BBC Bitsize - Pronouns

How? It's all navel gazing luxury beliefs, from where I'm standing.

Absolutely.

This is challenging gender:

first100years.org.uk/a-woman-is-not-a-person-a-review-of-bebb-v-the-law-society-1914/

The 2020 concept of gender identity just forces people into boxes.

Surely it is a discussion about developed/augmented breast tissue being on show because of the sexual aspect (hence, the exception is breastfeeding an infant). Not about which ‘gender’ the person is identifying.

Again, another poor example.

I don’t believe that any person should be in a public place unless they are swimming or in a place where swimming is done without their torso covered adequately. If they are in a private venue, whatever they wish to show is their choice.

The correct vocabulary is in a constant state of flux. Times change, so does language.

Yet sex remains immutable!

Trans people have to find a way to muddle through.

And so why do women and children have to bear the brunt of transpeople finding their way to muddle through.

If a straight man sexually harasses or assaults a trans woman is it on the basis of her sex or gender? If a straight man chats up a trans woman is it on the basis of her sex of gender. If a man beats up a trans woman is it on the basis of her sex or gender? When men straight men uses a trans sex worker is it on the basis of their sex of gender? Are trans people much more over represented in sex work than men because of sex or gender?

You do realise most of these instances is about sexuality and not gender. And if a man is lying to themselves that they are heterosexual when they are not, it again has nothing to do with gender. Except they might use ‘gender’ as a way to disguise their own homophobia.

Really, this is just as incorrect as your assertion that language has been gendered and not sex based.

Thankfully she was found but I think honouring her pronouns didn't help in that. We all know girls are at much greater risk of male violence. And, as that poor young woman who identified as trans who was raped found, sex offenders don't care how you identify. You can't identify out of sex, however much you may want to.

In Old English (spoken by the Anglo-Saxons) the word 'ship' was neuter. I'm fairly sure it would have been the same in Old Norse (spoken by Vikings) as well. I'm not sure when or why ships began to be referred to as 'she' but it doesn't appear to be a linguistic hangover.

As in German, the Old English word for 'girl' was originally neuter. However, by the late Old English period people had started to use it in a feminine form.

jj I can actually take on board your point about not expecting transpeople to be trailblazers. I can understand the desire to conform to certain behaviours and dress-styles that are more acceptable when exhibited by one sex than another. I understand that it is easier to present as the opposite sex than to try to overturn thousands of years of social conditioning. I get it, and if someone wants to transition socially then I don't have a big problem with that. I mean, I don't think it helps break down gender stereotyping in the way that you think it does, but I don't think playboy models or rap stars tend to help with breaking down stereotypes either.

My issue comes with having to believe that male-born people are women. That they have the right to access women's refuges because they are women. That women must give up the word 'woman'. That women have no right to male-free changing spaces or to participate in sports reserved for female-bodied people.

This is why women are so angry about all of this.

Politeness is one thing. In the past I have always tried to be polite. I have looked someone in the eye who had five o'clock shadow on their face and called that person Judith. I used 'she' and 'her' when referring to Judith when Judith wasn't present. The problem is, at no point did I ever believe that Judith was actually female: it was always just a matter of courtesy.

Perhaps that was a disservice. Perhaps I gave Judith the false impression that I truly did believe Judith was a woman. Maybe this is why the trans community is so hurt and outraged by women standing up for their rights now - because everyone was willing to distort reality to a certain extent for so long to try to make the transgender community feel better about themselves.

However, it seems that many members of the transgender community don't realise that for most people this use of language is an attempt to be kind. Some members of the transgender community also don't realise that most people, in their heart of hearts, don't actually believe that transwomen are women. When they realise the truth, it is a shock.

If TRAs had stuck to toilets and a request for certain pronouns to be used as a matter of courtesy, and if TRAs had not tried to encroach on language, sport, prisons, rape crisis centres and everything else, most women would have continued to go along with that. We wouldn't be where we are now. And I would still be referring to Judith in this post as 'she'.

But even where it doesn't, like with the example of Mädchen for girl mentioned above by OldCrone which has as a Genus Neutrum (neuter) even though the Sexus of a girl is female, where the referrent (the actual girl) is known, named or visible, it is actually much more common to use the ungrammatical she and all declined forms thereof even though das Mädchen requires es.

And, as ever, CharlieParley explains it far more clearly and scientifically than I can.

This is one of the things which confuses me about languages which have genders for all nouns. I was going by what I found on this page (but obviously input from a native or fluent speaker would be better). But there is a bit of discussion about whether 'es' or 'sie' is correct even there (the consensus seemed to be that 'es' was grammatically correct).

Es is grammatically correct but people would still refer to a girl, both in writing and in speech, as "sie", because they know she's a girl. As in "oh your little (Maedchen) is so cute! What's her name?*
"Little girl would be in grammatically neutral language, but in direct reference, it's she!

We do these things, and correct ourselves when we're wrong, not only to be polite. We do so because it's the truth, and we are correcting ourselves if we make a mistake
Whereas in the trans demands it's the other way around. We are using the correct vocabulary and being told to lie instead. That's actually quite rude.

The correct vocabulary is in a constant state of flux. Times change, so does language.

But biology doesn't. It's still truthful to refer to a male as he/him. Even if he and thinks he is a woman. That won't change for the foreseeable future. And language needs to stay in synch with biology otherwise we find ourselves in one huge muddle, unable to communicate effectively or succinctly or clearly. Who wants that?

With boats and that I think it's a protective thing. Like mother earth.

She looks after you.

That's gender, obv.

Just catching up.

So JJ thinks if a 14yo child goes missing, who 'presents' as a girl, and is female. If they had a trans ID. The missing kid thing should say to look for a boy?

Not read all the posts but think that's the gist?

Also the idea that she/he has always been based on 'gender' is patent bollocks.

Also that women have been called names that aren't their names for donkeys years and have made a bit of progress but still get caught. When was it women were allowed to get mortgages again? The 70s I think...

Better? I suppose I live in hope that the confrontation will end.

Does it get better?

Define better.

I essentially said I didn't think jj was being genuine because they wouldn't explain how anyone would work out their gender.

This was the response:

The topless trans woman who gets arrested, is she being arrested on the basis of her sex or her gender?

I mean, wtf?! What's that got to do with anything? I still haven't seen any responses about what having a gender identity actually involves.

Men referred to ships as she partly for their pining for female company they were far from and so the important love that their lives depended on was like a loving woman and partly because they acknowledged they didn't fully understood the opposite sex. No matter how skilled men were at sailing, a ship would behave the way a ship would because of its unique build, which was different to the build of a man.

Snap Errol.

Pronouns have always been based on gender, that's how things like ships ended up being referring to in the feminine.

Fuck what?

I thought I might read this thread but this has just made me chuckle and it's pages ago. Does it get better? Can anyone summarise?

She sells seashells on the seashore.

FWIW, the Lloyds shipping register now refers to ships as 'it', presumably because they're unsexed objects and the grammatical genders used by different nationalities were a mix.

jj1968
Pronouns have always been based on gender, that's how things like ships ended up being referring to in the feminine.

Like le bateau is feminine, for instance, and le navire. (In Dutch both are neuter, I think.)

*Curiously, this is exactly how the sociologists/sex researchers who coined the terms cissexual and cisgender framed it - as healthy to conform to the sex stereotypes and sex role stereotypes associated with one's own sex.

So women not seeking to identify as trans were seen as normal, but only in the context of also conforming to gender norms. Of course there wasn't even a hint of a critical analysis of gender as the tool for the oppression of the female sex.*

Indeed. The gender ideology argues that everyone has an abstract gender identity (very doubtful), but that some are very lucky in realising that their identities match their biological sex while for others there is no match.

So the first group is now viewed as privileged, whether they are women or men.

The next step, then, is that sex-based oppression is erased, partly, because remembering it would highlight the fact that trans women have enjoyed male privilege and still might, and because maintaining gender norms is important for those who transition as they can more easily appear their desired sex.

So women not seeking to identify as trans were seen as normal, but only in the context of also conforming to gender norms. Of course there wasn't even a hint of a critical analysis of gender as the tool for the oppression of the female sex.

Men beat up ajd harass non conforming males while there's pages of pages telling us we are the problem for not using pronouns

Don't add up really does it

YY Errol.

Well when men do those things it is because they are men and men are responsible for the vast majority of violence - sexual and otherwise - in the world.

And they murder, beat up and rape everyone from babies to centenarians and both men and women. Although - when it comes to sexual violence - they do like weaker victims, so more women and children than men, and most of them are heterosexual so a disproportionate amount of girls and women.

Does that help?