← Back to context

Comment by kepler1

5 years ago

The site is the work of a guy, "him", and "his" work. We don't have to guess and say "them" and "their" work.

72 comments

kepler1

Reply
franga2000  5 years ago

But it's way less effort than checking, isn't it? The name in the footer isn't English, so it's hard to know from that and there's no about page that I could find. The Twitter profile makes it more obvious, but I only clicked on it to check because of your comment. Why bother??

  • h_spacer  5 years ago

    Slav surnames are gendered. * ski is male, * ska is female, * sko is neutral. Using gender neutral in this case is as insulting as calling him a dog.

    Other cases where using gender neutral pronouns insults everyone speaking the language is using Latinx for Latino. If you want to butcher every other languages genders like they are in English, use Latin instead - the gender neutral form of Latino in English since only the middle ages.

    Hope this helps.

    • franga2000  5 years ago

      I'm from Slovenia and this is bullshit. Maybe it holds true in a couple of Slavic languages, but I'm familiar with a handful of them and this isn't a thing in any of those.

      Regarding the "insulting" part, you're probably mistranating it. What would be insulting in many Slavic languages is using the "middle grammatical gender" (rough literal translation) which is equivalent to using "it" to refer to a person in English. If you insist on translating literally, using third person gender neutral (in Slovene and many Slavic languages) is actually a sign of respect and is how talks to their superiors (antiquated in 3rd person, but still the norm in 2nd).

      Not that it matters anyways, as we're all talking in English and thus English grammar is the only one that matters. Even if you know for a fact all parties in the conversation speak the other language, if you're using English, the rules of the other language don't matter.

      P.S. Re: Latinx: yeah, that's stupid and I'd see it as mildly offensive if directed at me, but that is neither a pronoun nor common practice, so is entirely irrelevant here

    • antonfire  5 years ago

      > Using gender neutral in this case is as insulting as calling him a dog.

      In English? No it isn't. You are the one who is "butchering" a language's pronouns by improperly mapping considerations into it from another language here, not vice versa.

      I have a Slavic last name, and I speak English fluently and Russian not-so-fluently-anymore.

      If you use "оно" to refer to me in Russian because you don't know my gender, it would sound weird to me. (I haven't been to any Russian-speaking countries in a while, but I suspect there hasn't been a shift in Russian to use that pronoun that way while I've been gone.) I personally wouldn't be insulted, but I can easily imagine how somebody might; it would carry a subtext of referring to me as an inanimate object.

      If you use "they" to refer to me in English because you don't know my gender, it would not sound weird to me at all. (Though it might have 5-10 years ago, for different reasons.) A much closer (but still imperfect) analogy to using "оно" to refer to me in Russian would be using "it" to refer to me in English, which would sound weird to me.

      Hope that helps.

      4 replies →

Kye  5 years ago

I don't see mention of pronouns anywhere. Usually when people don't list pronouns or hints it's because they haven't thought about it or don't care. Without any comment from him, you have no place telling others how to refer to him.

I'm going by the photo on his Twitter account, but it's as valid a guess as any other. If you went by how I look or by my legal name, you would be wrong, and I would be annoyed at someone on a website chastising others for not using what they assumed was correct.

echelon  5 years ago

> The site is the work of a guy, "him", and "his" work. We don't have to guess and say "them" and "their" work.

Assumptions are presumptuous and harmful. Everyone is a they/them until otherwise stated. These are extremely useful pronouns.

You're a they/them.

Calm down. You seem to be overly attached to regressive labels. I don't know what drives this in you, but the universe is burning and people just want to be happy. Your life is short; you're going to die and rot away. Is this really something to get worked up over?

In the future, when our descendants are all uploaded to computers or replaced by an AI overlord, people will be all sorts of genders. They won't be bound by yesterday's norms. Would you be a stuffy gender policeperson, or will you just let people be who they are?

  • kepler1  5 years ago

    I'll share something with you.

    The level of consideration you have for people who are no more than 1% of the population is admirable. Very admirable, in comparison with the actual large problems that I'm sure you pay 0% attention to each day, and do make assumptions about. So very admirable that you go out of your way to bring this to the level of everyone having to select a pronoun in their dropdown menu because you feel morally superior for doing this.

    Extremely useful. I'm sure you live among people who are 50% transgendered and cannot tell the difference between an man and woman with every person you come across.

    Is it any wonder that most of the country feels you and such people are out of touch with the needs of the world, and vote in a backlash against you?

    • antonfire  5 years ago

      You're literally complaining about having more dropdown menus in your life like it's a big deal. Not a good place to "you're out of touch with the needs of the world" from.

      While it's true that pronoun usage in English is a relatively unimportant problem compared to lots of other existing problems in the world, it's worth noting that the person who seems to be the most emotionally invested in that problem here is you. You might accurately feel that using "they/them" this way is forced on you in other situations, but that's not what happened here. In this conversation, you observed "them" being used that way; you didn't get told that you have a moral or ethical obligation to use it that way. That a pretty important distinction.

      You're the one that's being high and mighty and trying to impose a standard on somebody else's use of language here, not vice versa.

      Also, until just now, the "1% of the population" that you are talking about (which I presume is trans people) wasn't even directly relevant. You're right that part of the cultural shift towards greater use of gender-neutral pronouns is socially driven by trying to make trans people's lives easier, but you could easily have the more or less the same conversation and not have trans people in mind at all. That shift is also socially driven by just trying to leave gender out of the picture when it's irrelevant. That's an aspiration that one might reasonably have even if one doesn't give a shit about trans people.

      The thing you're upset about in the first place wasn't a case of someone using "them" because it was a preferred pronoun or whatever. It was case of using "them" as a gender neutral singular second-person pronoun because they didn't bother to do the legwork to work out the gender of the person they were referring to.

    • echelon  5 years ago

      You're lashing out in anger. Calm yourself.

      It seems like you dislike trans folk. I'm not sure what they did to hurt you, but I suspect your fears and hate are the result of conditioning.

      What harm is it to use singular "they"?

      It avoids assumptions. It also avoids sexism. Do you want a world where all contributions are assumed to come from men?

      You've got a lot of fear and anger. Reflect on it. Let it go.

      I don't know if you're a Christian, but even if you aren't, remember that Jesus said to love one another first. It's one of the most important messages for the world. Love, not hate and fear.

      23 replies →

  • throwaway98797  5 years ago

    “They” is historically understood to be plural. Some information fidelity is lost if “they” can mean multiple people and a person.

    Language is hard, so I understand the need for compromise. “Zee” could be used to avoid gender centric labeling while maintaining language clarity.