The Great Pronoun Debate

“My pronouns are he/his, she/her, and they/them”

I often wonder how other languages handle trans pronouns. Unfortunately I don’t speak any others well enough to appreciate the nuances.

Every single post you’ve made in this thread has either been empirically false or morally repugnant. Glad you kept the streak going!

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If your sister is a cis-female who goes by she, “they are coming over” is not a correct way to say “she is coming over.” It’s not my fault you don’t know how to speak English and apparently hang out with others who have the same problem.

Empirically false. Try again.

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I’m pretty bad at linguistics so not sure what’s the correct way to phrase it, but in hebrew just saying “I’m going” will be different if you’re a male or a female. So once you add non-binary, it’s a big mess.

A couple years ago there was a change from using ‘/’ when referencing both genders to using ‘.’

I’m struggling to explain this properly in English, but Hebrew is just awful because the standard is to refer to everything as masculine.
The current leader of the Labor Party is a female who is ‘notorious’ for using feminine conjugation (maybe? not sure that’s the right word) when speaking. It drives people insane, which I find funny.

Just say they are coming over. An example makes this obvious: “Oh Quantgamble? Yeah they are coming over later.” The alternative they is sounds clearly wrong.

I was going to launch into a paragraph about how this has been around for centuries but it’s long and boring and you may as well just look at the wiki. Your particular form of baffled pedantry on this topic has been around since the 18th century, unfortunately the usage you can’t stand was around for hundreds of years before that.

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I think the reason why they works here is, that it is not known (with certainty) if QuantGamble is male or female. QuantGamble is anonymous.

If it was someone that all parties knew in person was cis-male, then “Yeah, he is coming over later” sounds much better to me.

I get the visceral reaction to Quant’s B.S. but your attacks on first principles and using arguments to adjudicate moral dilemmas is really weird, especially given your use of a first principle a few posts later!

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Yes.

Chaver means friend. Chaverim means male friends, Chaverot means female friends, but in Hebrew when speaking to a large mixed group, the standard is to use “Chaverim” (aka - the male suffix).

I’ve seen a lot of male gays use female suffixes regularly, but what Merav Michaeli does is use female suffixes when addressing multiple people. The effect it has is truly remarkable. People lose their shit over it.

I have literally never heard any of the things in that מגדרחב table. It will be interesting if it catches on in any capacity. It requires a complete change of the language.

Edit - I missed the question you asked.
Literally מגדרחב means wide gender (well they made a single word out of combining those two words, it doesn’t actually exists yet). “Talmide” is a made up word that i guess suppose to include both Talmid (male student) and Talmida (female studnet) and everything in between. It’s not actually being used anywhere and I’ve never heard of it until now.

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It’s not just Hebrew. It’s pretty much every language I can think of where this issue comes up. For example, in French or Spanish, if you have a group of 1 billion women and 1 man, you use the masculine.

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Language is a tool that we adapt to our purposes. The “rules” of language are social conventions. There is no E=MC2 of language grammar. Changing our language conventions is part of how language usage evolves and adapts to human culture and society’s desire to explain, share, and communicate.

Right now, other posters are explaining how English language conventions are evolving in a way to be more inclusive to trans or non-binary people. Similar changes have happened in the past as our language conforms to our mutual desire to be anti-racist, or feminist, etc.

As this evolution takes place people can insist that the old conventions of the language that were part of creating and maintaining hetero-normative supremacy and non-inclusive spaces are akin to laws of physics which can not be broken. We can choose to continue using language in a way that perpetuates a hetero-normative society, or we can choose not to. E’rybody got choices.

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This is all true, but it’s not what Quant is talking about.

He’s referring to a very specific example in which we have stripped away all of the inclusion issues.

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How does one pronounce iel?

The one pronoun thing I’ve seen that I don’t get is “she/her/hers”. Like, isn’t hers implied by she/her? Does anyone only use “them” only when it’s possessive? My trans kid agrees, but points out that there are no rules, so.

In tagalog (main language in the Philippines) all pronouns are gender neutral. Ive often wondered if this contributes to the higher number of out trans folks…

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Maybe we are talking across each other.

I think talking to people about people stuff, which tends to be somewhat subjective and context driven, is very important.

If you think that is a first principle, great. Perhaps youre right.

It is however far from the particular kind of insular, smart but dumb, “logic” that QG seems oddly proud of.

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The only advantage I see to “she/her” over “she” is that a naked “she” may be interpreted as a typo or a sentence that got started but never finished. “She/her” is a pretty short nomenclature that is unambiguously “These are my pronouns.”

Can’t wait for grade school kids to figure out ways to use “they” as an insult.

I’m not a grammar expert, but I think deep down in the grammar there are more “forms” of the pronouns than we usually think of.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT YOU GO BY A SET OF PRONOUNS I’VE NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE?

It means that if you refer to me using a pronoun instead of my name that you can use the pronouns from the set of pronouns I provided. Although you might have been given an abbreviated pronouns set (e.g. “ze/zir” or “he/him” or “they” or “ey/em/eirs”), every set of third person pronouns in English has five forms (though sometimes certain forms are the same). So, for example, he/him pronouns refers to he/him/his/his/himself as the five forms. Ey/em/eirs might actually refer to ey/em/eir/eirs/eirself as the five forms.

I’m not holding this site up as the ultimate authoritative source, but it seems at least helpful.