Do pronouns feel alien to anyone else?

[janeseymour78]

By this, I mean I have friends who are 100% pro pronouns as a show of support and we've had our debates, and then there are others who say it is unhealthy to reinforce stereotypes, eg. By using them on work signatures

For me though, adding she/her pronouns to everything and even having being asked what they are verbally, she/her feels alien to me in a visceral way. I'm curious about this because I have several friends who don't share that feeling at all.

Im GC and I don't believe people are binary. I have elements of feminity and masculinity that whatever else that form who I am. I know I'm a woman, I have endometriosis so I'm painfully aware, as well as all the other reasons women are made aware of their sex.

It comes down to adding 'she/her' to everything would not feel right to me, as though it didn't reflect me. It would like I was falsely reinforcing my womanhood when I don't live my life that way or feel that way. Am I making sense? Do others feel this way?

*ride around the world

@SeldomHere look at what is happening in America - abortion rights and birth control rights being taken away from women. This is an attack on women. Can't you see how not being able to name the problem would be a disaster?

There are 2 sexes. Male and female.
The male sex (humans this is) are boys who grow into men.
The female sex humans are girls who grow into women.

So you're a woman. Your daughter is a girl. You are both female.

Gender is... something or other. A feeling inside maybe. Stereotypes like girls like pink, boys like blue. No one can ever actually define it.
Or, imo, a load of nonsense.

I don't and won't use pronouns.

I have colleagues and friends who do and I support their choice to do so. I choose not to.

Wonder how nonbinary people express their special status in languages which don't have separate male and female third person singular pronouns? Much harder, I would think.

@IstayedForTheFeminism

I agree.

My niece is a female. She is a lesbian. She loves blue and football. She doesn’t want to change sex though and turn into a male 🫤. It is all incredibly bizarre.

A question for Seldom >
So what is your opinion about what happens in a language where inanimate objects, such as chairs and tables have a grammatical gender? In English, i say ‘ have you seen my handbag? I thought it was on the table.’ In French though ‘ avez vous vu mon sac? Je crois qu’il était sur la table ‘.

So the handbag is using male pronouns, and the table, should it reply protesting its innocence, would be female ? How do the social constructs about your gender identity work when chairs and tables use them too?

Also in French, certain professions and occupations have defined gender conjunctions. A baker and a schoolteacher are always defined using the masculine formation. If you are a trans woman and a teacher, how do you cope with being known as a professeur? ( un) toujours.

I see how anti-trans GC rhetoric actively empowers those taking away abortion rights and birth control from women.

You didn't answer my question. People always choose the evidence that supports their arguments, like Katy has done here - there are a lot of GC people with reasonable views on abortion out there.

I think this only supports the argument that pronouns are socially constructed rather then "biological"?

I'm not French so I imagine a French trans person would have more to say about this, but the idea that gender pronouns being strictly "sex-based" always struck me as ridiculous for this exact reason.

@Sunquench
> My niece is a female. She is a lesbian. She loves blue and football. She doesn’t want to change sex though and turn into a male.

I don't understand why you think "trans activists" believe she should.

If she's happy being a girl who plays football, it's okay for her to be a girl who plays football. If she'd rather be a boy, he should be free to be a boy.

That's all we're saying, that's all we're asking for. To give people the option to choose.

This whole argument is just GC people projecting the same strawman on us over and over, despite us objecting every single time.

The Republican Party in the US has tried to overturn Roe v. Wade since the day that decision was published. What gender critical women do or say today is irrelevant in understanding what is going on in the US.

The people pushing it are the right-wing Christians in the base of the Republican Party, and they have worked on this for many decades.

If she'd rather be a boy, he should be free to be a boy.
Except it's not possible to change sex. The problem is, as observed by many staff at the Tavistock, that homophobic parents are bringing their children in because they'd rather have a trans child than a gay child. The way you're implying people simply pick and choose their sex is a nonsense, as well as not showing the slightest understanding about the social context for the reason young males and females are claiming a trans identity for themselves at an unprecedented rate at this current moment in time, and in addition why many middle-aged transvestites are suddenly claiming to be literally female - because they are being celebrated as 'stunning and brave' rather than perverts. Again, I suggest further reading as you don't seem to be able to refute any of the points being made with any kind of arguments or evidence, you just revert back to name-calling and baseless accusations.

How is GC women voting for the Republican party to "reign in the trans agenda", empowering Republicans to achieve those goals, irrelevant?

The fact that conservative Christians are spearheading this doesn't change the fact that GC women bleeding over to the conservative side helps them succeed.

This is a British site, we don't get to vote in American elections, and we're mainly left-wing.

If she'd rather be a boy, he should be free to be a boy.

Why did you change the pronouns, if they are not connected to sex role stereotypes?

@penpalgal
> Except it's not possible to change sex.

1. We're talking about changing gender, not changing sex.

1. Sex actually can be altered to some extent through hormones and surgery.

> that homophobic parents are bringing their children in because they'd rather have a trans child than a gay child

This is nonsense. Homophobic parents are near universally also transphobic, and the opposite is usually true; trans people often have their parents ask them things like "can't you just be gay?", when it actually isn't the same thing at all.

Nature doesn’t give us the option to choose. I’d rather have smaller boobs than the melons I’ve got, but hey ho … having seen what a mastectomy looks like, and having more pressing concerns than a breast reduction, I manage with what I’ve got.

Circular arguments, ad hominems - I’d hoped that I might find something to enlighten me from the genderist viewpoint, but there’s really nothing there, is there? Shame.

I can see what they would think that, but that's because they haven't thought about it in depth. They just think 'I have no problem with my identity, therefore my pronouns are x/x'. What a lot of them don't realise is that by playing along, they are opting into an ideology that reinforces gender steroptypes rather than sees the complexity. If they are a woman, and say they are she/her, they are opting into the idea that 'woman' is a gender only, and that it means liking high heels and fluffy kittens.

If she'd rather be a boy, he should be free to be a boy.
Except it's not possible to change sex.

And this is why we are told that the definition of us must now be changed to some pure abstract gender identity which is like a religious belief in that it is not falsifiable but everybody is ordered to have one and if they have not transitioned they are ordered to have the 'cis' belief.

It's not possible to change sex, the demographic group which most people still call 'women' is discriminated on the basis of sex and in some places in the world legally oppressed on that basis, and that demographic group has the right to name itself.

Currently some work hard to get that right removed. It's not the worst thing that is caused by the gender identity ideology, but it is the foundational problem with it, because it is not possible to change sex and it is not really possible to transition out of that sex-based mistreatment, yet we are asked to relinquish our ability to fight the sex-based mistreatment. That is an unacceptably high price to pay.

I'm not the one who brought up American politics here, so…

@penpalgal

Wow, that’s fascinating the Tavistock have picked up on that. Somebody like my niece could be so easily manipulated into thinking she was born into the wrong sex!!!

Nar…. She’s just a butch lesbian. Nothing more to it. She describes herself as a butch female who fancies other females.

That's all we're saying, that's all we're asking for. To give people the option to choose.

You like analogies. Should I have the "option to choose" my chronological age? I don't want to be in my 40s, I want to be considered retirement age and collect my pension. I identify as being 25 or so years older than the boring rigid chronological time society has imposed on me with its constructs. Will that be ok?

If she'd rather be a boy, he should be free to be a boy.

But she can't be a boy. She can wear "boys" clothes. She can play football from noon until night. Heck She can even use a "boys" name for all I'd care. But she can't actually be a boy, any more than she can be a cat.