Pronouns annoyance

[crochetmonkey74]

I support every human being having the right to be who they are. This is not a bashing thread but I do want views on this.
Today , my friend messaged something about a non binary celeb. I replied with "I like him I think he's great" she then sent a text lecture about misgendering.
I actually didn't do it deliberately. My thoughts are these though: how can you insist on how others (who you will never hear or even know about) talk about you?
I agree with referring to people however they want you to in real life of course, am I just being a grumpy old bag? I genuinely want to get better at understanding the pronoun thing. What are your thoughts?

The ridiculous part of all of it, @Fairislefandango is that the person whose pronouns are being used aren't even there to hear them being use wrongly or correctly. So it's an academic argument. Personally I tend to take a minimalist approach which was what I was attempting to describe upthread, but clearly it hasn't landed well with you and I'm being ridiculous and woo.

When all said and done, I'm not known for being a keyboard warrior and trying to pick arguments on here, so I'd prefer we agree we each have our own opinion and move on.

Me too,@daisychain01 - and maybe I was a bit harsh with the woo comment. But I genuinely find the idea of calling everyone 'they/them' in order to avoid misgendering anyone really irritating. My eldest (pretty woke) dc did it for a while, but seems to have eased off now.

My reasoning is this: f the vast, vast majority of human beings define themselves by the sex they were born as (which they clearly do), then surely by calling everyone 'they', you are effectively 'misgendering' almost everyone you refer to (because very few people actually want to be called 'they'). Whereas if you use sex-based pronouns you will actually be 'correctly gendering' the vast majority of people.

but they didn't "take disabled people's toilets away from them ". They went in had a wee or whatever, they didn't permanently or deliberately deprive anyone.
They probably took all of 2 mins in there.

It's the thin end of the wedge. No, of course they haven't gone and physically removed the toilet from the room, but what if it isn't just 2 minutes? What if other NB people/other (non-disabled) groups just decide that it suits them better - so it ends up being lots of periods of 2 minutes?

What if it IS only 2 minutes, but it's the same 2 minutes when a disabled person is desperate for it and then ends up feeling publicly humiliated because they have a messy accident - all because somebody without any need for it spotted their toilet and fancied taking it for themselves?

Do you also advocate healthy, able-bodied people using scarce blue badge spaces in car parks, as long as no one person does so for more than 2 minutes?

I also agree that calling everybody 'they' is very far from neutral. The vast majority of people want and expect to be referred to as he or she (unless you don't know their sex - e.g. somebody mentions 'my friend' and you ask 'what is THEIR name?').

'They' is a pronoun just as much as he and she, and is the wrong one for virtually everybody, when you know the person of whom your talking. If you're so bothered about not offending 0.0001% of people, why do you avoid that by deliberately offending the 99+% instead?

Even if that person was your boss, or your CEO @DinosaurBaby ?

This is absolutely true. Not to mention the odious 'cis' prefix is highly offensive to me, I've been mis identified by calling me cis woman, who do I complain to!

Yup.

If the pronouns were in the signature on a work email, how would you know if it was because it was company policy or whether they were including them of their own accord, @peanutbuttertoasty ?

We need to be asking why? Every single time.

Why has this agenda so successfully infiltrated society so far it’s in the realms of thought crime everywhere? Whose agenda is it? Because you can bet your bottom dollar Frank who used to sneakily wear his wife’s frilly knickers to work in the 1980s has no masterminded a takeover of education, corporate life, or politics and the media.

So who has and why??? We need to keep asking these questions. I suspect it has very little to do with Frank and his mates.

So who has and why??? We need to keep asking these questions. I suspect it has very little to do with Frank and his mates.

I'd be very interested as well to know who masterminded this - and their actual intentions.

Considering that a 4yo child can quite clearly tell the difference between a man and a woman - and would giggle a lot at a huge hairy bloke with a deep voice asking "am I your mummy?" whilst just replying "No, you aren't" if another woman asked the child the same question - it must have been a deliberate plan by an intelligent adult(s) to be able to gain social purchase with this: intelligent enough to know that it makes no sense, but also intelligent enough to persist in gaslighting people that it does nevertheless.

I think it’s as simple as this - the trans movement is driven by men. They have a sense of entitlement that they must be taken seriously and everyone must play along. If the driving force in the trans movement were women, or if you prefer trans men, it would be given absolutely no quarter and they would remain an obscure sub culture that no one really cared about too much. Some of these trans identifying men are now very wealthy and powerful (though the most prominent I can think of were ALL men who lived the majority of their lives as men and built their success as being men, funny enough not a bloke in heels) and as vast money buys vast influence, they are now in a position with a more open society to force people to have to indulge their delusions. They have to get people to buy in to the idea that a gender identity is innate and that you can be born in the wrong body or to paraphrase Ricky gervais people would be rightly laughing at how ridiculous the concept is. Powerful men won’t countenance being laughed at.

I think it’s as simple as this - the trans movement is driven by men. They have a sense of entitlement that they must be taken seriously and everyone must play along.

But which men in particular, though? (I don't just mean 'transwomen'). The vast, vast majority of men are not only perfectly happy being men, but they are very often really quick to speak up quite decisively when 'something doesn't seem right' in this way.

The vast majority of men are very far from content to see/discover other males expecting to use the same toilets and changing rooms as their wives and daughters; and meanwhile, there's an alarming number of women who defend the practice.

What I'm saying is: the vast, vast majority of people of both sexes do not believe that males using female-only spaces is acceptable, and would always (until recently, at least) have spoken out against it with near-unanimous assertive 'well, this is obviously not to be tolerated' assurance. So how did this ever gain sufficient traction to capture so many influential people in the first place? Was it indeed the pronouns thing, coupled with the assumption of 'well, it doesn't do any harm to humour them' that originally pushed open the tiny crack that is now a huge international chasm?

There are some very, very wealthy and influential individuals behind this. Look up Jennifer Pritzker for one.

Also look up the Denton report, as a manifesto of how to effect a power grab behind the scenes.

one if my friends is transgender , she has been for many years. She was before I met her so to me she is a she because that’s how I was introduced to her. We’ve spoken many times about this. She works in a very male dominated profession and many know her as the man she was before and refer to her as he and she says it doesn’t bother her in the slightest.

I'd have told her to take a running jump. I'm not going to have my speech compelled by people who consider themselves liberal and awake to issues of discrimination and yet at the same time are more than happy to trample over women as though they don't exist and who are verging on fascist in their political leanings. These days if you absolutely don't kowtow to the latest ideological warfare you'll get cancelled and receive massive abuse online. Possibly lose your job like Maya.

We all know non binary is a load of rubbish. Because no one is absolutely 100 per cent stereotypically male or female, with completely stereotypical male or female attributes and pastimes. It's just desperate attention seeking, look how special I am, I'm not like other people. Well yes, yes you are. Calling yourself non binary won't make you any more special or individual.

And as for Sam Smith, well the less said about that idiot the better. Oh except he nicked his outfit from David Bowie.

Yes to doing away with harmful gender stereotypes, no to these awful, self righteous bullies who think they are on the right side of history but are actually just mini dictators who enjoy telling others off.

Absolutely.

BenCoopersSupportWren

Thanks - will check those out.

@FlirtsWithRhinos apologies for stalking you on this thread. I need to ask you something, (nothing serious!) Is there any chance you can PM me?

Thanks

Boiled

Tbh I’m fed up of the appropriation of the term gender - it’s been used for thousands of years within escoteric and initiatory spirituality. It is a facet of all things - to be balanced.

I hate to quote the Kybalion (those who know know) but this is a good summary of gender how it should be used

"Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes."

masculine has been used for thousands of years to indicate the active and feminine the receptive.

it has zero to do with sex.

To be spiritually either/or is unbalanced the whole point of most escoteric practices is to balance the two. It’s why most mythologies have a make Sun god and female Luna goddess. It’s shown in the alchemical Rebis.

People take sacred stuff and fuck it up with stupidity and ignorance.

Yet another attack on a group that’s been persecuted throughout history.

just be aware if you use the concept of gender you’re harmfully misappropriating spiritual concepts and abusing them for your own ends.

masculine has been used for thousands of years to indicate the active and feminine the receptive

yes indeed for thousands of years, layer upon layer of inbuilt misogynistic stereotypical vocabulary, dressed up in fancy form - Jeez give me strength, when will it ever end.

The descriptors "active" for men, but "receptive" aka passive/weak/waiting for permission to breathe from men, for women, sexist stereotypical undertones right there.

Exactly. Sex is intrinsic to a person.

There seem to be a group of people that get offended on other's behalf... I'm fine with apologising to someone if I've offended them, but 'these' people are just attention-seekers that need to get a life.

If someone has told you how they wish to be referred to, it should be 100% respected. If you don't know them, an accident.

Better still in my opinion is to call them by their name.

I cant deal with the cognitive dissonance

Using they for a neutral and unknown individual causes no problems because you don't have any knowledge of the person or anything in mind when speaking - eg the situation 'Someone has left their bag. I hope we can return it to them' is
easy to say because we have the idea of a person, a individual, an otherwise blank 'human shaped space' and its fairly easy to use sex neutral terms for this.

To swap 'they/them/theirselves in for sex based terms when we have interacted with the individual and have a clear idea in our mind what sex they are and thus would be naturally using the gendered pronouns of our native language takes a
mental work because we have to consciously overcome the dissonance of it - and using neopronouns is also very difficult for this reason. Im sure someone has linked in the thread to the Pronouns are Rohypnol article, posted by a very astute mumsnetter years ago, comparing it to the mental 'stutter' you get when doing the Stroop test.

Ive noticed some colleages from the Philippines who have English as a second language very often use male pronouns for everyone especially in pressured situations- not because of any personal animosity or concious deliberation but because their first language does not use gendered pronouns and so the fluency of the shift between sex based pronouns doesn't come as naturally to them. Discussing it with some of them, it takes not only understanding of the grammar rules but also an extra mental step to remember how and when to use it.

I'm also an adult learner of a second language (I count as 'fluent' eg I use my second language every day dealing with the public, have passed the required immigration and work permit certification exams to the highest level) and recognise the problem - it still takes a lot of conscious effort to remember all grammatical rules, sentence constructions, verb forms, formal and informal pronoun rules, and use them correctly while also understanding and responding to the person and situation in front of you when its not your mother tounge- its certainly not impossible but theres definitely extra mental load, especially when learning, and to be honest this makes me very forgiving of language slip ups and errors. There are always social and emotional consequences of speaking imperfectly/inappropriately/being judged or scolded/feeling that you have caused offense when learning a language and interacting with the cultural and social rules of another society.

Unfortunately this is apparently the end game with insisting on the use of dissonant pronouns, like in the OP, where not using the prescribed pronouns about a third person could have no consequences for that third person who would never hear or know of it without being informed by those having the conversation. So in this context the policing of the language becomes about something else, not offense but alliance and social power, signalling compliance to a particular political ideology, signalling conformity, and as an act of social dominance from the person doing the correction/shaming/criticism.

Its worth reading the Vaclav Havel essay 'The Power of the Powerless

'Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.'

I had some training yesterday by two people I couldn't talk too or write too, they put up slides and we couldn't see them.
They did have female names and sounded female. They introduced themselves as female and said our pronouns are she and her.

I was astonished. Why on earth did they need to tell us that?? I couidnt speak to them or communicate directly?