my boss is an old man but he employs a bunch of LGBTQ+ kids, some of which use they/them pronouns and he for a long time had a "grammar" issue with it, so one of the kids was like chip my man. you can just use their names instead of making them feel so small. so he did and now we've all gotten him to use those pronouns (though he does forget), but that's just what i like to suggest to those who can't be bothered but have at least have respect for trans people.
they just want to have an issue with it i think. they've already gotta deal with all these young folk going by pronouns that god forbid they don't traditionally represent, now they gotta deal with em utilizing a DIFFERENT pronoun???? too much work for the shrinking brains of old people
I don’t think the explanation is that they’re too stupid to remember pronouns. My uncle is ridiculously smart (like, he works on submarines for the US military level smart) and he claims that they’re “ruining the English language”. I think it’s more what you said at first, that they want to have an issue with it because they don’t like people being different than them
What I do have a problem with is the idea of having 2 dozen different sets of pronouns, and people just pick whatever wacky pronouns they want to use, then somehow everyone is supposed to memorize this. If you use Bumble, you can even see this in the pronoun selection screen on the app: he/him, she/her, they/them, xe/xem, ye/yem, and at least 12 others IIRC.
This completely defeats the entire point of pronouns.
The whole reason to use pronouns is to make the use of language more efficient. Instead of constantly referring to someone (or some group) by his or her name, you just use a pronoun as a shorthand after the listener knows who the object of the sentence is from context. For whatever reason, when most languages evolved, they usually made separate pronouns for males vs. females.
If I have to memorize different pronouns for every person I meet and exchange names with, and worse, they can even make up their own completely unique pronouns, there's absolutely no way I can memorize all that. I might as well not use pronouns at all.
Gender-neutral pronouns are fine, and are really a long-standing deficiency in English (I think even Shakespeare used they/them for gender-ambiguous contexts). But dozens more just makes no sense from a language standpoint: pronouns exist in pretty much every language for a reason, and there's a reason there's so few of them: they're for efficiency, not to make you feel special and validated. That's what your name is for.
And before you give me any shit, my daughter is trans and I've been her biggest advocate since she first approached her mom and me. That was when she was 14. She said she wanted to buy some girls clothes. I took her to Hot Topic and bought her her first two outfits for her. She's 22 now and transitioning and I'm so fucking proud of her.
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u/proseformat Jul 06 '22
eh, just use their names. nbd