To find the endless gender neutral attempts in posts annoying?

[TiredButDancing]

I know I'm probably going to be flamed for this but my word, it annoys me. "My DP said they didn't know what they wanted for dinner and now they're annoyed because I made spaghetti. AIBU?"

What is this trend? Do they really think it's a)not immediately obvious it's a man b) that it really matters? Do people ever speak like this in real life?

I was just thinking exactly that reading another post (busy day at work!!). I came off after a couple of paragraphs as it's very annoying. Probably don't want to be outing!!

You are not being unreasonable!

Mostly they slip after a few posts anyway!

And it get’s even worse when you can’t work out whether ds is a son or a sister because the rest is neutral

Yes! So then you get confused and wonder if there's a second person involved or if the poster has just made a mistake.

No idea why anyone thinks leaving the sex undeclared will be less outing - even if you confirm its a ds or dd there's still several hundred thousand children the same age, unless your query is "aibu to be annoyed at ds(3) for being a pain during his great granny's jubilee ceremony" you're probably not that identifiable and if you ARE worried about it that much just change something else, or change to the opposite sex, but all the "they were told off by her teacher" "they are upset with his friends" is so confusing!

What's the problem with it surely it's a good thing.

Equal rights
Equal pay
Equal pronouns

The other thing that drives me bananas is people who go along with their child's "nahn-binaree" identity and call them "they" on FB, you are left wondering if the parent is talking about more than one child.

I think I would do the same thing with a post if I was male posting on here about my female DP. The responses a male and female poster will get to the same complaint about their partner will be completely different on here.

Quite a lot of people posting about a female DP are female themselves, TBF.

Anybody see that feature by Gok Wan on telly this morning “50 Years of Pride” ?

God, it was just tiresome

As he started introducing people he said “Hi what is your name and what are your pronouns?”

Fuck off

People have more than one pronoun?

Because, quite often the sex (not gender) of the person they are talking about is quite often relevant to the topic the poster is posting about.. I'm with you @TiredButDancing. I find it irritating as well.

I always just assume that it's because they're not married when it's DP. So haven't become a DH or DW yet

I'm female. My partner is female.
But as far as I'm concerned all this DP DH DS is maddening, so I never use it.

I think people simply don’t know what they saying. They have seen other posters use “they” and think that is the proper way to speak. Similar to people not knowing what they are saying when they say “should of “. They don’t know it is a contraction of “should have”.

I think people are reading less and this is the result.

People have more than one pronoun? Confused

I think it's like He/Him or She/Her. So 2 pronouns I guess. I suppose you could have He/Her or even She/Them if you wanted but it'd be a bit confusing.

Except in practice its more like:

"Can't see sex. Can't see sexism"

All gender neutrality is doing is actually making it HARDER not easier to see when discrimination is occuring.

It over complicates things like healthcare, because the word salad disadvantages those with lower educational levels or limited english.
Statistically making things gender neutral, plays to men because standards are set to the default of man to begin with.
If you look at making toilets gender neutral, what tends to happen is actually women have toilet facilities removed to make way for gender neutral ones whilst men retain all theirs.

The list goes on.

If I genuinely thought all these posts are because they wanted equality et etc, I'd probably find it less annoying. Instead it's for some vague desire to not be outing or supposedly NOT to bias readers against the person being discussed (usually a man). But it jars and frankly, it is almost always true that the person IS a man and IS being unreasonable.

I don’t see the problem with they and them, to be fair. It isn’t relevant to know somebody’s sex in many circumstances and in those where I don’t think it’s inportant for somebody to know my sex in order to establish whether my opinion is worthy or not, neutral is perfectly sufficient. I’d far prefer we were neutral in as many situations as possible.

Practice is different to language, in the way the OP raised it.

I would far rather my colleague said to one of our clients “I spoke to our Company Secretary and they said X is correct, so please do it this way” than “I spoke to our Company Secretary and she said X is correct, so please do it this way”, with the possible result that my opinion is considered less credible once they know I’m female. My sex is entirely irrelevant in that scenario. I won’t put my pronouns in my email signature, and as far as possible I’d rather not advertise them anywhere else.

I know I'm probably going to be flamed for this

I never understand why people post things like this. They either don’t actually care that they might ‘get flames’ - or more likely actually enjoy the drama - or know that there are plenty of people who do agree with them, but like to think they’re being a bit controversial and outspoken.

It isn’t the case that “they” or “their” is incorrect in the singular. They are epicene third-person pronouns, typically occurs with an unspecified antecedent.

In my above Company Secretary example, our client, not knowing my sex, would generally say “Can you speak to your Company Secretary and ask their opinion on X?” We use they and their in the singular all the time and have done for literally centuries.

It's rare that I start a thread but when I do I usually always keep it gender neutral because responses can be super biased otherwise, from what I see on other people's threads.

I.e if it's obvious a woman is posting about her husband then a lot of the responses are "dump him he's an abusive arse" "ugh I'm so sick of fucking men, leave the bastard" "typical man" when not necessarily warranted at all. When you literally don't know if the person being spoken about is a man or woman, those types of responses are much less likely and you end up with answers to your actual issue at hand. I quite like it, doesn't bother me at all.

Exactly - and THAT’S what they don’t like about it. There are some posters who are so terrified that they might side with a man over a woman, they tie themselves up in knots trying to find a reason why the OP is wrong not to share their partner’s gender. Hence we get this ‘But it’s soooo confusing!’ nonsense.

If someone saying ‘My partner is annoying me because they did XYZ’ confuses you, you’re probably a bit thick.

It’s sometimes seems to be for same sex partners but more often than not it’s because they are talking about their shitty husband and don’t want people to make (justified in my opinion!) assumptions. I find it very annoying.