← Back to context

Comment by pona-a

9 hours ago

I don't know about others, but yes I'm entirely fine with people using singular they on me. My native language doesn't have an animate gender-neutral pronoun and I like how English gives me the option to actually be more gender-inclusive without an unnatural "he/she" construct.

If another cis man was suddenly uncomfortable with "they", I'd attribute that to some fragile sense of masculinity or a weird anti-woke crusade, as was the case with most such cases in my life, and find it personally annoying.

I don't want to deliberately make other people uncomfortable with my language, but it does feel exhausting to second-guess yourself, having to double-check if any innocuous phrase might be misinterpreted as an underhanded aggression, preempting a correction we know will be awkward for both sides.

I think we'd do better to consider context more than the specific language...