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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!
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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)
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.
"It" would imply the person is an object, "they" says you just don't know what their gender is.
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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