Best responses for being asked for pronouns in person

I'm enjoying the segue into language discussion. I am also an ESL speaker and can confirm that spoken Chinese (various dialects) do not have gendered pronouns, nor does Bahasa Malaysia/Bahasa Indonesia. I know plenty of people who therefore mixed up he/she when conversing in English.

Anything dismissive, eg

"Pass"

"The usual"

"You choose"

"Whatever"

I'm loving all the posts about different languages. In German, the word for girl 'maedchen' is not feminine, but neuter, because the suffix 'chen', meaning little, turns any noun neuter. This means adding it to any name as a term of endearment, eg. 'Katherinchen' means that any adjectives need to have neuter endings, not gendered ones. I don't know how the gender folk deal with that one.

@Sophoclesthefox

Then you’ve got Arabic, where all the verbs you use are conjugated according to the sex of the person that you’re talking to - so “how are you?” would be “kayf halak?” to a man and “kayf halik?” to a woman. What a minefield! I have no idea how Arab speakers are approaching preferred pronouns, would love to know.

I live in an Arabic speaking country. Generally, unless they're properly fluent in English, Arabic speakers default to male pronouns a lot anyway when speaking English.

eg my lovely (sadly no longer with us ) housekeeper could make herself perfectly understood in English 90% of the time - she was elderly, working class, completely uneducated (had never been to school), couldn't read in Arabic much less English, & had picked up spoken, functional English over many years of working for expats.

She'd come out with sentences like this: 'Corvus, your friend Bikky, I feed him cat, him sick, I hope him not die.'

It would take several follow up questions to establish if we were talking about Rebecca or Victoria, & if it was the friend or the cat who was sick.

If any of them had had a pronoun preference (maybe the cat did? Who knows? It turned out to be pregnant, not sick, FWIW) then frankly, she'd have struggled to comply.

I will say "I don't have a preference" if I am ever asked this. It hasn't happened yet.

I would not like to say "she/her" because although accurate it unnecessarily draws attention to my gender. Which is likely to be unhelpful to me as a woman.

I would prefer the use of "they" generally, especially at work, as non-gendered language is less likely to lead to discrimination against women. However I would not like anyone to think I was opting out of being a woman or that I was being demanding about other people's speech. So I would prefer to say "no preference".

DH's organisation has recently merged with another, and in order to provide introductions everyone has been asked (voluntarily) to provide preferred pronouns. In DH's part of the organisation, there is a very senior person who is transgender. That person has declined to provide preferred pronouns, stating that they will not be offended however people choose to address them. They are an older transgender person who has been living their life quietly for many years and not made any fuss about their gender. They are currently addressed in accordance with their presentation. As far as DH knows, there are 3 other transgender employees, out of 15000. Many of his staff have written to him expressing discomfort. His question is - if the one transgender person in his immediate area of work does not wish to provide pronouns, who are they doing this for? He concluded it is all very much virtue signalling rather than anything else.

LuckyWookie

Pronouns should be sex based. And regardless of how people present, it’s pretty easy to tell what sex someone is in the vast, vast majority of cases. That’s just not what some people want to hear though. Tough.

It’s impossible to remember them all
This is a pretty catastrophizing take, to be honest. In practice, most people's pronouns will match their presentation
Ha! So what you’re saying is, you’re relying on the majority of people to conform with the gender that matches their presentation, in order to reduce the mental load and make it easier to remember the pronouns of those who don’t conform? How discriminatory! Surely EVERYONE is entitled to have their own chosen pronouns hmm?

Haven't read the whole thread, but the whole point of saying second person singular as suggested earlier is exactly that that IS the pronoun needed most in conversation. Yes, you can refer to someone in the 3rd p when they are there but much more likely to directly address them and in English the 2nd p is effectively neuter unlike 3rd p pronouns.

Pronouns aren't an ideology, for crying out loud, they're a part of speech. All it does is tell people how they should refer to you when talking about you in the third person, it's helpful for the same reason it's helpful to let people know what your name is, so they know what to call you when they talk to you or about you. If you'd rather people call you "um" or "thingy" or "them overthere" then by all means withhold that information, but it's your own life you're making awkward at the end of the day.

The English language has been developing for more than 1,400 years since the Anglo-Saxons introduced it. For 1,398 of those years we've managed to rely on our initiative to work out what to call people. We haven't needed any silly icebreakers to announce to the world that we are a man, or a woman - it is almost always obvious to the world.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'll have forgotten your name within seconds of you telling me so there's no chance of me remembering which made-up pronouns from the 1990s you use. Much easier to say what one sees.

Related to the above:

Something I've learned over the years is to be very careful about when and how you take up someone else's cause as your own.

Because you can fight for someone else, but you can't compromise for them.

So there is always a risk that if too many allies join a cause which is not their own, albeit from a genuine and laudable desire to help and make things better, they become a force for polarisation and extremism.

That doesn't mean allies should stay out of it - of course not! A demand for fairness and justice should always be supported by more than just the people directly involved.

What it means is that allies should be careful that in their desire to support and do the right thing, they don't shout so loud that their voices drown out the very people they are trying to empower, taking away those people's agency to define their own best outcome.

Not sure where the joke is in stating an incongruous pronoun to try and provoke a negative reaction is, to be honest. Either you won't get a negative reaction, in which case all you've proved is no one else in the room is as uncomfortable with trans people as you are. Or you will get a negative reaction, in which case you've just gained personal insight into why some trans people appreciate a supportive environment in which to share their pronouns. Either way, self-own.

The sentence is italics is where you are going wrong. I'm not sure if you are projecting your own issues, deliberately misrepresenting gender critical people or just misunderstanding so I'll be kind and assume the latter.

Discomfort with the current trans orthodoxy is not discomfort with trans people.

There are many ways trans people could have been supported.

It is Trans Orthodoxy that has taken it upon itself to claim the only way to support and accept trans people to to believe categorically that gender identify overrides sex, and that any distinction made for any reason between trans women and women, or trans men and men, is hateful and negating.

It is Trans Orthodoxy, not trans people, that requires public demonstration of adherence through rituals - and I choose that word deliberately - like the sharing of the pronouns and the removal of the words.

People who look for logic in these rituals (eg "How come a trans man can give birth, yet be negated by pronouns?") miss the point. It's not about logic or practicality or consistent meaning, it's about symbolism and public displays of obedience.

But the problem with Trans Orthodoxy as the "only" way to accept and support trans people is that is it simply wrong. It requires those of us who are not trans to lie about ourselves and who we are. That is how I know it is wrong. Not because of anything I feel about trans people and trans identities, but simply because my own identity, which I know as deeply and as as certainly as trans people know theirs, cannot exist in the reality Trans Orthodoxy requires.

Simply, if I believe in my own identity, which I do, and I believe trans people are honest and genuine about theirs, which I do, then Trans Orthodoxy is the thing that is wrong, because it can't accommodate both of us. We need to talk more, think more, dig deeper to find the truth that encompasses both.

But Trans Orthodoxy won't let that happen. It shuts down anyone asking "is there another way, a better way, a way that accommodates both the truth trans people know about themselves and the truth I know about myself?" by shouting "bigotry" just as other orthodoxies have used accusations of blasphemy and heresy to prevent discussion opening the cracks in the façade.

So my choice is not between "be kind" by submitting or "self own" by blaspheming. My choice is to lie about myself and submit to an orthodoxy that I cannot believe in, one that reduces and denies me, or to resist and continue to respectfully state my truth and ask that we push for a better way.

The only self-own is if I choose to submit to an orthodoxy in which I do not and cannot believe just for the sake of an easy life.

Excellent posts @CharlieParley and @Sophoclesthefox

If it's such a trivial matter and warrants no deep analysis, why is OP or any of the rest of you even bothered by it? Why is it such a frequent topic of conversation on the board?
Do you really not understand why people are bothered? Do you wonder if it might be because organisations are falling over themselves in the rush to look “progressive” by encouraging staff to include pronouns on emails and when introducing themselves in group settings?

And when people say “No thanks”, you get others saying, “What's the big deal? Just say what your bloody pronouns are, and move along ffs!”

Do you think it could be that?

"If my pronouns aren't obvious to you, you are always welcome to use my name."

Pronoun policing
I can't forgive having my time wasted in a meeting, conference, training or whatever. I want it to be productive, focused, purposeful and to get things done. Pious pronoun policing pampers to verbal bullying and digresses from the meeting purpose into political religious context that brings up the war on women, children and LGB.

"It’s another part of the recent concerted attempt by believers in gender to uncouple not only the automatic association of the word 'woman' with females but also the words 'she' and 'her' so they can refer equally to males as well".
I think this is probably the most important objection I have as well. The attempt to change our language in order to change reality.

Exactly, Charlie. In my second language, possessive pronouns agree with the gender of the object, not the subject- so if you say “he loves his car”, it is “il aime sa voiture” - the feminine “sa” possessive pronoun being applied because “voiture” is feminine, despite the possessor being male. If you’re used to this, the idea that his and hers are static and do not change regardless of what they’re applied to is very difficult to master, and is made the more so if you would also have to remember that the possessor that you’re talking about doesn’t use the sex based pronouns that you’ve managed to master.

French has non binary pronouns, but it’s....messy at best. You can use “iel” and “ielle”, but then you’re left in a muddle with the verb agreements, which can be forced into place in the written form but I have no idea how it works in the spoken form, because I haven’t heard it used at all.

I saw this used recently as an example and it made me laugh because look at the indecision over the heureux/heureuse 🤣 - would the speaker/writer pick one? Or say both?

“Regardez Chris! Iel a l’air heureux/se aujourd’hui! Je vais ellui demander s’iel veut venir avec nous plus tard”

Then you’ve got Arabic, where all the verbs you use are conjugated according to the sex of the person that you’re talking to - so “how are you?” would be “kayf halak?” to a man and “kayf halik?” to a woman. What a minefield! I have no idea how Arab speakers are approaching preferred pronouns, would love to know.

Anyway, my prolonged language nerd out is meant to illustrate that the whole “it doesn’t cost you anything!” Is very culturally specific. If the goal is inclusion, then to me it falls down because it assumes native English language facility, which seems to me to be a pretty colonialist, exclusive concept, which I had been given to understand by my wokest friends, is a horrible thing... 😬

It won't be long before stating pronouns be as dated as putting "(Mrs.)", "(Miss)", "(Ms)" or "(Mr.)" in signatures.

Signed
B. Whabylon (Miss)

Apologies. You can see I just mis-pronouned them three times in that last paragraph.

Oops. And again.

Still, I note with a degree of schadenfreude that even the most extreme gender ideologues also get it wrong.

This, for example, is a TW on Demi Lovato.

"She's come out as non-binary."

She??? Good heavens! Wherever did you get that idea from?!

So interesting, CharlieParley to see where gender is not used. I spent a bit of time trying (and failing) to learn a Bantu language with huge numbers of genders/noun classes which defeated me.

English language pronouns are sex-based, and humans are naturally hard wired to recognise sex, hence every in-person meeting for the last however many thousand years not having to start with a pronouns round.

It’s another part of the recent concerted attempt by believers in gender to uncouple not only the automatic association of the word 'woman' with females but also the words 'she' and 'her' so they can refer equally to males as well.

Lurcher, if you google 'stereotype threat' you will see lots of academic studies whereby the act of drawing attention to one's race or sex can have a negative impact on performance etc
Announcing you are a she/her still comes at a cost in a sexist world.

If you are not convinced about it being compelled speech/additional mental load etc, I saw someone's twitter where they described themselves in their bio as 'Multigender. No pronouns, please'.
Just try talking about them!

An ESL speaker would already have learned he/him, she/her, they/them as a beginner to the language, there's not any requirement for them to learn new pronouns, just the same ones they already know. There's no reason at all it should be any harder for them than anyone else. It's not like trans people don't exist outside English speaking countries either, so I don't know why you'd assume the concept would be particularly hard for someone just because they're ESL.

This is an ill-informed statement, I'm afraid. I'm not only an ESL speaker myself, I also work with/encounter many ESL speakers. More than half of all languages do not have he or she pronouns. This includes the two languages with the most speakers in the world - Mandarin Chinese (which introduced he and she in written Mandarin a hundred years ago, but in spoken Mandarin both pronouns sound the same and so functionally are the same) and Hindi.

Very many other languages spoken in Asia also do not know gendered third person pronouns. As do various Indo-European, African, Oceanien and American ones.

ESL speakers from those countries frequently confuse he and she. L1 interference in such a fundamental of language is hard to overcome even for ESL speakers with considerable language skills.

My native language is gendered for animate and inanimate objects. I speak and write English at a native level and work as a writer and editor in both English and my native language. And yet, gender is such a fundamental feature of my mother tongue, I still find it strange that a table or a flower or an apple is neutral in English. And in spoken communication I still occasionally use gendered pronouns for inanimate objects in line with my mother tongue.

That's because language transfer in regard to such fundamentals requires constant and considerable and conscious effort to overcome. And sometimes we're too tired or stressed or hurried or emotional to do it.

And in my view, the requirement to mis-sex contrary to the learned rule that he refers to a person of the male sex and she to a person of the female sex makes the whole problem worse. This adds considerably to the stress of a non-native speaker.

You demand consideration for those who do wish to dictate pronouns to others, because it matters so much to them their mental health requires compliance. That's fair enough - as I tell my kids, you can ask for anything you want.

You just can't have everything.

In turn, I'll repeat what others have asked of you before - consideration for those of us who struggle with that requirement (for instance those who are ESL speakers or neuro-diverse) and experience adverse mental health effects because of it.

P.S. and FYI I have attached a map showing a distribution of languages without gender (the white dots). It's from here: wals.info/feature/44A#0/-44/130

but it's your own life you're making awkward at the end of the day.
It's really not.