6 ms·
She :)
by sequin 1y ago
She :)
- lukas099 1y agoAm I crazy, or does the article seem to go out of its way to avoid using any pronouns for Tang?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- luckydata 1y agomaybe they don't know the gender and playing it like at parties when you don't remember someone's boyfriend name.
- adammarples 1y agoNo because several times they directly quote people talking about Tang and editorialize the quote to use [Tang] where a pronoun would have been.
- jjgreen 1y agoI used to know a chap called Colin who's dog was called John, or was it the other way around? I could never remember so never used their name. Would have been easier if the dog was called Fido.
- quantummagic 1y agoIt's a gender superposition, don't collapse the wave.
- ameliaquining 1y agoIIUC at the time this article was written Tang was mid-gender-transition and consequently kind of cagey about what pronouns should be used for her. She now goes by she/her.
- neilv 1y agoWe shouldn't be using gendered pronouns anyway. In very few circumstances is gender relevant. And even when it is relevant, we don't need to bake it into every other sentence, like people should be treated differently based on their gender. If we baked social caste or race into how we referred to people, on the pronoun level, in every other sentence, it would obviously be ridiculous and terrible. So let's stop doing it for gender.
- ameliaquining 1y agoI agree with you but changing the basic grammatical rules of a language is a difficult coordination problem and you can't just do it by posting that it would be good.
- yowzadave 1y agoThere's an interesting series of fantasy novels by the author Graydon Saunders, occasionally recommended on this website, that almost entirely avoids the use of pronouns: https://www.goodreads.com/series/242525-commonweal https://www.goodreads.com/series/242525-commonweal . The avoidance of pronouns is a stylistic choice, but not a didactic one—you might not even realize it until you're a third of the way through the book and you start questioning whether a character you'd imagined as male or female might actually be a different gender, or not gendered at all. It's interesting to see how the author achieves this in dense but readable prose, without drawing attention to it.
- kybernetikos 1y agoAncillary Justice is told from the point of view of a character of a culture that doesn't draw the distinction in language. It is occasionally remarked on, but generally from the point of view of the main character being always a bit paranoid that they'll cause offense by not referring to characters of other cultures and languages correctly.
- ninalanyon 1y agoWhich grammatical rule is that? Singular they has been used in English for over four centuries. Using they instead of he or she does not break any rules.
- LearnYouALisp 1y ago[flagged]
- Faaak 1y agoWhat if their DNA is XXY? He/she is not about nature, it's about how you feel
- cally_cacti 1y ago[dead]
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoHave you ever checked your DNA? I actually haven't checked mine. I wonder what I am? How will I ever know?
- spauldo 1y agoOr you can not be a jerk and just refer to people the way they want you to refer to them. I ask people to use the shortened version of my first name and no one seems to have a problem with that.
- dang 1y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html