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Transnational culture war: For at least a decade, Chinese-speaking people who identify as "nonbinary" or "agender" have been using "X也" and "TA" as makeshift gender-neutral pronouns, replacing the original default "他" ("人" = "human", nowadays interpreted as "male" in this context) and the female-specific "她" ("女" = "female") that was invented only a hundred years ago as a result of contact with the West. Now (actually, back in September), activists have successfully gotten Unicode to codify a new hanzi for this purpose—a combined version of "㐅也". (At the time of writing, the actual character won't show up on your screen properly since it hasn't yet been added to the fonts on your computer, but it is "".) The parallel to Western neopronouns like "ze" is obvious.
CNN article
Kiwi Farms compilation of background information, including technical discussion of weird multi-script characters like "X也" and "⼴K" "⼴O"
Two new entries in Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names incoming:
People's names are written in any single script.
Okay, fine, a person's name may contain characters from multiple scripts, but surely no single character in any person's name contains multiple scripts within itself.
Unlikely to matter at all, all these BS. I can’t find any Chinese media discussing it, except on Chinese expat forums where people are mostly mocking it. The Japanese don’t use 他 as a third-person pronoun, and Koreans hardly use any Chinese characters these days. So who exactly is the target audience here? Taiwanese? Activists can make a thousand such characters a day and it won't matter a bit to the people who actually use it. I can't imagine anyone unironically using it and not get mocked. It’ll become one of those meme character like 囧 once Chinese netizens find out its existence.
Also all of these pronouns, 他 the neutral third person later repurposed as a male pronoun, 她 the female third person, 牠 the animal third person, 祂 the deity third person, 它 the catch-all third person, and whatever this new abomination is, are pronounced exactly the same: tā. In my Chinese speaking brain, these pronouns are all the same because they’re homophones. English speakers might notice that Chinese speakers occasionally misgender people, and that’s mostly not because we do it on purpose. I will support the idea to eliminate all these nonsense pronouns and just keep the original 他, and hopefully it'll also cool down the ever-intensifying gender war in China.
Can you tell us more about this? Has it reached South Korean levels of intensity?
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Sure I'll write an effortpost when I have enough time. I don’t think it has reached SK levels yet, but Chinese netizens often call the Korean dating market “early access” which implies that we’ll get there soon. I’d rank the intensity above the US but below SK. That said I haven’t been on the dating market for some time, and I only know what it’s like through second or third-hand information.
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