Pronouns she/they - what does that mean?

Still makes no sense. If everyone uses the same neutral pronoun then they're obselete de facto. If she doesn't want sex to be a factor then she shouldn't use a sex signifying pronoun at all - just don't have any.

@EweSurname There are very few contexts in which one's marital status is relevant and they occur infrequently. The same is not true of sex.

And I wish we could still say "one" instead of "you" without sounding ridiculous. Some social commentators can pull it off, but most of us can't.

I'm all for this! Far better than "you - not actually you but general you"

It means she is really very special. Not like us other ladies with candy floss for brains.

She’s not fussed if she’s called she, and she’s never specified to me or our other friends what we call her, let alone insist. I only know because she sent me her CV to look over and I noticed it on there and I’ve literally known her all my life so it’s definitely not a big deal, just a political preference. I don’t think she’d expect anyone to expend any energy or effort on it whatsoever.

I can’t see that it’s much different from me telling people I’m a Ms, not miss or Mrs.

ETA I agree that some people use it as a weapon to chastise others and demand other people centre them and their preferences at al times but the conversation I had with this friend made me see that it isn’t always narcissistic and burdensome to others

I wouldn't worry about it...you would never refer to somebody in the third person in front of the ( very rude I think)

This just isn't true. I hear it a lot in these debates but in reality it's impossible to avoid using 3rd person pronouns in front of someone if you work with them a lot and there's more than the two of you.

"Hi new joiner, let me introduce Jane, she'll be working with you on X"
"I'm sure you'll all join me in thanking Greg for his work on Y"
"I agree with Anna's point when she said Z"

None of these examples is rude, they're just ordinary workplace interactions in a conversation with 3+ people.

When I work with a female she/they (quite a few of those at my workplace) I just ignore it and use she. As does pretty much everyone.

I think this is true for a lot of women. They/Mx is the new Ms.

I just take issue with how irrelevant sex is really. But thats only because ive been thinking about it a lot in the last 10 years. If i were 20 now, id probably think differently.

In a lot of situations, I think there is a difference between not being prepared if someone is female or male.

There's enough ambiguity in English already without replacing sex-based pronouns with sex-neutral pronouns.

And I wish we could still say "one" instead of "you" without sounding ridiculous. Some social commentators can pull it off, but most of us can't.

@moderate I would actually prefer it if English didn’t have gendered pronouns, and the singular “they” seems like the most probable route to this.

I think there's an argument for the use of sexed pronouns, but that's for another time. Using 'they' as a singular pronoun is, however, an unequivocally bad idea. It is genuinely confusing.

I read a novel set in an imagined future world where that was exactly what happened and it was really difficult to follow because the plural pronouns made it difficult to know which character was being referred to. It was very much a speculative novel - an attempt to explore the consequences of studiously ignoring sex in public life, censoring certain expressions of religious belief - but I found it infuriating, because I disagreed with so much of the speculation - about historical processes, intelligence, psychology, sex, gender, technology etc. and the religious stuff simply irritated me. I just about made it to the end of vol. 1, but gave my copy away and didn't attempt the rest of the trilogy. I think it has a bit of a cult following.

No, I don't think saying "it's ok if you call me they" is necessarily saying that.

Me too.

There is a set expectation on usage including which one to start with.

I also can’t see any value in she/they… I just cannot fathom what purpose it serves.

I’ve said this before on threads, but if it was a social pressure, or pressure from employers to include pronouns… I would say I’m in inner turmoil about my identify and they are forcing me to out myself before I’m ready. I feel very marginalised 🙄🙄🤦‍♀️

So she wants people to have to think specifically about her and her political aims when they talk about her. All because she rejects that the English language does use sex based pronouns when people know someone’s sex.

By her own actions, she is the one who is making those discussing her conscious of her sex class. Everytime they discuss her.

Well they can sod off.

I've spotted a couple of instances like this where I'm fairly sure this is the intention.

Rightly or not, there are now a large group of people who will read "she" as "having a feminine gender identity" so it could be some attempt to counter that.

Well, no, because some 'non binary' people want pronouns to alternate. I've seen people chastised for not alternating at the correctly desired frequency.

Anyone who indicates they use or want you to use specific wording to refer to them that doesn’t fit into the conventions of the English language is making a demand that requires you to make additional effort just for them. It doesn’t matter whether why. A political statement is just as much as an imposition as for gender identity purposes.

It should be purely up to you, personally, whether you choose to make this extra effort. The issues start when there is coercion attached to the demand, either emotional, employment or social repercussions. As we interact with society, we need to be brutally honest about this demand and the impact on others of this demand.

The question is the same though, what type of person makes these language demands of others?

Is there social pressure at your workplace to announce pronouns? If she feels she has to, then maybe this is her way of telling people that she doesn't care how people refer to her, and maybe that nobody else should care either. If I felt pressured (and thankfully I don't), then I might do the same.

It's about saying "if you think "she"/a woman is something other than a female, then you would be incorrect to attribute that to me, so let's avoid that situation".

In this particular situation, that I'm describing, it's not about kindness or speech choices, it's about being clear on accurate descriptions where language has been mangled by genderists.

Seeing as nobody here actually knows what it represents, I would assume it is entirely performative and signalling allyship to the trans cause.

That doesn't logically follow, though. There are examples where she could be GC like me (as per my pp) and considers herself not to have a gender identity, or signalling that sexed pronouns can be harmful so "they" is fine. It might be more likely that it's T allyship or something but no-one can really tell either way.

She says her ideal situation would be that everyone was referred to by the same not-sex-indicating pronoun but she obviously can’t impose it on everyone so just opts to use it for herself!

All I glean from pronoun displays is that if you don’t know the person and then actually meet them there is no guarantee that ‘she/they’ is female.

But while 'they' doesn't give away sex, 'she' obviously does. So what's the point of being 'she/they' if keeping yourself sex-neutral is the objective?