There’s definitely some additional nuance (like a pronouns in bio/username situation) but this should cover the broad needs of anyone who is approaching this with good faith.
How to choose the correct pronouns
AND HOLY SHIT does it get toxic. for some reason there’s no will for even this basic level of nuance. currently watching an entire anti-blahaj hate crusade over a simple misunderstanding where the left and the right conclusions of the chart got conflated as though they are the same thing.
then i tried to help clarify and got called insults.
just… so sad :(
I think one of the issues is that several of the people involved in that crusade were also banned from blahaj.
People tend to not disclose their conflict of interest.
That’s a very probably true analysis :(
Relevant meme post of what brought on a lot of those bans for onlookers.
Edit 3: I’ve been trying to talk to her most of the day. It’s not proving fruitful. I’m holding out hope for her but she’s just continuing to tantrum.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37755294
Short version: elder queer makes post replies to a post on beehaw asking if it’s actually okay to stick with they/them pronouns for everyone because OOP’w autistic brain discards gender as irrelevant information (like how you cant remember your dreams or what you had for breakfast last week), so she tends to forget people’s pronouns. This caused OOP to accidentally misgender someone who thought she knew their pronouns, and she’s worried about hurting other people’s feelings. OP angrily insists that they/them is how you address people you don’t know the gender of, full stop, and then goes on a rant about how kids these days are little babies etc. Then a mod saw that post, interpreted this as gatekeeping who gets to be nb, and banned her from all of blahaj.zone.
To be clear, she is being an ass there throwing a big tantrum over getting banned. I think she will calm down soon. This seems like the
BTW, I also have this problem, Ive just learned to do a better job of hiding it because for some fucking reason when transphobes (and traumatized trans friends) hear me ask “I forgot X’s gender, what was it again?” they hear “Oh no, the trans-genderism and the pronouns is so confusing, they should stick with calling themselves by their peepee and vajoojay like the founding fathers intended” and then i wake up the next day with no friends. So I’ve just learned to not ask for help and correct myself when i fuck up. It was also hard to learn that the apology has to be through your immediate actions by immediately correcting yourself and moving on; it is so easy to panic and apologize like you just ran over their cat, but dramatic apology + autistic RBF = what looks like passive aggressive sarcasm.
I get why this happens, and I can’t be mad at trans people for being traumatized by all the transphobes. After the 3rd or 4th time you find out someone you thought was your friend secretly wants to call you a slur, you start getting paranoid. And more importantly for this subject, if someone told me that our mutual friend X misgendered someone, I am immediately blocking X’s number, passing the word on to my friends, and shunning X for the rest of their life, no questions asked because that’s how transphobes should be treated.
Edit: forgot she said she is a lesbian. Changed the pronouns
Edit 2: thank you kind commenter for pointing out that OP was one of the commenters on the beehaw post, not the poster. Read the comments, she came across as an old yelling about how kids these days are too soft. Edited my summary to reflect this.
Ah yeah. I banned her. Not because she defaults to they/them, but because she was victim blaming queer folk as the cause of their own oppression, and using a lot of thinly veiled insults against gender diverse folk
And for what it’s worth, I’m almost certainly a similar age to her
Important detail: the person who posted that question isn’t the one who got banned, it was one of the commenters
Also, if you mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, apologize and respect their wishes.
We’re humans after all, and mistakes happens. No one is asking you to be perfect. People just want you to be a decent person.
If only there were gender neutral pronouns in my language 😭
In arabic we don’t even have neuter or non-gendered anythings, a table is a he or she.
Not even objects are safe 😔
In German it feels completely random.
A table is masculine. A castle is feminine. A sausage is feminine. A boy is masculine. A girl is neutral. A fire is neutral. …
Not sure if there’s any meaningful rule behind.
Actually, Mädchen (meaning “girl” in German) is a diminutive. It comes from Magd (an old word for “maid” or “young woman”) with the -chen suffix, which is a common diminutive in German.
The -chen suffix makes words grammatically neuter, which is why Mädchen takes das instead of die, even though it refers to a female person.
I’m not German but the same applies to the Dutch word for girl, and we’ve the same rule for neutral. By the way, ‘magd’ in Dutch means virgin (maagd to be precise), which sounds incredibly inappropriate to be going around calling someone; little virgin (/¯ ಠ_ಠ)/¯
Some non binary people use the pronoun “they” in arabic, but unlike english it is exclusively meant for plural. And in arabic, verbs also are conjugated with amount, So you just can’t say “They ate” in a singular form, you have to explicitly mark “ate” in plural.
It’d be like saying “they ate(plural verb)”. It sounds very weird but there’s not much better.
As far as I know there isn’t any rule to learn. Grammatical gender is a wild mixture of several things, sometimes it has something to do with the ending of words and sometimes with attributes of the things, if it has like agency, is an inanimate object, or is an abstract concept. Sometimes it’s completely arbitrary and sometimes there are rules to it like with group of people. But there is no way of telling, you got to memorize it. In any way, grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender. And I’m pretty sure that’s not it’s origin. Though, we try to link it to biological gender in case of people. But even that has exceptions, and it doesn’t really work with group of people etc.
Unlike for girl, das Mädchen, which is a diminutive (of die Maid, a virgin young woman) as it is ending with -chen and thus, is of neutral gender, I doubt if rules for the other examples do exist:
- Die Wurst (the sausage), female – der Durst (the thirst), male
- Die Burg (the castle), female – der Zwerg (the dwarf), der Berg (the mountain), male
My only issue is when apparently someone can choose that “they”, a gender neutral pronoun, doesn’t apply to someone. I saw it in a recent Elliot Page post. Someone was getting ripped to shreds for talking about Elliot and saying “they”. “No it’s him! You’re trying to minimize his identity!” was basically the response. But the person was talking about Elliots work pre and post transition and you could tell they were taking great care to not offend, and yet it was still offensive apparently. Which was then made even funnier when others chimed in to point out that Elliot specifically asks to be referred to as “They/Him”.
My whole point is that some people need to cool it when it comes to gender neutral pronouns. Lest we forget, “I’m a dude, he’s a dude, she’s a dude, we’re all dudes!”
Use their name, if you know it.
