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I just applied for a job that included this beautiful pronoun selection question (skipped it). Then further down the page there was another blank field to enter my pronouns (skipped it)!
I kind of want to know what the hell "Fae/Faer" is, but also kind of don't. Is that for people who identify as fairy folk? I can see that giving you an advantage on your job application!
/images/1671730033406268.webp
Can anyone steelman the case for any of the non-standard pronouns? Why hasn't the LGBT community settled on he/she/they, or even just exclusively using they?
Also curious what's the point of including the subject and object forms (e.g. he and him), seems redundant to me, unless someone is combining he/her or she/him? I've heard non-binary folks are doing similar that in languages where both the verbs and pronouns inflect based on gender and there isn't any neuter form (e.g. hebrew)
It does seem a little weird to include both subject and object forms. The way I generally understand mixed usage of the forms is as an indication that the individual in question would be fine with either gendered pronoun, not that you should literally alter the gendered pronoun depending on which form you're using. So something like "she/they" is an abbreviation of "she/her/they/them", indicating a comfort with either feminine or gender neutral pronouns. Similarly I'd interpret something like "he/her" or "she/him" as indicating either (1) comfort with either masculine or feminine pronouns (but not gender neutral) or (2) comfort with any pronouns (he/him/they/them/she/her).
It's tribal signaling. That's the convention that was settled on, and so that's what Americans use(and, indeed, the object form seems in practice to be the part of the convention most likely to be dispensed with), and the blue tribe is all about following convention more generally, and the whole point of the pronouns thing is to signal that you're a good progressive blue triber who follows all the blue tribe conventions.
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I’ve seen he/her twice. But I think the more common case is she/their. Makes it rather a pain.
Honestly, what on earth would make someone decide that they are a he/her or a she/their? Like, I really want to know. What is it inside them that tells them that those are the right pronouns for them, and nothing else will suffice? That they're okay with people saying "She is transgender", but not "She is very serious about her transgender viewpoints". I don't like being uncharitable, but I really am inclined to agree with @zeke5123, it really does just seem like they're trying very hard to be difficult, or at least to be uniquely special.
He/her is appropriate because women are objects
Low effort and obnoxious. Don't do this.
Ok sorry i thought it was funny
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Most of the “she/their” (or “they/her” or “he/their” etc) people I recall were actually, uh, cis, at least in the sense that the one traditionally gendered pronoun was congruent with their sex. To be fair, I haven’t met too many of these people.
As to why they do this, I’m afraid I only have as much of a clue as you do, and am as sympathetic as you are, broadly. I suspect that some of them are actually pretty happy with being a man/a woman, but want to cash in just a bit on being nonbinary or somesuch, but not the whole way, and convinced themselves that they liked the sound of oddly mixed pronouns better.
I still think the “he/her”s has to be trolling in some way, or was some sort of bizarre mistake. One was on a profile page on a very cis-presenting man who was otherwise pretty unremarkable.
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Is the intention to be difficult?
I honestly couldn’t tell you. I certainly found them a bit difficult, but the use of mixed pronouns didn’t give me a good first impression to begin with.
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"Steelman" can in practice be equivalent to "find an excuse to reject conflict theory".
The answer may be "they don't have a logical reason to do it that way, doing it that way just lets them attack their outgroup".
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English is not my native language but "it" seems much more gramatically correct than the plural ambiguous "they".
The fact we alter language to make it more ambiguous, for humans and even more so for AIs is worrying.
At some point I was for eliminating she/he but then I remembered the little known fact that it is useful for coreference resolution. However besides this fact I'm convinced if we eliminated he/she, there would be much less identity wars between the two genders and therefore more egalitarianism.
They is only inherently plural in literary English. In most dialects of spoken English they is acceptable to refer to an unknown referent.
This is true, but only to a point. "Today I went to Allie's house and had dinner with them," has a very strong connotation to me that Allie is married and dinner was with the couple, rather than dinner being with a singular person who uses "they" as a pronoun.
But I maybe I've been under a rock for too long.
Well, yes, because in that case Allie would be a known referent. In the statement ‘I was just in the handicap bathroom. Someone made a stink beforehand, they also used all the toilet paper.’, it doesn’t imply more than one person because the referent is known.
Unfortunately in the context I heard this Allie was not a known referent (to me), but a person who goes by they. I fear the experience made me a bit jaded.
Well sure, but that’s an individual being a weirdo. Almost everyone who goes by Allie uses she/her pronouns.
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More grammatically correct, but also very rude. To use "it" as a pronoun carries the connotation that you're referring to an inanimate object. As you might imagine, people don't like this.
I appreciate the desire for good grammar but using "it" as the neutral third person pronoun will never catch on because of how rude it is.
To be fair, "it" is still used for infants, and it used to be used for non-infant children as well.* Maybe it could make a comeback.
*Examples from a 1902 children's book coincidentally named Five Children and It:
Eugenisists, Anti-natalists, and Fabiains (but i repeat myself) have been trying to normalize the use of "it" to refer to children, infants, and the mentally impaired since the late 19th century. It hasn't caught on for reasons already covered by @SubstantialFrivolity, refering to humans as inanimate ojects just naturally sticks in a lot of people's craws, but that hasnt stopped them from continuing to try.
This seems a bit preposterous. Could you provide a source? As far as I can tell, 'it' was simply the most common pronoun for infants in the 19th century, and considering that 50% of infants didn't make it past early childhood, it sort of made sense not to get too attached to your infant child.
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It's not because something is useful than it is logically sufficient. Those culture might have gender issues for other reasons, yet the linguistic distinction promote tribalization.
I don't see a proof, languages SOTA in NLP are consistently inferior to english SOTA.
That is because there are more researchers and datasets for english but not only.
Some languages are more fit for NLP, and english as it is known is among the simpler languages.
Now about the usefulness of he/she, well it trivially solves coreference resolution in case of ambiguity.
For example:
I was talking to Alice and Bob, then suddenly she passed out.
Who passed out?
Alice.
It is trivial and useful, it reduce the cognitive load of reading and writing, and works well since 49% of humans are women.
Use of he/she only resolves ambiguity when you are talking about exactly one man and one woman. If the goal is minimizing ambiguity, you might look into something more similar to obviative pronouns: something like I was talking to Alice(1) and Betty(2), then suddenly she(2) passed out.
Excellent comment, very much appreciated.
It's not everyday someones manage to teach me a new concept :)
Quite a crazy coincidence, I saw this word before your comment yesterday by pure luck https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WNjOWZiY/
It often happen to me, to see something apparently (?) for the first time in my life and then to see it again, in the following days out of pure coincidence.
While I'm tempted to believe such coincidence have a mystic nature, the insight I derive from this phenomenon is that I must have a cognitive bias of being blind to unknown words, that is until I see a proper definition of them. Kinda sad.
Anyway back on the topic, would there be a way to use an obviative pronoun in english without sounding too robotic/unnatural?
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Well English surely seems deceptively simpler than it is, I often find in my quest of building the first program able to understand sentences, such hidden complexity.
The most effective way to contemplate it though is to browse this forgotten field that is Computational linguistics
https://semanticsarchive.net/cgi-bin/browse.pl?search=
Exactly, this is an optimization not a necessary component of language but I believe, a useful one.
The most striking example is to learn French, where we gender objects. That seems absurd and it semantically is, but it allows to disambiguate objects in a mental scene.
Oh I just realized that's what you meant with German.
Also yes, the path to progress is a long one :)
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"It" would imply the person is an object, "they" says you just don't know what their gender is.
or an animal.
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An ambiguous "is maybe an object" is preferable to "is maybe plural" since contextual confusion about the former is extremely less likely than the later.
But yeah ideally we would create a new gender neutral singular pronoun.
I haven't seen a case where it wasn't obvious that "they" was referring to the plural over the person. Can you point to an instance where that happens? I think people just clarify which "they" is being referred to.
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I am unsure whether the following qualifies as a steelman, but I think it may be an actual explanation some non-trivial percentage of the time.
Social signaling--but specifically, signaling a willingness to acquiesce to someone else's self-conception as the primary driver of that person's social identity. Note that neopronouns serve this purpose even better than any flavor of standard pronoun, because they are individual. If I use your specially-chosen pronouns to refer to you, that is a show of deference to you, individually. This deference operates as a filter--if I am willing to defer in this manner, I am more likely to be aligned with you politically, think of you as an ally, and--importantly--not harm you.
In reality, I think this rationale is not as strong as those who may hold it hope, because there are many environments where this flavor of pronoun use is enforced by social coercion, which undermines the accuracy of the signal. Someone may bow to the coercion while seething internally, and the obvious target of his ire is the pronoun-person, who may not be the person driving the enforcement! ("Trans activists" are trans themselves sometimes, but quite often not.)
This dynamic is sort of the inverse of "shit-testing," since the desired outcome is reversed, though both are social probes.
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Because there isn't one single governing body that can make pronouncements like that. Non-standard pronouns have a long history; outside the special case of LGBT, there have been various ones used by SF writers, and before that people trying to invent neuter or neutral pronouns in English. Naturally, if there were sixteen different versions floating around, everyone who wanted those kind of non-standard pronouns picked the one they preferred, and then numbers seventeen to twenty were invented by "No, I don't like any of those".
I dislike singular "they" but at least that is standard English and seems to be becoming widely adopted. The xe/ze/e lot can go stand in a corner, as far as I'm concerned. Pick "they" or be "it" which is the neuter pronoun in English.
I'm exactly the opposite. When it first came out, I couldn't stand ze/zir/etc., but every time I read something where people use the "they" pronoun to refer to a singular person it grates like nails on a chalkboard, and it almost always makes the writing more confusing to read. Now I wish the powers that be would switch to ze/zir/etc.
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‘It’ is not a neuter pronoun, it is inanimate. ‘They’ is neuter, and generally plural, but has been commonly accepted as a referent to ‘unknown’ for centuries(eg, ‘they must have built a fire when they were here, whoever it was’). ‘He’ is also grammatically correct when referring to a generic person(eg, ‘the operator of this machine must follow safety precautions. He should wear steel toed boots.’ Does not imply that women cannot wear steel toed boots and operate this machine), but is often replaced by he/she or (s)he in some contacts. An Englishman from 1600 wouldn’t have much difficulty parsing a singular they, even if he would probably think it ridiculous, but would find the use of it to refer to a person as confusing.
It has been used to refer to animals, which are plenty animate, and as mentioned above, for children. Even if "it" is "inanimate", I'm fine with it being used for the people who can't decide if they're a boy or a girl or both or neither. Okay, you want to pretend you are not living in a body that has a definite sex? Great, let's all refer to you as a thing, so. If you're too special to be an ordinary human, you're too special to be referred to as a human.
I'm inclined to agree with you, just pointing out that using singular they is not actually unprecedented.
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One peculiarity of colloquial Finnish is that Finns are wont to use "it" for persons in spoken conversations, too. Like, it's informal and probably slightly impolite, but nobody would blink an eye if, for instance, a parent coming to pick a child from daycare and trying to chase them down to dress them went "Minne se meni?" ("Where did it go?") if they lost sight of the child momentarily.
"I call my friends it and my pet him/her*" is a recurring observation in various circles...
(ie. the neutral Finnish third-person pronoun)
Calling your friends “it” seems less so, though.
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This seems to be a natural consequence of 2 principles that the people who use these pronouns believe they hold:
Anyone is any gender/sex they identify as.
All self-identifying of gender/sex must be respected by everyone else, through submitting to the individual's demands of pronoun choice.
These principles were invoked as a way to justify the coercion of people into using trans people's preferred pronouns - usually the opposite gender/sex as their biological one - but if you apply these principles to a situation where gender/sex isn't a binary but rather anything at all, then newly invented pronouns and the enforcement of others using them follow pretty naturally.
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Because they’re special snowflakes. There doesn’t seem to be much else to it. Everything about all of them(people of neopronouns) is unique; self expression is always the highest priority. Add it all up and there’s some unusual neopronouns because the singular they doesn’t capture their uniqueness.
Yep, I totally agree. It's perfectly normal for teenagers to go to great lengths to express what unique snowflakes they are, and how nobody else gets them. But as you said, when those teenagers grow up they need to also grow out of the childish behavior.
When I was a teenager, I used to be seething mad that my parents made me get braces. As an adult, I cringe and feel bad that I was such a little shit about it. I certainly wouldn't go on a crusade to require that no parents be allowed to put their kids through orthodontics just to validate my teenage feelings.
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Fine and healthy is a bit of a stretch- the whole point of being a teenager is learning to be an adult slowly, so infantile look at me nonsense is not laudable even if it comes from teens- but it’s certainly excusable and acceptable for adolescents to make up random bullshit that they can be dramatic about. The bit problem with trans is when 1) adults encourage them in this and 2) it has rather more severe consequences than calling Jessica a bitch for stealing your fanfiction character.
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Precisely - and the problem is that normally teen slang is limited to that demographic, and in fact actively discouraged from being used by adults. Neopronouns however are required to be used by all on pain of social ostracism.
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One version would be the Judith Butler-ian take that bourgeois sexual norms (and potentially even the underlying biology that might predispose people toward it) are inherently repressive, and thus must be mocked and undermined wherever possible in order to preserve the possibility of liberation.
I'm not super up on Butler's theory, so it's possible I'm not giving her argument justice, but that's what I recall of it from a few seminars in college and grad school a decade ago, plus scattered podcast references more recently.
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