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It's never been clear to me how he/she/they would be insufficient. We don't use separate pronouns for other categories of being. That said, if I knew somebody personally who preferred xir (or whatever), I'd make it work, because it's not a big deal, even if I privately don't get it. No loss for me, some satisfaction for you, whoop de doo. Life's too short to make people unhappy through unnecessary arguments. Now, if in my daily life I was bombarded by more than a few different new pronoun sets, I'd might be irritated, but that has never happened to me, nor do I expect it to, so who cares. Like, has anybody been accosted IRL by a cacophony of novel pronouns?
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Mar 29, 2016 19:54
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Cingulate posted:Inverse the situation and it makes more sense. It's not that special pronouns are somehow good and clear and obviously meaningful and well justified; it's that misgendering is oppression, and we should try and not do it. ...right, but "they" already covers that which is outside of he/she. Indeed, the idea that people only got he or she was because of a mindset in which gender is fixed, fundamental, and binary. "They" covers everybody. Some languages lack any gendered pronouns...must they introduce new, gendered pronouns? Either way, in person, I'm happy to accommodate others' needs. I don't need to study Islam in depth to not offer a Muslim pork.
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Mar 29, 2016 20:26
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Commie NedFlanders posted:So if you cooked a meal with pork and a Muslim guest showed up and rejected it, I suppose you would be understanding even if you are not a Muslim or an Islamic scholar yourself? I would be utterly unsurprised that a Muslim would not eat pork. I'd be pretty mortified if this person was my guest, but I had no acceptable food for them. I would apologize and produce something else. As to the second set of questions, that can take us into hinkier territory. People need to be able to define themselves. If someone says that they're a she, then they're a she. If somebody I knew said that they were a xie, then I'd accept that, and I would work with that. Life is too short to give people a hard time. However, pronoun usage is nonetheless a different concern on some levels. "He" and "she" come from a worldview in which sex and gender are not only the same, but also fixed and innate. However, if gender is indeed socially constructed and non-binary and fluid and so on, which is a sentiment I more or less agree with, then why would each gender need its own pronoun at all? If gender is not fixed and innate, then it's just another quality people possess. In English, we don't use different pronouns for members of different races, or adherents of different religions. Instead, we have "he", "she", and "they", plus "it" for inanimate objects. "They" is already in place as a gender-neutral pronoun. It is not a gender unto itself. That's somewhat similar to where I was going with my earlier question of, "some languages lack any gendered pronouns at all...must they adopt them?" Nobody's answered that one yet. And to clarify, in the real world, I'd be happy to use somebody's preferred pronouns. I'm talking about this topic in this way because this is a thread on the internet designated for that. In the real world, I'm not interested in bogging down anyone's day, let alone my own, in some grand interrogation of others' identities. Life is way too short to make other people feel bad for no good reason, let alone to waste their time.
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Mar 29, 2016 22:39
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Law school was fun. I was actually about to bring up how one of my mentors back in law school was a hardcore Catholic of the old school - socially ultraconservative, economically basically distributist. One of his other mentees was (and is) a big LGBT rights activist. He was proud of her, even though he disagreed with much of what she stood for, and vice versa. People are complicated. Doesn't mean you have to accept every bigot, but it does mean that individual situations and relationships are often complex. Proust's famous madelines cause the narrator to launch into a huge, long story. Kinda the opposite of simply spacing out? Either way, leading questions are allowed on cross-examination, honk honk.
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Mar 29, 2016 23:16
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(spreads cheeks to fart, but only THE LAW comes out)
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Mar 29, 2016 23:19
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