The pronoun 'they'...

[heartbroken22]

I find it hard reading articles with they. I'm not sure if I've got a disability or something but if the article is talking about one person and it says they, my brain automatically inflates trying to make sense of it and I turn off like I'm confused. Not here to offend. But it's just hard trying to process it.

And when you do know the sex of a person but they insist you use 'they' to refer to them? When you're not even in their presence?

Because that is the point.

Exasperating.

But your first sentence undermines your second!

Yes people use they in limited and temporary situations until they know someone’s sex.

That’s very different from having to consciously remember to ignore the millions of years of animal evolution that have programmed you to understand the person in front of you as a ‘ he’ or ‘she’ , so you can use a different term to refer to them.

Using they in the first instance ( sex unknown) is neutral.

Using it is the second ( sex known) is not a politeness, it is a political act that reflects submission to a belief system that some feel is deeply harmful to women and same sex attracted people in particular.

And Being able to acknowledge and enforce single sex spaces is not ‘right wing’. It is a the most basic human rights protection for women’s dignity, safety and fundamental human rights. No woman should be pressurized or coerced to be naked in front of a male. That’s a really basic right.

I don't have a disability and my brain also interprets this as having to speak an untruth.

I guess the difference is less how we interpret it, and more that my disability makes doing this more difficult and uncomfortable. I can't do it smoothly and easily, it's like jamming a stick in the spokes, a spanner in the works that makes it so I can't think straight, and causing what I can only describe as a kind of mental pain. But I don't think anyone should be required to actively speak untruth, regardless of disability or discomfort.

It just pisses me off how people post in this "Look at me and what a tolerant virtuous person I am and how I condemn nasty right-wing people and people who refuse to do a simple thing to help the most marginalised and oppressed" way, and they might as well be saying "La la la fuck you and fuck your disability, your brain can't do what mine can so you should be ostracised and mocked".

Very much this. We made the language up so we can change it.

You are not being asked to speak and untruth , you are being asked why that "truth" is at all relevant. Actually it's revealing a protected characteristic - would you find it ok to always announce someone's religion every time you spoke about them?

They has been used since before Shakespeare times so it's not new to anyone

years ago people would say the colour of a person when talking about them. Would you say your disability meant you would always say "black Susan in reception " or would you find you learnt to just say Susan ?

Language is weird.

'They' in French is ils (multiple males - or multiple females and one male ...), or elles (multiple females).

'His/her/their' ignores the sex of the owner and references the gender and number of the things owned.

The same concept exists in Spanish, ellos and ellas, - but they usually don't even bother using it as the verb itself has distinct endings for each 'person' - I, you singular, he/she/it/you singular and formal, we, you lot, they/you plural and formal ...

Yes, language is WEIRD

Respecting how someone wants to be referred to won't hurt

This is simply not true. It does hurt to be forced to say something you know is not true and is part of a movement causing harm to others.

it does hurt to refer to male sex offenders as ‘she’. It hurts their victims, it hurts many victims of violence. It hurts all women who understand this is about prioritizing what men want over the violence they suffer.

It’s not just a language thing. It’s reflecting the ‘reality’ the movement is trying to impose. And that means letting newly created ‘they’s’ and ‘’she’s’ who are male into women’s spaces when women are vulnerable.

And it does hurt women to be denied the language to talk about their experiences and their concerns of male violence when they are not allowed to say ‘he’.

It is the shallowest of analysis to say ‘ it’s just about respecting what someone wants to be called’. But it really isn’t about that. It’s about much, much more. And if you don’t realise that, then you have not being paying attention at all.

We didn't make the language up on a whim. It was and is a gradual process. You don't know how language works. I'll give you a clue though: forcing people to use it in a certain way never ends well.

Because the OP doesn’t have a language processing disorder 🙄 it’s faux confusion under the guise of ‘I must have a disability then’. Offensive.

and no, it’s not ‘common’ to find it difficult. Only on Mumsnet it is.

The way that my brain has developed within an English-speaking 20th/21st century society, and the frameworks it has as a model of reality to help me operate within the world and that society, when I say the word "she" it means "individual I believe to be female, or a ship", when I say "he" it means "individual I believe to be male, or generic 'he' for animals of unknown sex or in instructions etc. from older books", and when I say "they" it means "more than one individual, or one or more individuals whose sex I don't know, or generic 'they' in instructions etc.". So if I am instructed to use "he" for someone I know to be male, or "they" for someone I know to be female, that requires me to state that I believe something which I do not believe. I am not allowed to choose not to use a pronoun — to properly demonstrate my kindness, I must use a pronoun which states that I hold a belief that I don't hold.

"Susan" does not mean "white person called Susan unless otherwise specified", so wanting to call a black woman called Susan "black Susan" is not comparable. If you insist on this analogy, it's more like a white woman asking to be referred to as "black Susan".

if I am instructed to use "he" for someone I know to be male, or "they" for someone I know to be female, that requires me to state that I believe something which I do not believe

Typo 🙄 I mean "if I am instructed to use 'she' for someone I know to be male"

She for he is wrong

They - none sex specific for male or female isn't wrong and has been in common use for centuries

You just have a habit
A bad one
Of calling out someone's sex every time you speak about them

I saying it's rude to highlight the protected characteristic of anyone who doesn't want that called out all the time

So nothing to do with being incorrect
Just being over specific

Sure, you can call it a bad habit that I've been trained into if you want; lots of people like to criticise the way certain languages work in order to denigrate their speakers. The language I learnt from infancy requires that if you know the sex, you use the appropriate gendered pronoun. In the language I learnt, when you use the gender-neutral pronoun, you're stating that you don't know the individual's sex or that you're referring to a non-specified person. I can't do anything about the fact that this is the language I grew up with, and that if you require me to use it in a way that makes me feel I'm having to state that I believe something which I do not believe, this is harder for me than it is for you because I have a brain which resists stating that I believe something that I do not believe.

Perhaps you will be able to change English so that "they" takes on an additional meaning, "person whose sex I know but prefer not to signal", but those kinds of changes are difficult and will not happen within a single generation.

@NotAnotherBathBomb you never know I might have it 🤭

Of all the terrible arguments I have heard, this one has to be the worse. ‘They’s’ motivation is not to hide their protected characteristic. ( And changing your pronoun to they does not hide it, everyone can see what sex ‘they’ is). Instead they want everyone to indulge them in a pretense that they do not have a protected characteristic of sex, as they are neither make nor female.

‘They’ is essentially trying to get people to lie about how they see them . And see right there, right there was an example of how using ‘they’ rather than he or she creates confusion. Who was I referring to with that second ‘they’?

What you believe is that we must draw attention to someone's sex when speaking about them.

This is unnecessary and harmful and in many cases hurtful

That you can't / won't contemplate changing - even though you must change beliefs and ways of speaking many times during your life because what is acceptable changes over time ..
odd

perhaps you are not old enough for the n word to be regularly used , but I don't believe you haven't changed anything since being a child - how we refer to people with mental health problems for example has only really changed over the last few years.

Just because something is hard is no reason not to try

It's not wrong in the sense of being inaccurate or untrue- just less specific

People are so inconsistent with it. On here you read a post initially using ‘they’ then it slips in to ‘she’, or ‘my girlfriends’. If you’re talking about people you know, friends etc, surely you know what pronouns they are using?

I quite agree. I believe it is a phase which will pass - at least I hope so.

No one can make me use words to describe them when they aren't around. See, I used "them" at this point because that's a reasonable use of "them". It's not referencing anyone in particular.
But some whiny narcissist can gtf.

midge what I believe is that I speak a language which works in a particular way, and that changing a fundamental aspect of this is not as easy as choosing not to use particular nouns and adjectives. In the language I learnt, singular "they" is not just less specific than "he" or "she", it actually communicates the internal state of knowledge of the speaker, that of not knowing the sex of the referent. The vast majority of the time it would feel and sound odd for someone to consistently use singular "they" when it's obvious they know the sex of the person. I think that's part of why people find it so difficult to be consistent with use of "they" when they do know, as midsomer points out.

Again, swapping out racial slurs for non-offensive words is not the same thing. It's not working at the level of the structure of the language (and it's not asking people to say words which imply their internal states of knowledge and belief are different from what they actually are). It's the difference between replacing bits of fabric on the upholstery of a chair, and changing the structure of the chair frame.

And when you say "Just because something is hard is no reason not to try," I'm again hearing the "La la la fuck you and fuck your disability" refrain. I'm tired of people like you discriminating against people like me with communication disabilities.

I went to school in the 1970s and we didn't have 'they' pronouns. It seems a relatively recent thing. I even get emails with pronouns added. I never had those before. As a child I certainly don't remember being confused about which child was a girl and which child was a boy. There was never a situation where I didn't know what sex another child was. Genitals tend to be a bit of a giveaway. It seems more an adult constraint. Referring to yourself as 'they' doesn't make a vagina magically appear does it?

I could argue that people who claim to be non binary are being silly, as it’s impossible to not be either male or female. The term Mrs denotes a married woman, Ms denotes a woman who may or may not be married so neither of those terms are problematic - unless it’s a male who is telling others to use one of them.
Demanding that others deny the reality of one’s sex is expecting them to use compelled speech, which generally goes alongside the silent threat of ‘bigot’ if one fails to follow orders. Ie, coercive.