Do pronouns actually belong to anyone?

[JellySlice]

The only pronouns that an individual can have claim upon are the first person pronouns "I" and "me".

What right does an individual have to claim the third person pronouns that are shared between people and dictate their use?

Yes.
They belong to the speaker.

We each own our own speech. We don't own the words from someone else's mouth.

What right does an individual have to claim the third person pronouns that are shared between people and dictate their use?
None. Surely the point of third person pronouns is short hand for a talking to b about c. Provided a & b can understand who is being referred to I dont understand what it has to do with c.

Excellent point Jelly

The thing that bothers me most about all this newspeak is the forcing of counter-intuitive pronouns.
As well as forcing me to say something I don't believe, such as this man is a "she", it forces me to momentarily suspend reality, as if a man can ever actually be a "she".

This belief in self-identity can't overwrite what I see and identify there in front of me, and it's not right to force people to deny their own reality.

We have a useful gender-neutral 3rd person singular, though referring to humans as "it" is considered offensive, while the plural, "they", is not offensive.

(I wonder what pronouns GC people use in languages which lack any gender-neutral pronouns.)

Anyone know? How do GC people avoid using an untrue pronoun in gender inflected languages?

How do GC people avoid using an untrue pronoun in gender inflected languages?

I'd probably just use the masculine pronoun for a man or the feminine pronoun for a woman. Why make it more complicated than that? Or do you mean in a situation like Mumsnet where pronouns are mildly censored? Could just do the old 'no pronouns, just repeat their name over and over' trick.

Or do you mean in a situation like Mumsnet where pronouns are mildly censored?

No languages like Turkish and Finnish don't use he or she, they use a "human" it. Gender is suggested by usage and proximity depending on relevance. You can however be an arse and use the "object" it if you want to be insulting.

My second language only uses the neuter pronoun, equivalent of 'it', to refer to humans when you have first used a neuter noun (e.g. the word for child). You can't use it for a named person, it's just as rude as it would be in English.

The pronouns are mine, all mine. Even the ones I don't want. And especially the ones I use about you.

In Finnish it's common to say "it" rather than he or she if you're not sure, I'm told, and nobody cares, it's not understood in the same way you'd say "it" meaning an object in English. In German I guess you could use es (neuter) or man (impersonal, like our "one") but I have no experience of that in use so I may be wrong.

This is interesting: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender

The only time I would use pronouns is when 'I am talking about you, not to you' so why does it really matter. I have enough trouble remembering names, pushing luck to get me to remember pronouns too.

The whole re-writing of languages is bonkers. We can't rewrite them to appease a few.

We also have adjectives that decline according to the gender of the noun, so it's really hard to talk about people without defining them as male or female. Some people who call themselves non-binary like to use neuter adjectives about themselves, which is a really new thing in the language. Neuter adjectives would generally only be for people in the case of neuter nouns, like 'the child is x'.

There's also a new gender neutral pronoun that people are trying to get going, but it's not the same as 'they' because it's not really neutral, it's a pronoun that means 'this person calls themselves non-binary'. Nobody would ever use it in the case of 'I went to the doctor' - 'Oh, what did they say?' like we do in English.

We also have adjectives that decline according to the gender of the noun, so it's really hard to talk about people without defining them as male or female.

Same here and almost every word in the sentence reflects the person's sex. (Pronouns, articles, nouns, adjectives, participles...) Also all given names are either male or female, never ambiguous.

It's impossible to get around it. Still waiting on them coming up with a whole new grammatical class for non-binary...