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’

Most of the posters disagreeing do understand I think. They see the title of your thread and are outraged as they think you mean something else, post before they've read the thread, then try to save face by insisting that they'd use "the baby" multiple times in a conversation rather than using "they/them".

"They" is an impersonal pronoun. The OP's usage is correct and anyone arguing that it's not is just letting their ignorance show.

Okay, but say you didn’t choose to find the sex out early, and you didn’t have such a strong conviction that your baby was a boy before that.

What would you have used then?

Using ‘he’ as the default pronoun when you don’t know (or are convinced of) the sex is considered sexist these days.

Repeating a name in a sentence too many times definitely sounds jarring.
“I met Mary today. Mary said that Mary was going on holidays with Mary’s husband next week and could we mind Mary’s cat until Mary gets back?”

"That said. I believe trans women are women."

Every cell in a trans woman's body is male, @GrammarTeacher, and there is no medical or surgical treatment that can change that. Biology is fact.

Using ‘he’ as the default pronoun when you don’t know (or are convinced of) the sex is considered sexist these days.

Since when is using 'he' sexist?

Congratulations 🎊 welcome to motherhood. This is the start of many things to come. Pick your battles wisely.

If the person you’re talking about could be male or female - you don’t know - it’s often better to use ‘they’ rather than ‘he’, surely?

“Someone forgot their umbrella. I’ll just leave it here and hopefully they’ll find it later.”

is better than

“Someone forgot his umbrella. I’ll just leave it here and hopefully he’ll find it later.”

Everyone use's they/them/it/he/she/boy/girl etc etc etc. I am sure I used all those pronouns when I was talking about my unborn baby. There is nothing confusing about using those pronouns. I think the op needs to pick her battles wisely or else she'll have 18 years of arguments.

When I was pregnant with my last child I paid for a baby scan and he told me I was having a boy. After pushing out 3 girls I was elated.

Everyone use's they/them/it/he/she/boy/girl etc etc etc. I am sure I used all those pronouns when I was talking about my unborn baby. There is nothing confusing about using those pronouns. I think the op needs to pick her battles wisely or else she'll have 18 years of arguments.

I agree about picking your battles wisely.

The problem OP has is that some of her friends apparently do misunderstand her when she uses ‘they’ as a singular pronoun, They do find it confusing and that is the problem she is posting about. I’m still not entirely sure why they find it confusing though, as ‘they’ has been used in this way for centuries.

Unlike you, I don’t think I referred to my baby as ‘he’ or ‘she’ before I knew their sex btw, but each to their own I guess.

I don't think you calling the baby they or them (I'm assuming don't say they/them together each time 🤞) at some points is wrong, but if its got to the point your friends are confused/annoyed by it I would say the way you are using it is coming across as pretentious. There is nothing wrong with saying "the baby".

Of course correct use of language is about the ability to be understood by others, communication does serve any purpose otherwise.

If all the people are confused by what you mean you are failing at using language correctly.

I am sure that when you were with your friends or coffee mornings with other parents someone tried to guess the sex of your baby. A friend of mine tried to guess from the size of my bump that I was having a boy it turned out I had a girl. Like I said I paid for a baby scan the consultant told me the sex of my baby so I used 'he' going forward. He was my fourth and the whole baby sparkle wore off.

The op is pregnant so everything that goes on around her is more magnified. Wait until she gives birth and the nurses critique her breastfeeding. I struggled with breastfeeding I was told by a stranger that I should be breastfeeding rather than expressing. That comment upset me at the time but he's here now and no harm was done. Sometimes you have to make sense of things and not take it so personal but pregnancy hormones does not help. All I can suggest to the op is enjoy her pregnancy and learn to ignore.

My bet is they are winding you up because they know you'll dwell on it.

Or possibly they are confused as ‘they’ as come to have an additional meaning more recently?

Reading OP’s posts it also seems that some of her friends are slightly annoyed/confused by her decision not to find out the sex at this stage rather than confused by the terminology she’s using.
She says they’re complaining it’s more difficult to buy gifts and so on.

The people who post on there are just members of the site like everyone else. If people don't agree they can post an alternative view surely? And I don't imagine for a moment anyone genuinely committed to furthering the interests of women is going to stop defining themselves as a feminist because of the views of some people on a board on MN. If that's all it takes to put them off they must have been pretty half hearted about it in the first place.

They're not just members of the site. They operate like a pack, and they dominate the board. Anybody who doesn't toe the party line is harassed until they give up or leave. It's actually classic bully behaviour.

You can live by feminism values and further the rights of women in society without loudly proclaiming yourself a feminist to the world. I fight for women's rights in several spheres and have had a large impact on policies affecting women in my workplace, but people like the posters on FWR are part of the reason I don't identify with the word feminist anymore. I am pro woman, I am not anything like those posters and don't want to be associated with that kind of behaviour in any way. I call myself a believer in equality and a promoter of women's rights to achieve that. Of course the posters on FWR don't stop people being feminists, to suggest you believe they do is silly. They put people off the label because they've dragged it's name through the mud as far as many reasonable people are concerned.

You're just wrong. 'They/them' has always been used when someone doesn't know what sex (as opposed to gender) someone is. I think you might have just got so embedded in the gender debate that you've lost sight of that.

Reading OP’s posts it also seems that some of her friends are slightly annoyed/confused by her decision not to find out the sex at this stage rather than confused by the terminology she’s using.
She says they’re complaining it’s more difficult to buy gifts and so on.

This comment above makes perfect sense. End of thread

Yeah OP is referring to her unborn child as they/them at every chance she can get you gotta start early don't you

FFS 🙄

I have teens and I think it was still less common then to find out the sex of the baby - probably because social media wasn't really I thing. We wanted the surprise and didn't find out.

I am sure we referred to the baby as 'them' rather than 'it' - although I can't be 100% certain.

They / them are perfectly correct singular pronouns when you don't know someone's sex (as well as when people choose to use those pronouns).

There is nothing wrong with saying "the baby".

Maybe it might help some people if think of they as a portmanteau of the baby?

They/them has been used forever to describe a singular person who you don't know the sex of. I don't understand people getting so het up over it. I have my own personal thoughts around people stating they are non binary and using they/them, it does become confusing in those instances.

My cousins girlfriend is non binary. 'They' are female, born female, present as female but pronouns are they, they also refer to themselves as my cousins GF. My cousin messaged to say that we couldn't go to the restaurant we had planned with his GF as they had cancelled. Who cancelled, the restaurant, the GF? The language just doesn't work. I still don't know who cancelled as I was too scared to cause offence if I asked.

However with unknown sex baby, surely you would probably say 'the baby is kicking, they kept me awake all night' and that would sound perfectly reasonable, not confusing in any way. Using it would work also. If you just said they kept me awake all night kicking no one would know who you meant (could be partner/dog/cat) or may well assume you meant twins. I don't understand how you would just use they or them without it getting confusing! That is not due to singular/plural confusion, purely due to the fact you aren't using they/them in context properly.

They/them is not, and never has been a singular pronoun.

The fact that some people use they when they don’t want to use he or she doesn’t make they singular

If course it has. If you have an email from someone called Sam, you dont know what sex they are, you may well say I had an email from Sam from XYZ, they said we need to give them a quote. I don't know whether to use he or she in this instance.

That's a perfectly normal way to speak. You wouldn't just keep repeating their name or call them it!

😂😂😂