Do you support transitioning at all?

[UnlockedXCX]

I somewhat do, I will admit. I think it's okay if an adult wants to take hormones, dress as they'd like to, be treated as M or F, or even change their name. I'll respect it all. However I don't agree with them being allowed into single sex spaces or conversations (a gay trans person is functionally a straight person, despite what they say, and a gay FtM shouldn't try to date gay guys for example).

I question if this is a common view or is it niche in these more gender critical spaces.

What's your view on a new entirely gender neutral singular pronoun like "ze"?

They are nonsense words. We already have specific pronouns that we ask people to use to refer to us - our names. He/she/Them/I/You etc are used in speech to avoid using that specific word (their name) to refer to someone. The pronoun used is used to help others who also don’t know the name of the person you are referring to, or as a short-hand instead of a name, identify who we are referring to. Random collections of letters like ‘ze’ are just another form of name so it would be better to simply use their name if you remember/know it. If you don’t remember their name, why would you remember their pseudonym?

This. Languages evolve when an innovation catches on, and that will usually be because it's useful (e.g. in preventing ambiguity) or "cool". You can't impose it from above.

TBF singular "they" is useful, and that's why it has caught on in certain contexts - along with the fact that it's not a made-up word like "ze". But its usefulness is very much hampered by the difficulty in differentiating singular and plural.

Actually I would be in favour of the introduction of a set of universal 3rd-person-singular pronouns that come to be used for all humans regardless of gender/sex. We can still know who the men are for the purposes of privacy, decency and fairness and no one should have to declare their gender beliefs for normal human interaction.

I don't like using singluar they, although I will in some circumstances, but a pronoun is supposed to fully substitute for the name in a sentence.

"Please can you ask Peter if Peter eats chocolate cake and if Peter wants sugar in his tea when Peter comes to visit. I think Peter has a sweet tooth, doesn't he?""
Maps directly to
"Please can you ask Peter if he eats chocolate cake and if he wants sugar in his tea when he comes to visit? I think he has a sweet tooth, doesn't he?"

• the pronoun replaces repeated instances of the name but no other grammar changes.

However if you use They/Them it's
"Please can you ask Ziam if they eat chocolate cake and if they want sugar in their tea when they come to visit. I think they have a sweet tooth, don't they?""

• all the verbs have started taking plural forms so the pronouns are not doing the job correctly.

If we adopted a universal unisex pronoun then you could say

"Please can you ask Peter if ze eats chocolate cake and if ze wants sugar in hir tea when ze comes to visit? I think ze has a sweet tooth, doesn't ze?" - and then it is doing the pronoun job correctly and the sentence is exactly the same if the person referred to is Anne or Ziam

I would like this because while I don't mind using they/them occasionally, I construct my sentences very carefully to avoid having to use opposite-sex pronouns which feels like lying.

When Ms became popular as a title I liked it because shops and other businesses really don't need to know if a woman is married or not to do business with her, especially when they don't ask a man.

In a similar way, I don’t think we should be centring our belief or not in anyone's gender identity if we are just referring to them in casual conversation unrelated to the entirely legitimate circumstances when their sex is relevant and important. Starting to use ze/zir for everyone regardless of gender identity or absence thereof would achieve this, in a similar way to addressing a female teacher as Ms Smith by default without checking if she'd technically be Mrs or Miss.

It is delusional. People can dress as they want and have whatever hobbies and names they want but the whole idea of changing “gender” is based on stereotypical nonsense so people are free to say they have changed “ gender”and the rest of us are free to say “ don’t be so daft”

I mean, they can adopt whatever ‘gender’ they like, because gender is a social construct that’s actually pretty meaningless.

they can’t change sex though.

But the whole point of using he and she is identification. We all know who is male and who is female which is why we even have male and female pronouns. Dividing humans by sex is the most basic and instinctive thing to do. Hence pronouns are sex based to make use of that and narrow down the identification of the subject where no other information is known.

Actually quite a fair few languages have gender neutral pronouns, either as an alternative or a complement to them. tā can mean 'he' or 'she' (or even 'it' for non-human objects) in Mandarin.

There's some evidence generally that the less gendered the language the lower the gender divide. As I said, as well having to use he or she often becomes he in certain texts or is very arduous to write he/she.

Of course we have "they" but the trouble is that then becomes both singular and plural which increases the likelihood of misunderstandings.

Also in Hungarian, where ő means either he or she, though it's usually dropped entirely with third person verbs.

This has never stopped Magyars knowing what sex any given person is.

I suspect that we and future generations of English speakers will continue to find singular "they" useful, and the plural form of the verbs will gradually become less jarring. This is more or less what happened with "you" (and originally also "ye"), which took on the function of the formal singular 2pers pronoun (like "vous"), and then eventually supplanted the original singular pronoun "thou". When we say "you are", we're using the same plural form of the verb as in "we are", but we don't think of it as weird when we're addressing just one person. And yes, sometimes it's confusing to have the same form for singular and plural, but this is why colloquial alternative plurals have evolved, like "youse" and "y'all".

I think it's much more likely that "they" will continue to evolve in this way, rather than "ze" catching on. I haven't noticed my kids' generation using "ze".

I also think we will continue to use "he" and "she", because gendered pronouns are useful. When we construct simple narratives, such as jokes ("The actress said to the bishop ...") or didactic examples ("Bob has four apples and Alice has five oranges ..."), we often deliberately create a male and a female protagonist just so that we can refer to them as "he" and "she" and then nobody can get confused.

I am so going to regret typing all that once I sober up.

Linguistically 'they' is a newcomer in English; it was imported from Scandinavia in the 13th century when the native, old English, third person plural, 'hie', lost its phonetic distinction due to sound change. From the very beginning it was also used as the 3rd person singular when the gender of the individual in question was unknown. For example: "I saw an individual approaching me on the street one dark night, they stopped under a streetlamp and I could tell it was a young woman, about 5' 10"; she was carrying a lightly filled shopping bag." The proscription against using it in a third person singular sense was an artificial imposition by grammarians in the same way as to-not-split-infinitives and proposition-stranding were; in the vernacular the usage continued uninterrupted to today.

The problem with using 'they' as a singular is that there are special rules - once sex can be established, you should switch to the gender pronoun she/he. That moment usually corresponds to when you know the name of someone, i.e. you're referring to a specific, known person. 'They' sounds unnatural when you continue using it when the person is known, as though you've introduced another party into the conversation, undetected due to careless reading.

Given that, 'ze' is not attempting to correct a grammatical deficiency in the English language, we already have 'they', it's attempting to correct a perceived cultural backwardness, namely that an individual should be able to keep their sex a private mater, and that you should only use gendered pronouns to refer to people if you know you have their permission - thus the mania for declaring pronouns. 'Ze' refers to a person for whom you don't have that permission. Since 'ze' never really caught on, nor is it likely to, the use of 'they' has expanded, and it's increasingly common to see it used in the above capacity that 'ze' was proposed for, for which it has the added advantage of making the tendentious works in which it appears even more performative and obscure.

Fascinating, thank you!

@BeLemonNow "There's some evidence generally that the less gendered the language the lower the gender divide."

I would be genuinely interested in this evidence if you have links.

Edited to add: By "the lower the gender divide" I assume you mean the narrower the division between the sexes?

Also, 'they' singular is used as an indefinite pronoun.

When it's used to refer to a particular person, it gives the impression that they aren't really there.

I would have no problem with a gender neutral third person pronoun, but I don't know how you introduce it in a way that doesn't seem forced.

From what I remember it took a while for 'Ms' to bed in.

No.
You cannot change biology.

Although I do believe that everyone should be able to dress how they want without stigma from stereotypes. If stereotypes were completely erased, trans wouldn't exist.

"However there is plenty evidence of humans are born with innate beliefs, or however described, to help them navigate their environment - I.e. gravity, object permanence."

I was very much under the impression that babies AREN'T born with object permanence, and that it develops over time.

Animals are born with instinctive behaviours, but I don't think an instinct can be classified as a belief. I think a belief has to be abstract.

There seems to be a gap between the kind of instinctive behaviours that would logically be linked to sex e.g. a female cat instinctively knowing what to do with a kitten - and behaviours and feelings that are supposed to be linked to gender identity in humans.

Object permanence is one of the developmental stages for infants if I remember correctly.

It is strange to see it used to prop up identity theory.

And gravity is real, observable and unchangeable. I didn’t understand how it was comparable at all to identity theory either.

and originally also "ye"

”ye” is “thee” where þ was written to look like a modern day y

Object permanence is developed between 4 and 7 months old. It is why infants can get so distressed when their mother leaves the room.

Gravity is also something learnt through experience - a baby is not aware how hard they will hit the floor if they roll off a changing table. And young children often get upset when they can’t get impossible towers of toys to stand.

Stating these are innate beliefs just shows how little understanding or interest transactivists have in children or child development.

https://melindawmoyer.substack.com/p/debunking-the-maternal-instinct

And apparently there isn't consensus on maternal instinct either.

Another problem with the theory that people are born with an innate belief about their sex, is that the evolution of the idea that one might be the wrong sex is so directly linked to the development of hormonal and surgical gender to treat the problem.

I don't mean "ye" as in "Ye olde coffee shoppe", etc., which is certainly a misreading of a late and loopy version of the thorn character, as you say. (The word misread was the determiner "the", not the pronoun "thee".)

I mean "ye" as in "Ye holy Angels bright", i.e. the older nominative version of plural "you" (from Old English "ge" and "eow").

I also don't mean "Ye" as in the musical artist formerly known as Kanye West, but that probably goes without saying.

I'm not a trans activist and my mention of this has nothing to do with them.

Innate beliefs is a concept in the philosophy of mind and these are specific examples from psychology of which there are evidence from... it doesn't mean a child doesn't develop the abilities at a certain stage of their development.

I've also been clear there no evidence as far as I am aware that self awareness of sex is innate but it's possible.

I am genuinely starting to feel like many posters on here are anti trans.

I am genuinely starting to feel like many posters on here are anti trans.

Why? Because we don't believe that someone can genuinely 'feel' that they are not the sex that they materially are? Have you posted a logically and scientifically based, coherent description of what being transgender is?

And as a philosophical belief that is not reflective of material reality, why should the group with that belief have additional privileges available to them that is not available to other groups?

I can see how object permanence could be viewed as an innate skill because it depends on brain development.

However, what would be the point of having an innate sense of sex that is distinct from your physical sex? What would be the evolutionary pathway and how would you define this sense in an objective way?

It was mentioned as a possibility. I guess the argument would be the advantage of having an innate belief in what your genuine sex is alongside how to have sex with the opposite sex to reproduce would make you more likely to reproduce.

That would then create the possibility that something could go awry with that process (perhaps to do with cross sex hormones) and someone could have the belief or part of it that is female - based on certain neural pathways as all beliefs are - despite being biologically male.

The rough idea - from what I remember - is that these innate "quick tricks" about how the world work prepare the infant for survival. I think Daniel Dennett is a good read on the evolutionary pathway which I can't remember .