Pronouns are Annoying
22Hastings
3ymeskhout
1martinkunev
17Milan W
10mako yass
9Joseph Miller
11Dana
5eniteris
4lsusr
3brambleboy
6ymeskhout
6Michael Cohn
3localdeity
3Cole Wyeth
2Nathan Helm-Burger
4mako yass
3martinkunev
3Dacyn
3ymeskhout
3Dacyn
2ymeskhout
3Dacyn
2[anonymous]
1A. Weber
2ymeskhout
New Comment
The structure of language kind of screwed us here. Picture literally any reasonable policy for discussing each other’s religious affiliation in the workplace. Now implement that policy, but your workers speak a language where the grammar only functions if you know whether each referent is a “True” christian.
Yes, and there were areas I could've gotten into in terms of how other languages rely on pronouns. One that I am most familiar with is French and its distinction between singular and plural 'you' (tu & vous), and vous also can be singular if used formally. So if anyone is translating from French, you have to make a judgment call regarding whether each vous is plural or formal singular. Some information is inevitably lost in the transfer.
French to English you always translate as "you". You probably mean translating from English to French where you need to make a judgement whether to use "vous" or "tu".
Making up something analogous to Crocker's rules but specifically for pronouns would probably be a good thing: a voluntary commitment to surrender any pronoun preferences (gender related or otherwise) in service of communication efficiency.
Now that I think about it, a literal and expansive reading of Crocker's rules themselves includes such a surrender of the right to enforce pronoun preferences.
1Hot take: Prevalence of gender transition in male-majority fields is attempt to restore pronoun compression efficiency.
Communication efficiency is just that important.
3Anyone who harbors such an intense attachment to specific gendered pronoun preferences clearly sees it as much more than a superficial aesthetic designator.
This makes you sound like a bit of a straw vulcan imo. All I have to do is imagine how jarring and upsetting it would be to have everyone start calling me "she" and it's very obvious how, for almost all people, what pronoun others call them is deeply emotionally salient.
What would be upsetting about being called "she"? I don't share your intuition. Whenever I imagine being misgendered (or am misgendered, e.g., on a voice call with a stranger), I don't feel any strong emotional reaction. To the point that I generally will not correct them.
I could imagine it being very upsetting if I am misgendered by someone who should know me well enough not to misgender me, or if someone purposefully misgenders me. But the misgendering specifically is not the main offense in these two cases.
Perhaps myself and ymeskhout are less tied to our gender identity than most?
It is important to note that people have a wide range of attachment to their gender identity, ranging from willing to undergo extreme body modification in order to match their gender identity, to those who don't care in the slightest.
The issue is that cisgender is the default, and if you don't have a strong attachment to your gender identity, you have no reason to change the label. Hence, cisgendered people have a wide range of attachment to their gender identity, from strongly identifying with it to no attachment at all.
(There is also the group of agender, which includes those who have deeply examined their gender identity and decided that they don't really care (and probably also want to signal their examination and non-caring of gender identity))
Someone who is transgender obviously has an attachment to their gender identity, and this is obviously from which the Pronoun Discourse stems. They have a strong preference for a gender, and a preference to be referred to with the appropriate pronouns, and thus being misgendered is upsetting, as their preferences are violated.
(Of course, most of this rests on the ability to communicate the preference, and accidental violations when the preference was not communicated are less egregious than deliberate violations.)
Otherwise misgendering can be upsetting if it is tied to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and attempting an insult based off those stereotypes.
I feel complimented when people inadvertently misgender me on this website. It implies I have successfully modeled the Other.
If random strangers start calling you "she", that implies you look feminine enough to be mistaken for a woman. I think most men would prefer to look masculine for many reasons: not being mistaken for a woman, being conventionally attractive, being assumed to have a 'manly' rather than 'effeminate' personality, looking your age, etc.
If you look obviously masculine, then being misgendered constantly would just be bewildering. Surely something is signaling that you use feminine pronouns.
If it's just people online misgendering you based on your writing, then that's less weird. But I think it still would bother some people for some of the reasons above.
That's the thing, I generally present as very masculine and if anyone referred to me as 'she' I would find it more confusing than anything else. If I actually cared, maybe I'd look for what effeminate signals I gave off, but I can't imagine a scenario where I would find it offensive or get mad at the person.
I also don't think it's useful to try and learn much about pronouns qua pronouns social battles over them. Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
I don't think everyone proxies it that way -- I know there are some people who are just old-fashioned, or passionate about prescriptive grammar, or have essentialist beliefs about gender but are libertarian about others' behavior. I think that if everyone had very high confidence that someone not using the pronouns they requested meant that at worst that person mildly disapproves of them but would still actively defend their civil + legal + human rights, there would probably be a lot less of the handwringing you mention, and we'd be able to learn a lot more about the fundamental intrinsic meaning of pronouns.
Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
There's an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.
I guess refusing to use someone’s preferred pronouns is weak Bayesian evidence for wanting to have them killed, but the conclusion is so unlikely it’s probably not appropriate to raise it to the level of serious consideration.
Depends on the context. There are definitely contexts where a white man says n***** and it gives me the sense that he at least fantasizes about killing African Americans. Similar contexts do occur with trans people and certain groups of white men. If you were occasionally the target of such veiled threats, it might start becoming hard not to lump less directly threatening instances of similar-ish behavior in with the truly threatening.
You need just enough of them to distinguish subjects, but not so much that they lose their intuitive meaning. When cops are interviewing witnesses about a suspect, they’ll glom onto easily observable and distinguishing physical traits. Was the suspect a man or a woman? White or black? Tall or short?
Yeah.
Notably, basically all of the people I've known who have asked for neutral pronouns were also visibly of indeterminate gender (for instance, mid-transition), and over time their preferred/accepted pronouns always lined up with what a person would guess by looking at them.
This is generally the norm.
If you've encountered a lot of genderqueer people with non-obvious pronoun preferences, and they're pushy about them, that's probably a product of some kinda perverse selection process. In the least, whatever is causing those people to be annoying about that is not the queerness per se.
There is the possibility of misgendering somebody and them taking it seriously. Sometimes it feels like you're walking in a minefield. It's not conducive to a good social interaction.
too few pronouns, and communication becomes vague and cumbersome
I'm wondering why languages like finnish can do just fine with "hän" while english needs he/she.
John told Mark that he should administer the medication immediately because he was in critical condition, but he refused.
Wait, who is in critical condition? Which one refused? Who’s supposed to be administering the meds? And administer to whom? Impossible to answer without additional context.
I don't think the sentence is actually as ambiguous as you're saying. The first and third "he"s both have to refer to Mark, because you can only refuse to do something after being told you should do it. Only the second "he" could be either John or Mark.
No, because John could be speaking about himself administering the medication. It's also possible to refuse to do something you've already acknowledged you should do, so the 3rd he could still be John regardless of who is being told what.
No, because John could be speaking about himself administering the medication.
If it's about John administering the medication then you'd have to say "... he refused to let him".
It’s also possible to refuse to do something you’ve already acknowledged you should do, so the 3rd he could still be John regardless of who is being told what.
But the sentence did not claim John merely acknowledged that he should administer the medication, it claimed John was the originator of that statement. Is John supposed to be refusing his own requests?
The whole point of the sentence was to demonstrate how bad ambiguity can get with pronouns, and this exchange is demonstrating my point exactly. The issue might be that you're making some (very reasonable) assumptions without noticing it narrows the range of possible interpretations. The only unambiguous part of the sentence is "John told Mark", but every other he can be either John or Mark.
Edit: my apologies for any rude tone, it was not intentional. All of us necessarily make reasonable assumptions to narrow ambiguity in our day to day conversations and it can be hard to completely jettison the habit.
I don't agree that I am making unwarranted assumptions; I think what you call "assumptions" are merely observations about the meanings of words. I agree that it is hard to program an AI to determine who the "he"s refer to, but I think as a matter of fact the meanings of those words don't allow for any other possible interpretation. It's just hard to explain to an AI what the meanings of words are. Anyway I'm not sure if it is productive to argue this any further as we seem to be repeating ourselves.
1But there’s no denying that expanding the They franchise will necessarily increase ambiguity by slurring two well-worn axes of distinction (he/she & singular/plural). By no means would this be the end of the world, but it will require some compensating efforts in other areas to maintain clarity, perhaps by relying more on proper nouns and less on pronouns.
I believe the psychological perception of others by gender, and the 'defaultness' of the notion of gender in humans, cause(d) more bad than good (at least when discluding the evolutionary era). This motivated me to switch to using the non-gendering pronoun 'they' for almost[1] everyone.
I haven't found my use of 'they' by default to require nontrivial compensation to maintain clarity. Any ambiguity introduced in a draft is removed by one of the simple checks I try to run across all of my writing for others: if referent of a word (namely 'that', 'this', 'it', or 'they') is unclear : replace with direct referent word or rephrase to remove unclarity.
Also, I think this helps match the reader's interpretation to my intended meaning. Among humans, a being's 'gender' has a lot of connotative meaning. I think not introducing those connotations is instrumental to eliminating unintended ways my text could be interpreted, which in my experience is the real difficulty with writing.
- ^
excepting beings who this would harm
and excepting some contexts where I expect some readers might be confused by singular they
Do you also believe we should revert "you" to "thou," "you," and "ye?" Because "you" has the exact same problem (gender-neutral, used for both singular and plural cases), but most people seem to struggle through it just fine. (inb4 "y'all" or "yinz," which are acceptable in their respective dialects but don't seem to be making progress in universal usage).
I didn't take a position on what balance between convenience vs ambiguity we should strike, it's always context-dependent. That said, second-person pronouns like "you" tend to be significantly less ambiguous than third-person pronouns. Because you generally know who is talking to you directly (see what I did there?) whereas "they" can potentially refer to anyone in the world.
