terms in my speech, but this actually wasn't one of those cases. I had originally used "his", but noticed it resulted in he/him/his referring to two different people. "Destin has also peaked [...], as he interviewed Obama during their presidency." vs "Destin has also peaked [...], as he interviewed Obama during his presidency." Obviously, Obama was president and Destin wasn't, but the sentence still reads more weirdly with the grammatical implication that Destin was president.