Comment by int_19h
5 days ago
The weirdest thing that I've run into wrt pronouns is when people object to the use of gender-neutral pronouns as "misgendering" - e.g. a person insists that you must not use "they" to refer to them but rather their preferred gendered pronoun, and if you don't, then that is "erasing their identity".
The argument that's usually made for this is that if someone's referred to as "they" while other people around them are "he" or "she", this makes them feel excluded etc. But if so, then using "they" uniformly would have been acceptable, and yet the same people insist that it is not.
Doug Hofstader in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas has a good essay on non-sexist language crica 1980 and how there was a very good case that English needed a gender-indeterminant pronoun for routine use where you did not know (or care) what the gender of a person who, say, was subject to a contract, was.
Even though there was a precisionist case for it, people interested in language reform thought it was a complete non-starter and instead focused on other sorts of reforms.
Then 10 years ago thoughtless people who thought it was OK to mislabel people with terms like "latinx" and "cisgender" suddenly thought they could engineer language (which we share) without anyone's consent and in a culture of bad faith of course you get some jackass like Musk say his pronouns are "prosecute/Fauci" because it is all in bad faith.