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> "Joseph, James, and Joe were in the store. They punched James and could feel the crunching of teeth against their fist." I don't find this confusing in this

> "Joseph, James, and Joe were in the store. They punched James and could feel the crunching of teeth against their fist." I don't find this confusing in this context because, presumably, you know only one of those three use they/them pronouns (probably joe, because I called james and joseph men earlier), and only one fist is being used. Maybe I'm weird but I immediately knew from chapter 1 that Dex was a they/them. Like page 1. Here's an excerpt from the beginning: https://www.tor.com/2021/06/22/excerpts-becky-chambers-a-psalm-for-the-wild-built/ https://www.tor.com/2021/06/22/excerpts-becky-chambers-a-psa... Dex couldn’t pinpoint where the affinity had come from. [...]They’d never lived anywhere with cricket song, yet once they registered its absence in the City’s soundscape, it couldn’t be ignored. They noted it while they tended the Meadow Den Monastery’s rooftop garden, as was their vocation. [...] Oh, there were plenty of bugs—butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. They were city bugs and therefore, by Dex’s estimation, inadequate. This paragraph uses 'they' to refer to Dex, and also 'they' to refer to insects. But it's very clear to me that the first several "they" refers to Dex, because Dex is the only subject before this. The sole "they" that doesn't refer to Dex explicitly uses "Dex" separately, so you know there isn't ambiguity there. Genuinely asking... what's confusing about this? Chambers is using literally what people use when there's more than one guy in a scene- one pronoun usually referring to the subject just spoken about, and if two subjects exist with the same pronoun then the most recently spoken subject gets the pronoun and the other is explicitly named. Later on... “Okay,” Sister Mara said, for her duties as Keeper were simply to oversee, not to dictate. [...] If Sister Mara knew what was up with the monks under their shared roof, her job was satisfied. “Do you want an apprenticeship?” “No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.” The "they" that doesn't refer to Dex is literally called a shared roof. It obviously doesn't refer to Dex as an individual. This isn't ambiguous.

stevenAthompson 3y ago
I actually find your second example confusing and ambiguous. >“No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.” Who is the "they" here? Remember that we haven't been told that Dex is a genderless person yet. Which means "they" probably means more than one person. My first guess would be that he and Sister Mara had studied together in the past. Other guesses, some of which I entertained while reading the book, would be that Dex is either reminiscing about the people they went to school with, has multiple personality disorder, is part of a hive mind, or the author is just bad at the English language. They idea that Dex is genderless and using "they" to deal with that didn't even occur to me until much later. Did you know that "you" used to only be used in plural? I imagine the transition period to singular/plural was also confusing to readers.
- KittenInABox 3y ago
  > Who is the "they" here? Remember that we haven't been told that Dex is a genderless person yet. Which means "they" probably means more than one person. Dex's relationship with gender is unambiguous-- before that sentence are multiple paragraphs where Dex is referred to exclusively with "they" and "they" refers only to Dex. We don't need to be told Sister Mara is a woman, she is just called she. This is an unreasonable standard that doesn't apply to any other pronoun. > They idea that Dex is genderless and using "they" to deal with that didn't even occur to me until much later. I can even tell this "they" you use in the beginning is a typo or something due to the grammatical structure of the sentence. Are you sure the writer's mastery of English is the problem, here? Or maybe you're just personally unfamiliar with third person singular pronouns, and fall under the category of another commenter who admitted that their first experience with "she" protagonists felt different? (btw, is it ambiguous which "they" is being referred to there?)
  - stevenAthompson 3y ago
    > >“No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.” Does the "they'd" in the above sentence mean Dex, or the plural of Sister Mara and Dex, or some other grouping of x + Dex? Normally it would mean a group, but in this case we can no longer be certain since Dex alone is considered a "They". As far as I can tell there is literally no way to determine that without asking the author directly. As I said above, it could just be me. I'm not an English professor, and don't claim to be. The extra "y" was a typo.
    - KittenInABox 3y ago
      >Does the "they'd" in the above sentence mean Dex, or the plural of Sister Mara and Dex, or some other grouping of x + Dex? It very clearly refers to Dex, because Dex is the subject of the sentence prior and there's no indication of a shared experience. It literally follows that Dex is denying something, and the sentence follows the structure of the very same denial ("X, but Y"). It's really not ambiguous at all. If it was ambiguous to refer to Dex as "they" there because "they" can refer to multiple people, you must hate if this scene had Dex use "she" when Sister Mara exists in the same conversation. This short story starts with two women: https://www.tor.com/2023/12/13/the-sound-of-reindeer-lyndsie-manusos/ https://www.tor.com/2023/12/13/the-sound-of-reindeer-lyndsie... The first thing Ada Cirillo noticed on the way to her girlfriend’s family’s Christmas Eve party was the way Lil looked out the window. Usually Lil was the talkative type, the beak that broke through Ada’s shell and hurled her out to experience the world. But as they drove through the limestone-blasted roadways of Missouri toward Saint Charles, where Lil’s parents resided, Lil was quiet. Distant. She didn’t rest her hand on Ada’s knee as Ada drove through the light crust of snow on the highway. Instead, both hands knotted together in her lap. It's the exact same techniques that Becky Chambers is using here. Or do you just genuinely have difficulty with pronouns as a grammatical concept?

stevenAthompson 3y ago

I actually find your second example confusing and ambiguous. >“No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.” Who is the "they" here? Remember that we haven't been told that Dex is a genderless person yet. Which means "they" probably means more than one person. My first guess would be that he and Sister Mara had studied together in the past. Other guesses, some of which I entertained while reading the book, would be that Dex is either reminiscing about the people they went to school with, has multiple personality disorder, is part of a hive mind, or the author is just bad at the English language. They idea that Dex is genderless and using "they" to deal with that didn't even occur to me until much later. Did you know that "you" used to only be used in plural? I imagine the transition period to singular/plural was also confusing to readers.

KittenInABox 3y ago
> Who is the "they" here? Remember that we haven't been told that Dex is a genderless person yet. Which means "they" probably means more than one person. Dex's relationship with gender is unambiguous-- before that sentence are multiple paragraphs where Dex is referred to exclusively with "they" and "they" refers only to Dex. We don't need to be told Sister Mara is a woman, she is just called she. This is an unreasonable standard that doesn't apply to any other pronoun. > They idea that Dex is genderless and using "they" to deal with that didn't even occur to me until much later. I can even tell this "they" you use in the beginning is a typo or something due to the grammatical structure of the sentence. Are you sure the writer's mastery of English is the problem, here? Or maybe you're just personally unfamiliar with third person singular pronouns, and fall under the category of another commenter who admitted that their first experience with "she" protagonists felt different? (btw, is it ambiguous which "they" is being referred to there?)
- stevenAthompson 3y ago
  > >“No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.” Does the "they'd" in the above sentence mean Dex, or the plural of Sister Mara and Dex, or some other grouping of x + Dex? Normally it would mean a group, but in this case we can no longer be certain since Dex alone is considered a "They". As far as I can tell there is literally no way to determine that without asking the author directly. As I said above, it could just be me. I'm not an English professor, and don't claim to be. The extra "y" was a typo.
  - KittenInABox 3y ago
    >Does the "they'd" in the above sentence mean Dex, or the plural of Sister Mara and Dex, or some other grouping of x + Dex? It very clearly refers to Dex, because Dex is the subject of the sentence prior and there's no indication of a shared experience. It literally follows that Dex is denying something, and the sentence follows the structure of the very same denial ("X, but Y"). It's really not ambiguous at all. If it was ambiguous to refer to Dex as "they" there because "they" can refer to multiple people, you must hate if this scene had Dex use "she" when Sister Mara exists in the same conversation. This short story starts with two women: https://www.tor.com/2023/12/13/the-sound-of-reindeer-lyndsie-manusos/ https://www.tor.com/2023/12/13/the-sound-of-reindeer-lyndsie... The first thing Ada Cirillo noticed on the way to her girlfriend’s family’s Christmas Eve party was the way Lil looked out the window. Usually Lil was the talkative type, the beak that broke through Ada’s shell and hurled her out to experience the world. But as they drove through the limestone-blasted roadways of Missouri toward Saint Charles, where Lil’s parents resided, Lil was quiet. Distant. She didn’t rest her hand on Ada’s knee as Ada drove through the light crust of snow on the highway. Instead, both hands knotted together in her lap. It's the exact same techniques that Becky Chambers is using here. Or do you just genuinely have difficulty with pronouns as a grammatical concept?