Calling my unborn baby they/them

[Irish24]

I am keeping the gender a surprise and the amount of people that are confused when I refer to the baby as they/them’ is starting to aggravate me. I don’t like referring to them as ‘it’ or just ‘baby’. They/them is a word and has been going around for centuries. It also is a singular pronoun and does not always mean multiple. My friends say they can’t get their head around it. I don’t understand. I know they/them is a controversial topic these days and more people are perhaps finding out the gender. I still don’t find it confusing at all and it never even occurred to me that it would be. Anyone else experienced this or am I being over dramatic here? It’s just tiresome having to constantly explain to people, I don’t know the gender so that’s why I’m calling the baby ‘them/they’

Cross-posted @CatCaretaker 😁

TBH I'm not going to take anyone seriously who uses the term 'wokerati' unironically and thinks that the plural of 'baby' is 'babys'.

😂

I honestly think that quite a few posters on here don't know what "pronoun" means or why they're useful!

I don't think people are confused. They just don't like it or the feeling that now goes along with making a point of using 'they/them'. Just as you don't like using 'it', 'baby', or 'he or she'.

You can use whatever words you like, of course, but apparently the people you interact with find it off-putting, so you'll just have to grit your teeth until everyone knows the sex of your baby.

Good luck OP when your baby is born and you will become forever known as nameless 'Mum' in any kind of clinical setting. I'll be eagerly anticipating the thread.

Really? Your friends are confused and you are aggravated by something so trivial? You sound hard work by insisting on not calling it what it is (a baby), and they sound a bit dense.

That's just not true at all. People use 'they' all the time in normal everyday language.

This is just a combo of pedants and the anti trans brigade getting on their high horses.

Also, with ref to Equal Marriage Act UK, there is no definition of adultery between same sex couples so Woolf's affairs with other women would not count as adultery now and presumably not then either, only an affair with another man. Wasn't Vita Sackville-West her lover?

You’re a proud pedantic or a proud pedant ?

Insisting on not using a noun multiple times in a conversation which would be weird and stilted is not hard work.

And given the responses on this thread, I can imagine why OP finds the reactions of people who seem incapable of understanding grammar through the prism of anything other than owning the wokes irritating.

Yes, you can use 'them' for a person(s) of indeterminate sex i.e. you don't know it (what sex is Evelyn?) or cannot recognise sex from a distance (i.e. modern people wearing trousers and a helfty jacket - at a distance difficult to determine sex).

😂

The only point of this is to cause an argument, its obviously confusing to use they/them out of context and makes it seem like multiples. They is not blanket applicable as a singular term so if you use language incorrectly people will misunderstand you.

It's not a gender debate either, I was team green in all 4 of my pregnancies but its just annoying to look for drama. Just come up with a nickname, thats what most people team green or not.

That seventeenth century bod was talking clap-trap at the time, since 'thou' was going out of use, mainly because it was considered insulting, as it implies an inferior person as well as someone intimate. 'You' is the second person plural but people use 'thou' to God - because God is an intimate friend not a distant idea.
Seventeenth century bod is actually complaining that he/she is being called out on designating people as 'thou' as in 'thou knave', by describing the use of 'you' (the plural) as flattery. And can do this because 'you' is also the formal term of address e.g. to a king, or great lord or lady, to whom 'thou' would be an insult from an inferior. 'thou' = 'tu' and 'you' = 'vous' in French (and 'usted' in Spanish). The use of 'you' to everyone is one of the causes of saying that the English are over-formal i.e. we address everyone with the formal pronoun 'you' and never with the informal pronoun 'thou' (except God - and that's a whole other discussion).

Agreed! This was also true when I was at school in the 1970s.
I am astonished people think 'they' is only for plural use, or that using it for a single individual is being obtuse. If you use the word 'obtuse' then I am pretty sure you know the OP's use of 'they' is perfectly normal.

But OP hasn't used language incorrectly.

And saying something like 'The baby has really started kicking. They've been keeping me up all night.' isn't confusing at all to anyone who speaks English fluently and is not being deliberately obtuse.

I would never call an unborn baby 'it'. They is much more sensible.

This..am i being a bit thick but if you know why can't everyone else know ? Why does it matter. Its either one or the other

Read the op, keeping the gender (sex!) a secret

Well, if we believe the post that multiple people are outright telling OP that what she is saying is confusing then she MUST be using language incorrectly. When everyone is raising an issue its not the whole world conspiring against you people are telling you something.

The only other logical assumption is that no one is saying this and OP has posted on mumsnet to be dramatic and cause arguments (because mumsnet loves a good pearl clutching over gender stuff) and in which case its worked, 32 pages of attention.

The assertion that ‘they’ can’t be used when talking about an unborn baby whose gender we don’t know isn’t pedantic, it’s wrong.

This debate isn’t pendants vs slapdash grammarians, or gender criticals vs wokes. It is literally those who are right vs those who aren’t. Everyone can have their own opinions but this isn’t an opinion situation.

But whether language is used correctly or not isn't judged by whether people find it confusing, it's determined by whether the language is used correctly or not.

Referring to a baby whose sex is not known as 'they' is objectively a correct use of language. That fact isn't invalidated because some people don't understand grammar.

Fraid you are - no one else knows what sex the baby is because OP doesn’t.

Is the cute little princess now happy with her five minutes of glory???
Drop that pigheadedness at once and just think for a second: you can't expect people not to be amused or confused if you start using the language in a way that no one else follows. The English language isn’t some bloody Mr Potato Head you can twist and tweak however you fancy.

There really are some strange people around OP. It’s perfectly normal to refer to your baby as they/ them, same as we all use the same pronoun in a singular every day. Don’t listen to people trying to make it a big deal.