Do cis people care if they get referred to as they/them?

[theatrenerd]

So I’ve recently been thinking if I may be something other than cis. I really don’t care if I get to refered to as they/them but idk if this is normal for a cis person or not. Please tell me if it is or if it is not!!

 

(I really hope I didn’t offend anyone with this because I know there’s a lot more to non-binary than just preferring they/them pronouns)

[Just Somebody]

As I've lived,  no they don't care to be referred by neutral words, unless they're religious or/and conservative radicals I guess.

 

 

[TheAP]

I don't know what your gender is, but I'm cis and don't mind being referred to as they.

[Guest]

If it makes things easier for even one person I'm not offended if I'm called they or them.

[RoseGoesToYale]

I'm cis and I don't even care if people call me he/him. As long as they don't call me "miss", we're all good.

[natural blue]

i personally don't. i always use "they/them" pronouns when i'm talking about someone when they're not in the conversation (i don't know why, it just seems more fitting?), so that might be part of it.

[Snao Cone]

Cis and totes fine with they/them. Just don't call me m'lady.

[Grimalkin]

I don't care, but I can really only see it arising in a situation where the person referring to me has never seen me/doesn't know my name. I present as pretty feminine.

 

Honestly, the English language needs a good gender neutral pronoun. They/them sounds so stilted thanks to sounding plural.

[Life With Masks]

I'm not english nature speaker and I'm always confused by they but I love they! However, I imagine that it might feel a bit condescending, like using "it" for a person, but I don't know if people that English is their first language agree. I love that you can hide the gender of a person or choose to adquire a non-binary gender, but I wished there was a pronoun just for it.

 

I'm going to be honest, I prefer to refer to people by their name even if I have to say it many times. I think that using pronouns too much might be too condescending, but this is my perception as a not English native speaker.

[no-longer-in-use]

I think there's a lot more to being trans/nonbinary than being okay with they/them pronouns, because as you can see based on the responses to this thread, many cis people are fine with being called they/them. If you want help figuring your gender out feel free to pm me.

[Galactic Turtle]

I personally feel like being referred to as they/them is creepy so yes I'd mind and most likely ask the person to cut it out. I'd first probably wonder why someone was talking to me like that and then probably assume they're trying to be extra cautious. However I'm fine with he/him just because it's, quite frankly, not so abnormal sounding. I wouldn't use that as a deciding factor for what your gender is. But yeah, "they" registers in my brain the same way if someone were to call me "it." Not gonna happen buddy. 

[everywhere and nowhere]

I don't like it. In my opinion, "singular they" should be used in two situations:

a) when someone specifically prefers this pronoun,

b) when we are talking about a non-specific person whose gender we don't know.

 

And now another of my interlinguistic considerations... In Polish genderless talking is almost impossible. It's not just pronouns which communicate gender - every noun has a grammatical gender (m/f/n), adjectives have different gender forms and also some verbal forms are gendered. Particularly past tense, this is what makes it so hard to avoid using gendered forms if someone for example doesn't identify with any gender. Moving from (trans)gender issues to feminism: there is also the issue of feminine suffixes. Since every noun has a gender, neutralisation won't work and the feminist policy in Polish is the opposite: to promote use of feminine suffixes. Feminism aims to promote them because there is much to change: some of these suffixes were widely used before, but during the last ca. 40 years they became less common, particularly so-called Professional Women tend to believe that masculine forms supposedly Sound More Serious... (Another example: some of these feminine forms have another meaning, for example "pilotka" logically means "female pilot", but it's also widely used in the meaning "aviator hat". Men who love ridiculing feminism of course use this example to show that "ha ha, feminine suffixes are dumb, pilotka is just a stupid hat"... however, "pilot" just as well has an extra meaning in Polish: "remote control".)

Feminism is very important to me, without it I wouldn't even be the same person. So I always use feminine suffixes when referring to myself, I don't let others refer to me with "generic", supposedly "neutral" masculine forms (example: my mom could say "Córka jest alergikiem" - literally, "[My] daughter is an allergy-sufferer" - and I always protest, because I'm obviously an alergiczka - allergy-sufferer +fem-marker). I also get angry when I'm misgendered on forums. Well, it is more possible because the nicknames I use on Polish forums are non-gendered. Sometimes I use the nickname "Emu" - my initials, but also emu the bird is grammatically neutral; and most widely I use the nickname "zewsząd i znikąd" which has no gender whatsoever because both segments are adverbial pronouns and adverbs don't have a gender (the nickname means "from everywhere and nowhere" and what I mean by it is a state of cultural homelessness - there is no single culture which could be fully "mine"). However, since gendered forms are so ubiquitous in Polish, in most posts I have used some "-am" or "-abym" - the feminine markers in past tense and conditional mode - so misgendering feels to me like people don't even pay attention to that because they consider men the Default and women the Deviation...

And now the strangest thing: I don't mind being misgendered in other situations. A few times I have been mistaken for a man - for example, I was trying to catch a hike from Harrachov to the Polish border and later the driver admitted that he hesitated whether he should stop because with my polo shirt, jeans and baseball cap I looked like a man. I identify as a woman - however, a gender-non-conforming woman, not a "womanly woman", not a sexual object for anyone's taking. And in such situations, despite I don't identify as a man at all, I may feel strangely glad - it's a kind of confirmation: "See? I'm androgynous, I am really most likely uninteresting to men ". But when it's not about my appearance, but about language only, misgendering annoys me very much because it's no longer about my personal preference for androgyny, it's about disregard for women and for women's obvious social presence...

[theatrenerd]

Okay thanks everyone😊

[theatrenerd]

.

[SithLord]

I've seen some people get offended when you use they/them, but only when it's super obvious you're avoiding the gendered pronouns. In the sense that they don't mind if it sounds natural to them, but as soon as they pick up on it bein intentional, a few of my friends have pointed out it annoys them.

Maybe offended wasn't the right word, more annoyed. In the sense that they find it easier to not go out of one's way to use gender-neutral pronouns unless there's a reason to. 

 

I wouldn't mind, but then I try to stay somewhat androgynous anyway. 

[firewallflower]

Cisgender woman here. I wouldn't be offended by being referred to by they/them, per se (unless it was in an insulting context, obviously, but that's beside the point), but it would feel wrong. I would rather be referred to  with the pronouns I identify with, and the ones that feel comfortable to me—those being she/her.

 

But the thing is, I don't see it happening unless someone was trying to make a point for some reason or hadn't seen me/didn't know my name/gender (as @Grimalkin said; I also present as female and have a clearly feminine-sounding name). In the former case, I might be offended by the point they were trying to make, but that would entirely depend; in the latter, it wouldn't bother me in the least. My cisgender privilege means that being misgendered just isn't something I need to worry about on a daily basis.

 

Gender identity is about more than pronouns, though. I know plenty of cisgender people who identify as, say, female, but wouldn't mind being referred to by feminine, gender neutral, or even masculine pronouns.

 

And yes, lacking in a singular gender neutral pronoun is definitely one of English's flaws.

[DuskFire]

I mean I'm cis mostly and I don't care. I don't think I'd like being referred to as she/her though but mostly anything else I'm fine with.

I mean I wonder about cis females being ok referred to as dude or guys?

I mean how friends casually refer to each other.

[SithLord]

55 minutes ago, firewallflower said:

And yes, lacking in a singular gender neutral pronoun is definitely one of English's flaws.

I would say more that the flaw lies in that our singular gender neutral third person pronoun is the same as our plural third person pronoun. Sort of like how we use "you" to refer to both 2nd person sinular and 2nd person plural, "they" has been used throughout history to refer to an individual whose gender was unknown. 

 

It's there, but prescriptivists say it's inappropriate and we teach it to children despite it being used almost every day by everyone. I would prefer we stop this and teach it as an appropriate pronoun instead. Maybe this non-binary and gender-neutral push will help?

[natural blue]

21 minutes ago, Lonely Leafeon said:

I mean I'm cis mostly and I don't care. I don't think I'd like being referred to as she/her though but mostly anything else I'm fine with.

I mean I wonder about cis females being ok referred to as dude or guys?

I mean how friends casually refer to each other.

i'm a cis girl and i'm fine with "dude" and "guys". i've called a lot of my friends those, too, and they didn't seem to mind.

[SithLord]

14 minutes ago, Lonely Leafeon said:

I mean I'm cis mostly and I don't care. I don't think I'd like being referred to as she/her though but mostly anything else I'm fine with.

I mean I wonder about cis females being ok referred to as dude or guys?

I mean how friends casually refer to each other.

Beware, gender politics tangent incoming:

 

That's an interesting discussion towards the generic "he" in English. How the default pronoun or word will be male. There are some people who take this concept too far (see Futurama Eco-feministas) but it is generally true that the default for many titles as well as generic calls for the attention of a group of mixed genders. It even happens with the push to be more inclusive to non-binary individuals because saying "boys and girls" or "ladies and gentlemen" can be exclusionary, but "guys" is easier to say that "everyone". 

 

I find the push towards singular non-gendered titles to be welcome though troublesome. Such as the word "server" instead of "waiter" or "waitress" or using "actor" to refer to all actors and not just men. My problem arrises with the latter example more than the former as no female-gendered alternative for "server" exists to my knowledge, but with actor/actress, the chosen title to use is the masculine one. It was only chosen, to my knowledge, because of the generic-he and tendency towards accepting masculine titles for females. 

 

Okay, that's enough of that. I'm at work so my feminist brain needs to shut down now. 

[abandoned-account]

1 hour ago, natural blue said:

i'm a cis girl and i'm fine with "dude" and "guys". i've called a lot of my friends those, too, and they didn't seem to mind.

Same here haha. We’re not really serious/gender specific on those terms, though. 

 

I guess my preference is pretty much like Leafeon’s, just swapping m/f pronouns respectively.

[Custard Cream]

I oten address my colleagues with 'hey guys' - even though they are mostly female - and nobody raises an eyebrow. But we don't seem to have a female equivalent of 'guys' that I can use. 'Girls' or 'ladies' are both just wrong!

[everywhere and nowhere]

7 hours ago, Lonely Leafeon said:

I mean I wonder about cis females being ok referred to as dude or guys?

I mean how friends casually refer to each other. 

I absolutely hate it, exactly like those forms of verbal misgendering I mentioned. I'm simply not a guy! And I demand linguistic respect and presence as a woman!

But then, English is not my first language. I know how this form is used (but I still hate it), but still it's an early-acquired foreign language to me. It also influences how I think about several other words. I'll mention one thing because I consider it important and it went rather unnoticed. There was a poll on whether "queer" is a slur. It also had some other questions, such as "Do you use this word?", "Do you consider yourself queer?" - but for me a very important question was missing: "Is English your first language?". While I know English very well, I think, it's still a foreign language to me and I realised quite late that "queer" could be a slur. The first meaning in which I've seen it was simply "strange" - in a few contexts, such as in Robert Frost's poem: "My little horse must think it's queer / To stop without a farmhouse near". The second was almost immediately academic queer theory. Sure, also in Poland some scholars who specialise in queer theory try to show the broad contexts of "queer" in English and say that perhaps it shouldn't be polonised as "teoria queer", but rather, in the manner of taking back an offensive word, as "teoria pedalska" - "pedał" is a slur for a gay man, more like English "fag" or "faggot" (it also means "pedal", btw... the new meaning was coined because of this word's similarity with "pederasty"). But still the result is that for me "queer" sounds probably much more benign than for native English speakers.

There is a somewhat similar problem with the word "Murzyn". Literally translated as "Negro". To be sure: it is falling out of use in Polish too, being replaced by words such as "Czarny" (Black) or "ciemnoskóry" (dark-skinned). But still I don't think that it can be considered a 1:1 equivalent of English "Negro" because it simply has a very different social history. People who use this word probably don't mean to offend anyone, they are rather confused about what word to use to avoid sounding racist or offensive.

[DuskFire]

@Nowhere Girl well it's kinda similar to calling humanity "mankind" 

Some see it as offensive some don't. I think it's odd though how some cis females are offended by being called dude or guys when they often advocate for pronouns not being restricted to a specific gender.

Is it because of a sensitivity? Ok that's fine. I just find it unusual.

(BTW am I in the hotbox again? I'm really sensitive so I'm probably gonna stop reading this now. Arguments stress me out to much)

[abandoned-account]

15 hours ago, Nowhere Girl said:

It also had some other questions, such as "Do you use this word?", "Do you consider yourself queer?" - but for me a very important question was missing: "Is English your first language?". While I know English very well, I think, it's still a foreign language to me and I realised quite late that "queer" could be a slur.

This sort of reminds me of how I don’t often use the word “gay” to describe homosexual/romantic people because... idk... it just doesn’t... feel right? I guess this may be from coming up in a generation where it was commonly used as a generic insult, and I guess in my mind it still feels that way? It’s odd because many folks in that group refer to themselves as such all the time and even act prideful of it, even more so nowadays. Yet for some reason I just still don’t feel like I wanna call them that. Hm.

Likewise with the word “retarded”. I would just feel mean using that term to describe someone with a mental condition. 

 

Maybe my understanding of terminology is just stuck in the past or something.

[Philip027]

People who get offended by this must live some pretty carefree lives.

 

I understand how strongly gendered language can offend, but the singular they is about as nongendered as it gets.

[QuirkyGeek]

It really varies among cis people. Lots are fine with they/them pronouns being used to refer to themselves, others aren't because they don't think it's grammatically correct, and some because they're enbyphobic and/or don't want to associate with anything non-binary people associate with.

[everywhere and nowhere]

I'm not enbyphobic. I'm just not non-binary myself and femininity is important to me as a political identity. So I want to be referenced as female.

[General]

It really depends on the cis person.  Some are okay with they/them pronouns, and some aren't.

 

It's also worth noting that there are nonbinary people who don't feel comfortable using neutral pronouns.  Personally, I still use she/her even though I'm a masculine afab nonbinary.

 

 

[kiaroskuro]

I sure wouldn't mind being referred to as they. The thing is, and people might find that a little odd: I don't know whether I'm cis or not. I don't really worry about it, though.