Pronouns she/they - what does that mean?

I asked a close friend who uses she/they pronouns what she meant by it and for her, it wasn’t about rejecting her womanhood. She acknowledges that she is a woman and is happy with that, patriarchal pressures notwithstanding, but it’s a political stance to reject the idea that you would need to know the sex of a person in most everyday contexts. She also values sex-segregated spaces esp in prisons, sports, hospitals etc but I suppose it’s similar to rejecting the honorific choice of Miss/Mrs and opting for Ms - in the same way she doesn’t agree that a women’s marital status needs to be announced, she also thinks it disadvantages women to have sex announced when not necessary.

I’ve probably done a really poor job of explaining it, but it did change my perspective and I can see that for some people, it isn’t purely performative as I had originally thought

Sam? Chris? Alex?

Plus plenty of us work with people whose names are from cultures where we don't know the gender markers. I've worked with people overseas where we've only had email contact to start either, I haven't seen a photo, and I have no idea if they're male or female - and it doesn't matter. What matters is whether they can do the job I'm asking for.

I'm learning Welsh, and while I have grown up with quite a few Welsh names, I sometimes come across ones I don't know, so I need to look for other clues in the text to tell me. Hefin caused me confusion for a while.

It means she is a pathetic handmaiden and is as thick as mince.

Most names are gendered so people within the same culture would know straight away whether you are female or not, so your example would mostly be unworkable within the same culture/country.

Interesting, in what context? I'm struggling to think of a situation when I'm standing in front of woman and say 'she' rather then 'you' I might with small children though, when I'm checking stuff with their parents. Its a genuine question BTW as this is one of my key confusions when people feel they need to announce their pronouns. I will use 'they' when referring to someone who I don't know what sex they are i.e. - 'I'm not sure when they are turning up', and I'm not sure what sex they are -and I guess this would follow the rules of other languages, when being more formal.

Sound like you're doing the right thing by your son, so don't be swayed and he will thank you in the end.

Because the grammatically correct pronouns perpetuate sexism ?

when I worked with people in different countries who didn’t recognise my name as female , they all use male default pronouns - all work was done by email and how they interacted with me was notably different and more respectful than when people knew my sex. I had a few laughs whenever we met and they jaws hit the ground

and we know that just knowing the sex of the person affects how people interact and interpret what you do - remember all those cvs sent out where the only difference was the name ( male or female ) and the males got far more interviews than the females?

making it easy to practise sexism just embeds it

I am all for neutral pronouns and names

Interesting, in what context? I'm struggling to think of a situation when I'm standing in front of woman and say 'she' rather then 'you' I might with small children though, when I'm checking stuff with their parents. Its a genuine question BTW as this is one of my key confusions when people feel they need to announce their pronouns. I will use 'they' when referring to someone who I don't know what sex they are i.e. - 'I'm not sure when they are turning up', and I'm not sure what sex they are -and I guess this would follow the rules of other languages, when being more formal.

Sound like you're doing the right thing by your son, so don't be swayed and he will thank you in the end.

I must be very rude. I frequently use third person pronouns when talking about someone in her or his presence, and I don't stop to think whether I have referred to them by name a moment earlier. Third person pronouns are a convenience, mostly used automatically (without conscious thought). No-one has ever had a quiet word with me about my rudeness.

On the other hand, I have been shouted and screamed at, by a third person, for "misgendering" my son; I have known his sex since a few seconds after his birth, when midwife, doctor and I unanimously agreed. Nothing since has persuaded me that he is female, not his own declaration, not even his dresses, nice haircut and new glasses, nor all the people falling over themselves to be kind to him (but not kind at all to his bemused and distressed parents).

I'm fairly sure my sex has sometimes got me interviews because some recruiter has to tick some boxes to say their vacancy ads appeal to a diverse range of people.

Once in a role, I've definitely had to do more to be seen as good as some of my male colleagues. It's tiresome.

I did have one colleague today who kept calling me "man" - as he does with everyone else. The difference is, they are actually men. I suspect he doesn't realise he's doing it, and I think it just shows he accepts me as one of the team. It does grate a bit, though. I am not sure whether to bring it up with him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_stereotype#Gender_bias

"one" has left a gap

Generic "we" does a fairly decent job in particular kinds of academic prose, e.g. maths.

That's not quite the same as using "they" indiscriminately for everyone, male, female, singular and plural, which immediately sacrifices quite a bit of clarity and precision.

Languages do change, and a lot of the successors to Latin (French etc) did eventually abandon their noun case- endings and find other ways to clarify what they meant. But as far as I know it was a gradual process over time, not a sudden diktat from somebody with a dislike of case endings.

So perhaps we'll see something similar with a gradual adoption of "they", and other clear and satisfactory ways of distinguishing the various different people being mentioned will emerge. But it will take time to sort out. Something similar has happened with the partial demise of "one" (now seen as overly formal and "posh" ), which has occurred in my lifetime. People try to replace it with a generalised "you", and I've seen offence taken in threads on this board because a poster has misunderstood a general "you"= "one" statement to be a statement about "you"= "you individually and personally" directed at them. As someone remarked earlier (on this thread?) "one" has left a gap which hasn't quite been filled - yet.

So even fairly organic change has its problems, and sudden surgical operations on language even more so.
Of course, coerced use of particular forms of language on pain of tantrum or of being officially reprimanded (or worse) is a whole other ethical issue.

@moderate ’suggesting it's no bad thing if they're gradually adopted to replace irrelevant (at best) and harmful (at worst) gendered pronouns.’

In what way is correctly identifying someone’s sex by a gendered pronoun harmful?

But how do you get over the confusion caused?

Referring back to @Mapletree1985 's post yesterday - can you make sense of this?

"Martin and Brenda went shopping. They was looking for a good charity shop, while they was hoping to pick up a bargain at Wickes. They said to them that they should split up and run their separate errands and then they would meet them at the coffee shop by twelve. But secretly, they was planning to meet their affair partner in the paint aisle."

Who is having the affair?

As pp have said, other languages work without gendered pronouns but they may be structured differently or have other signifiers so that you can understand what is going on. If there are specific circumstances where knowing someone's sex could be harmful or used for discrimination then there are ways to avoid it. Why is there a need to remove gendered pronouns in general language?

We already know exactly how ungendered pronouns would work grammatically in English, because we already use them when the sex of the referent is unknown.

They have invented a gender neutral pronoun, "iel", but I have never seen or heard it used in real life

Depends on the circles you move in. French has developed lots of ways to express gender neutrality, e.g. https://www.anyti.me/fr/fiches-pratiques/ecriture-inclusive-quelles-regles-ou-conventions-utiliser-pour-ecrire-dans-un-langage-non-genre-en-francais/299

Because the grammatically correct pronouns perpetuate sexism ?

when I worked with people in different countries who didn’t recognise my name as female , they all use male default pronouns - all work was done by email and how they interacted with me was notably different and more respectful than when people knew my sex. I had a few laughs whenever we met and they jaws hit the ground

and we know that just knowing the sex of the person affects how people interact and interpret what you do - remember all those cvs sent out where the only difference was the name ( male or female ) and the males got far more interviews than the females?

making it easy to practise sexism just embeds it

I am all for neutral pronouns and names