3 ms·

Sorry, if someone doesn't like being called "she", and you really want to call that person "she" -- that's on you. You have other choices, after all.

by mlyle 4y ago

lmm 4y ago
My other choice is to lie, to willfully mislead whoever I'm talking to (probably a friend). Again, people might not like being called rich or privileged or out of touch, but we would never dream of saying this means you shouldn't call them that.
- mlyle 4y ago
  No-- most people understand how pronouns work now (and the rest are rapidly coming up to speed). It's only people who are deliberately insistent on misunderstanding that are mislead. Just like the people mislead by 'decimate'.
  - lmm 4y ago
    No, absent other context everyone will understand female to mean having typical female characteristics, almost by definition. Calling someone who is unlike a female in most ways "she" is deceptive even if you consider it "correct", in the same way as making a tomato dish and calling it a fruit salad.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > No, absent other context everyone will understand female to mean having typical female characteristics, almost by definition. As we've talked about a whole bunch in this thread, language can-- and does-- evolve. The pronoun thing isn't fixed within extant human cultures. Our language can evolve as mores do. And, yes, people are occasionally confused by various kinds of new usage, but overall people keep up.
      - lmm 4y ago
        There's no "keeping up" with an unnatural category. It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place.
        mlyle 4y ago
        > It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place. If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place".
        lmm 4y ago
        > If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place". What languages and cultures would those be? (The example usually given is "two spirit", but (as has been more widely reported recently) that was largely a fabrication)
        mlyle 4y ago
        Lots of languages have complete gender neutrality in pronouns. They often include arbitrarily or self-assigned signifiers or honorifics, which isn't too far from the direction we seem to be evolving towards. E.g. Kurdish, the Turkic languages, Tagalog (although Spanish influences have caused some appearance of -a and -o suffixes), Armenian, Estonian, etc. Some languages assign gender to everything grammatically. English is a rare case of a language without very little grammatical gender except personal pronouns. The only other language that I know of with this characteristic is Persian. Singular "they" dates back to middle English.
        4y ago

Sorry, if someone doesn't like being called "she", and you really want to call that person "she" -- that's on you. You have other choices, after all.

by mlyle 4y ago

Sorry, if someone doesn't like being called "she", and you really want to call that person "she" -- that's on you. You have other choices, after all.

lmm 4y ago

My other choice is to lie, to willfully mislead whoever I'm talking to (probably a friend). Again, people might not like being called rich or privileged or out of touch, but we would never dream of saying this means you shouldn't call them that.

mlyle 4y ago
No-- most people understand how pronouns work now (and the rest are rapidly coming up to speed). It's only people who are deliberately insistent on misunderstanding that are mislead. Just like the people mislead by 'decimate'.
- lmm 4y ago
  No, absent other context everyone will understand female to mean having typical female characteristics, almost by definition. Calling someone who is unlike a female in most ways "she" is deceptive even if you consider it "correct", in the same way as making a tomato dish and calling it a fruit salad.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > No, absent other context everyone will understand female to mean having typical female characteristics, almost by definition. As we've talked about a whole bunch in this thread, language can-- and does-- evolve. The pronoun thing isn't fixed within extant human cultures. Our language can evolve as mores do. And, yes, people are occasionally confused by various kinds of new usage, but overall people keep up.
    - lmm 4y ago
      There's no "keeping up" with an unnatural category. It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        > It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place. If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place".
        lmm 4y ago
        > If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place". What languages and cultures would those be? (The example usually given is "two spirit", but (as has been more widely reported recently) that was largely a fabrication)
        mlyle 4y ago
        Lots of languages have complete gender neutrality in pronouns. They often include arbitrarily or self-assigned signifiers or honorifics, which isn't too far from the direction we seem to be evolving towards. E.g. Kurdish, the Turkic languages, Tagalog (although Spanish influences have caused some appearance of -a and -o suffixes), Armenian, Estonian, etc. Some languages assign gender to everything grammatically. English is a rare case of a language without very little grammatical gender except personal pronouns. The only other language that I know of with this characteristic is Persian. Singular "they" dates back to middle English.
        4y ago