My son's girlfriend and pronouns

[BootMaker]

I have a wonderful son, and he has a wonderful girlfriend who calls herself 'him'.

We had what I thought was a great conversation about performative femininity and there are many ways to be a woman.

But I don't think we did.

Sex is biological, unchangeable and binary. Yes, there are genetic and developmental situations where the binary blurs, but these are exceptions and not proof of how sex is not actually binary after all. We evolved down a long line of male / female mammalian ancestors. Simple as that.

Gender, however, is not a thing that can be objectively measured. It's a process. It's one of the main ways we interact with each other and with society. It's an ongoing negotiation between internal experiences and societal expectations, and is highly context dependent with different expressions in different situations.

It's not a fixed property of the human mind, waiting to be discovered. Different people experience it differently, and it doesn't live solely inside us. Our gender is a response to the world around us as well as a response to our own biology, and also our own sexuality. Some people feel at home inside their gender expectations. Some people fight to redefine what gender means. Others feel a deep mismatch between who they feel they are and what they feel their gender says they are.

Truth is, we don't really have a good conceptual grammar to understand gender properly. It doesn't really fit into the way we in the West understand human minds. There is no neat and tidy explanation that works from either the TRA or the GC position because our framing is too narrow.

Ok. And my take from OP is that regardless of her views or their validity, trying to lecture her son's trans partner about "the many ways to be a woman" is cringey and embarrassing behaviour, it'll be obvious to everyone why she brought the topic up, and she's naive if she thinks the partner doesn't already know this, or that the conversation will have any effect beyond embarrassing her son and making his partner feel awkward and berated.

Indeed...like "The Most Serene Highness, SadtimesinFife"...."Your Worship"... 😀

Those aren't pronouns.

I was thinking of using "They/Them/Lie and Appropriate".

Don't oppress me. It's how i choose to be addressed.

Ok, HSH, fact remains that's a title not a pronoun. It's amazing to be as fixated on a feature of grammar as GCs are with pronouns but then still get it wrong when you're required to produce an example of one.

Where does she say that she lectured them? She had a conversation with them. She’s entitled to state her opinions during conversations whether you think it’s cringy annd embarrassing or not. Personally, I find buying in to gender ideology is far more cringy and embarrassing.

If the nouns woman and man have no shared meaning then it follows that pronouns don’t either. Who are you to say what words people can use to describe themselves. We didn’t make the rules.

This is probably one of the most coherent explanations of the word "gender" (in relation to gender identity) that I've ever read.

I still don't believe that I, or anyone else, has a "gender identity" (instead I recognise that we all respond to sex-based societal expectations and limitations in different ways) but your description of gender as an explanation for this response reads really well.

Ultimately though, the idea of gender identity all comes down to each of us answering one question: "which set of sex-based stereotypes fits you best?" If it's variable, you're gender-fluid or non-binary, if it's mostly female stereotypes you're a "woman" and if it's mostly male you're a "man".... but all of that requires a belief in gender as an essence or soul that is present within each of us and is separate from the physical body. Some people believe we have this. Great, as long as they aren't imposing that belief onto others as fact, including vulnerable children and young adults, they can hold the belief that they have a gender identity of the opposite sex and live their lives happily doing so. Perhaps you do believe in it, perhaps not? This sentence could be read either way ⬇️

Different people experience it differently, and it doesn't live solely inside us.

I (and many others) don't believe that gender identity exists, so what those who believe in it can't do is force others to act as if it does e.g. going into changing rooms/loos or sports etc that align with their gender identity (where this is different from their sex).

But back to the OP, the son's partner clearly does believe in gender identity. The son too, presumably. I actually agree with the PPs above who say it will be unproductive challenging this directly. Whether that's with the son or the partner. That said, I wouldn't use the partner's preferred pronouns because that would involve me saying something I don't believe, just to keep the peace. Instead, I would avoid the topic and would avoid using any pronouns at all. If challenged I would explain that I don't believe in gender identity, but I'm being respectful of the son and partner's belief in it by not using pronouns and not debating the subject. If nothing but positive and active belief in the partner's identity is acceptable (to the son and partner) I would reluctantly, and with huge sadness, grieve the loss of the relationship and step away. No child or parent should ever use emotional blackmail to force the other to adopt their belief. It should be possible to believe different things, recognise that this is OK and find ways to focus on other things that are important within the family relationship.

Edited for typos and clarity.

OP seems to have disaapeared.

I would find this very, very hard op. I think I would end up avoiding all circumstances that require me to be coerced into using male pronouns when it’s pretty bloody obvious they’re a girl. I would find it absurd and insulting. But obviously you don’t want to hurt and alienate your son. I would just be as avoidant and non-committal for as long as I possibly could until they break up or grow up.

Just use their name at all times, not pronouns.

My DD has a lovely male flatmate who goes by they/them and a few confused trans friends. I just avoid pronouns altogether when talking about them and use their first name for all references. They are nice, but deluded, and I'm having no part of indulging or encouraging it.

I don't think your son's girlfriend is going to be interested in her boyfriend's mother's views on anything, including performative feminity. If she wants to tiddle around with her pronouns she can. No-one really thinks she's a bloke, including your son, but it's not your place to say anything to either of them.

ALthough you might want to make very sure your son understands that a pronoun change is not a form of contraception.

Language is organic, it changes, “rules” are transitionary.

Some languages don’t even have sex based pronouns, Finnish for example has hän for both he and she.

So who’s to say we can’t start a linguistic revolution and influence language fluidity by all using what we decree to be a new neopronoun, such as “Superior-intellect”. After all, new words are added and removed from dictionaries every year.

Behave

So who’s to say we can’t start a linguistic revolution and influence language fluidity by all using what we decree to be a new neopronoun, such as “Superior-intellect”. After all, new words are added and removed from dictionaries every year.

Time to abandon this thread. If anyone is still here when/if the OP comes back to clarify the original ask, please can someone @ me back in.

Until then, I'll sign off with a polite request that if it is necessary to refer to me in my absence, it is respectfully done with the neopronoun 'fireself' 🔥 Thank you.

it’s very silly and hard to keep schtum and not say anything sometimes! My daughter has a female friend who identifies as male and sometimes non binary,
in a relationship with a transwoman, who presents as a regular bloke. They call themselves a queer couple, but it’s a male/female relationship, so surely just a boring heterosexual one?

Languages do change organically. It's also true that not all languages have generdered pronouns. But English does have gendered pronouns and the new linguistic rules being foisted on us by trans ideologues are far from organic.
This isn't how language naturally evolves. It's more akin to authoritarian regimes banning certain words/dialacts and imposing new words on the population.

Is the girlfriend trans ? I missed that bit

I'm sure you can navigate this without needlessly being a dick to someone who's done nothing wrong, OP. It's really not difficult.

Why does she want to be referred to in the third person all the time?

But they are a very special heterosexual couple, and if they ever have babies it will be fun to see how they try to register them on the bc.

Exactly this. In living memory Welsh children were forbidden to speak Welsh at school, fortunately that is no longer the case which only goes to prove that in the end you can’t force language changes on an unwilling population.