Pronoun ownership
“When someone tells you their pronouns, the only option is to use it.”
Wrong! There are other options. One option is to step away and talk to different people. Another is to say no. Another is to leave the scene altogether. Another is to say “I have no plans ever to refer to you for any reason so I have zero need to know what ‘your’ pronouns are, child.” Another is to say “I didn’t ask and I don’t care.” That’s only the beginning – there are many woundingly indifferent things one can say in reply to such a stupid thing as “telling” someone what “your” pronouns are.
“Mandatory”? Who’s enforcing them?
Oh right. Many states…
States? I don’t think so. This is just some arrogant child trying to tell us they’re mandatory.
“Kneel before your Queen, you,” said the elf. She was wearing red, with a copper crown in her hair.
“Shan’.t Won’t,” said Granny Weatherwax.
“You are in my kingdom, woman,” said the Queen. “You do not come or go without the leave of me. You will kneel!”
“I come and go without the leave of anyone,” said Granny Weatherwax. “Never done it before, ain’t starting now.”
https://fairygodboss.com/career-topics/new-york-pronoun-law
Maybe that’s not “many” states, but it’s one where I’ve lived about 90% of my life.
Ugghh.
That’s employers and “covered entities,” whatever they are, not people at large. But still – ugghhhhhh.
It’s a little more complicated than that.
It’s NYC, not the state, and it’s guidance on interpretation, not the law itself.
It’s still idiotic and unreasonable though.
Thanks!
Yes, it’s idiotic to legislate (even if in the guidance on interpretation, not the words of the law) that if I happily hire you, pay you the same as my other workers, and give you the same benefits, but insist on referring to you (in the third person!!) as “he” rather than “she”, or as “she” rather than “x0xir”, that that constitutes “discrimination”.
Unless of course you actually are a woman. A male boss or supervisor referring to a woman as “he” could easily be bullying, and the same goes for calling a man “she.” It’s a kind of bullying we’re all familiar with, I would guess – telling people they don’t follow the gender rules correctly.
But using the literal pronouns that accord with the literal sex? Not the same thing, not the same kind of thing.
Hmmm. You’re right. But since this is so, that does complicate things, because it raises the question “Can it ever be bullying to tell the truth?” And the answer is definitely: “Yes, sometimes it can be bullying to tell the truth.”
It could definitely be bullying to say: “Stacy’s a woman!”
e.g.
BOSS: These folders belong on the red table.
EMPLOYEE: But Stacy said that they belong on the blue table.
BOSS: But Stacy’s a woman. Don’t listen to her.
But here we’re not even saying “Stacy’s a woman.” We’re just saying, simply: “Stacy left her computer here.” trying to use the English language without having to say “Stacy left Stacy’s computer here.” So this can’t really be construed as harrassment, I’d think.
“If you don’t know someone’s pronouns … use no pronouns?”
Ever? How would that work?
“It is not the job of the trans/non gender-conforming folks in your life to teach you,” taught the officious, preachy, hectoring child who was recklessly blending together people who absolutely MUST conform to their gender with people who DON’T conform to their gender as if they were obviously the exact same group.
GW @ 11 – Oh it can easily be bullying to tell the truth. Horribly easy. Telling ugly people they’re ugly, that kind of thing. I once did that (when I was a child) about a guy’s ugly necktie, and my mother whispered furiously “He heard you” and I wanted to stab myself. Taught me a damn lesson, I hope.
GW:
This is another instance where common wisdom regarding the function of pronouns is, um, unwise. We can’t simply replace pronouns with their referents. Why? Because the act of using different words is how English indicates multiple matches. When I read, “Stacy left Stacy’s computer here,” my intuition is that there are two women named Stacy. And if we can simply substitute given name for pronoun, we can substitute another valid name, such as her surname. “Stacy left Jenkins’s computer here,” really suggests that Jenkins is a different person. Perhaps a non-name? “Stacy left the woman’s computer here.” Even if Stacy is the only woman for miles around, the statement refuses to read as referring to one person.
Most jarring is when the pronoun in question is reflexive, as the only way to indicate reflexivity in English is via pronoun. Not using a reflexive pronoun signals to the listener or reader that the utterance is not to be interpreted reflexively. “Stacy caught Stacy before pointing to Stacy,” syntactically demands that “Stacy” be understood to refer to at least two different people. Of course, it gets worse as, “Stacy caught Jenkins before pointing to the woman.”
I distinctly recall someone saying that using non gendered language or no pronouns at all is verboten because it means you aren’t sincere. Now this one gives us permission to do so.
It’s not the job of the transgender or non binary person to teach you because they can’t even keep it straight.
This irks me no end. It is a cop out. Of course it is your job to teach me if you are demanding I behave or believe in a particular way. If I choose to see you as a man because you have a male body, a male voice, male pattern baldness, and male entitlement, it goddamn well is your job to teach me. Teach me why you are not what I can see plainly with my own eyes. Teach me why TWAW.
If you are an advocate. that is an ENORMOUS part of your job, teaching. As a feminist, I regard it as my duty to teach people who don’t get it, who don’t understand the problems of casual stereotypes. As an environmental scientist (and advocate), it is my job to teach if you don’t get why global warming is such a big deal. If I am just some random person, maybe not, but if you are making YouTube videos (or Twitter posts, blogs, TikTok, whatever the hell people are using these days, I can’t keep up with all the juvenile names for social media), then you are an advocate. Which means it is your job to teach me…or whoever you are demanding behave or believe a particular way.
So teach me. Show me science, robust science, that supports your position. Show me statistics that you are more murdered, more hated, more oppressed than women, than people of color, than disabled, than ANYONE. Show me why me calling a male “he” is literal violence. The problem is, you can’t do that, so you just shout.
In the third person, yes. In first and second, one can use non-reflexive pronouns, and the sentence will come out awkward, but comprehensible. E.g.: “I gulp the slightest gulp, [ɠ ], and I saaaaay to meeeee…..!” (From here.)
Yup! When I was cancelled by a former friend about a month and a half ago, her cancelling message said something like: “When you say that the second person pronoun in English is the same for masculine and feminine, you entirely miss the point. You need to constantly validate and affirm trans people’s identity; this is necessary for the treatment of their pain. And misgendering retards the treatment.” Or something like that.
I thought saying “retard” regardless of context was verboten these days…
GW: That is such an awful philosophy in #18. It is not anyone’s DUTY to validate other people’s alternative self images (except maybe your parents, to a small extent).
GW:
Of course, only the third person is gendered in English, but even so, losing access to pronouns in the first person renders everything third. Nullius sees things thusly, at least. GW may see things differently, despite arguing against the humble yet pedantic writer. However, given that the person sharing initials with a former president is, in fact, forgetting that the Bible-translation-initialed one was writing specifically about pronouns’ general substitutionary capacity, Nullius doesn’t feel that GW’s interlocutor need make any explicit concessions.
Jesus Tap-dancing Christ on crutches, that’s a horribly painful way to write. Fuck these fucking fucks who’re trying to fuck my language six ways from Sunday.
Ha. Yes, that’s awful. First- and second-person pronouns, and sometimes also third-person pronouns, make things so much clearer! (Obviously there are also instances where third-person pronouns make things less clear, such as: “manifestly an error, whether on the part of the copyist, or his own, since he is attached to the reign of Abu-Jaafar, whom he himself mentions by name” (where “he himself” at the end refers to the author, not to the historical figure under discussion).
Well: “manifestly an error, whether on the part of the copyist, or his own (i.e. the author’s own), since he (i.e. the historical figure) is attached to the reign of Abu-Jaafar, whom he himself (i.e. the author) mentions by name”.
Yes, pronouns are a mixed blessing, I had to explain to one of my students that his use of pronouns in an answer had made the answer unclear, and if he intended it the way it read, the answer was just plain wrong. If my students had an option, I don’t think they would ever use nouns, at least not proper nouns.
As for me, in my writing, one of my first editing tasks after completing a work is to clean up ambiguous pronouns. My current novel contains a lot of women with a handful of men. The pronoun “she” can be quite confusing when there are at least two women in the passage!
Oh, involuted sentences, how I love you. Let me count the ways. One, for the way, noted by countless critics, whose writing is, even they must admit, generally not of quality comparable to that which they critique, despite often being orders of magnitude more pompous, that such structures, by means of multiple appositives, both restrictive and nonrestrictive, not merely sequential but instead nested within each other like a матрёшка in a hall of mirrors, introduced irregularly and without markers indicating with specificity to which objects they refer as though each is written in the moment it appears in the author’s mind, can in many cases, for which examples can be produced, as excessive appositives, parentheticals, and asides are commonplace, especially among those who, in their overweening, although understandable, desire to be accepted among the intellectual elite, conflate compositional facility with sentential length, but also among rank beginners, lead to painful ambiguity and occasionally even amphiboly, termed amphibiology by some, that might be avoided by the mere insertion, not of an additional appositional clause or phrase, but of a lowly, unassuming, underappreciated period.
I think I’ll stop at one.
Learning to speak and write clearly (never mind eloquently) takes years of practice, and that’s just for basic linguistic competence, not social or cultural competence. Even with a complete syntactic toolkit, eliminating ambiguity in English is difficult, which shouldn’t be surprising. Natural languages aren’t programming languages, no matter how often I dream of being able to communicate in C[++,#].
Nullius, that was AWESOME.
Why thank you. :D
@25: I love this!
GW @18
How speaking of someone who isn’t even present is supposed to affirm them is left as an exercise for the reader. What is clear is how these so-called “preferred pronouns” are being weaponized to police speech.
J.A.,
People use third-person pronouns all the time in the presence of the referent (“This is Ophelia. She writes that horrid blog.”). That doesn’t mean you have to give in to trans ideology, but things can get awkward.
Nice cat though, I have to say.
I thought the cat was channelling the the message “THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT SEND HELP!” at the end there.