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Why I hate pronouns


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Calligraphette_Coe
On 4/11/2021 at 12:00 AM, verily-forsooth-egads said:

You're under no obligation to contribute to the normalization of pronouns! Cis allies made the bed, and you, a person with a nontraditional relationship with gender, get to lie in it. Do whatever makes you comfortable, and anyone who pressures you otherwise can stuff it.

The trouble with having that nontradional relationship with gender when you're androgynous and sir'd and ma'am'd in the same week is that pronouns and how you react to them becomes a matter of doing code switching transparently to make those others feel comfortable with _you_. I somtimes feel the best I can do in the glass closet is to embrace that code switching and be really good at it so as to get by in a heavily gendered world going down the garden path of least resistance.

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19 hours ago, Rynn said:

So literally just 'Het was gister naar de dokter. De dokter vertelde het dat het ziek was. Dat vertelde het toen aan de moeder van het en toen zei de moeder van het 'ja duh, je ziet groen schat'.

 

I dunno mate, in my opinion, that does not work at all. Definitely sounds at least as dehumanizing as 'it' in English, and the possessive form 'van het' is very clunky. I'm going to stick with 'die' and 'hen', which are neopronouns by the way. I suppose they are less unconventional than other neopronouns.

 

Also yeah no genderneutral pronouns are going to sound acceptable for formal situations in Dutch for a while. At least not until they're normalized. It is what it is.

The use of "het" is probably a bit of a teenage rebellion thing. Where I grew up the non-binary thing is something recent, so you won't find anyone over 20 doing that. I sympathize with the sentiment of refusing to pick a side, though. Gender non-conformity has been around much longer, for example when I was a teenager people of either gender would be wearing kilts as a statement.

 

As a language nerd you might be interested in the Low Saxon dialects. They're similar to (Old) Dutch and German. hij/'ie/hem/zijn is hee/'e/'um/sien en zij/ze/haar/haar is see/se/eur/eur. Interestingly the pronouns that are male-exclusive in Dutch are neutral in at least some of the dialects, where the female ones are used to emphasize feminity, mostly when referring to married women by their husband's name. For city folk this may come across as uncivilized, but I think in today's society it is worth considering this, as much of the original elements of our language are still present in the dialects. For what my opinion is worth, I think if you want everyone on board with challenging the established gender roles, the optimal way is to reclaim the male-exclusives for everyone.

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Nerdy language rant ahead. Skip it if you don't care (which is completely understandable).

Spoiler

I'm not even going to apologize for the length of this. I told you I was a language nerd. You knew what you were getting into when you started talking about dialects.

 

 

1 hour ago, Pandark said:

Where I grew up the non-binary thing is something recent, so you won't find anyone over 20 doing that.

Well I'm sure the terminology is recent, but it describes something that is as old as humanity itself. But I can imagine people would be less comfortable being open about it in a more conservative area :) .

 

1 hour ago, Pandark said:

I sympathize with the sentiment of refusing to pick a side, though.

That's not really what being nonbinary is about. It's not a sentiment or a choice, the same way that being gay is not a choice. Though I guess you can choose to stay in the closet forever. 

 

1 hour ago, Pandark said:

As a language nerd you might be interested in the Low Saxon dialects. They're similar to (Old) Dutch and German. hij/'ie/hem/zijn is hee/'e/'um/sien en zij/ze/haar/haar is see/se/eur/eur. Interestingly the pronouns that are male-exclusive in Dutch are neutral in at least some of the dialects, where the female ones are used to emphasize feminity, mostly when referring to married women by their husband's name.

That's really interesting. So you can call a woman 'hee' and it's completely normal?

I have a friend who can speak Twents and when he does I do not understand him at all. He's a language nerd too. We've tried a bunch of times but yeah no I only get what he's saying after he breaks the sentence into parts and translates some words into more standard Dutch, and only then I can somewhat see the resemblance to the Dutch I'm used to.

 

1 hour ago, Pandark said:

For city folk this may come across as uncivilized, but I think in today's society it is worth considering this, as much of the original elements of our language are still present in the dialects.

So with 'this' being uncivilized you mean referring to everyone with the masculine pronouns? I don't see why that would be uncivilized. Not sure why you would think that.

 

I do think that transfeminine people would have a problem with being referred to as 'hee', so I don't think it's an ideal solution.

 

I also think feminists would have a lot to say about this, what with men being the standard, and women the deviation. They've got a whole branch of academic feminism just about that basically, so... yeah. Would like to know what feminists who grew up with that language think about it.

 

I think maybe every dialect/language would need to figure out for itself which genderneutral pronoun works best for its own context. In standard Dutch, i don't see a genderneutral 'hee' working, but if that's what people do in Low Saxon dialects, then I think that could make sense for them, though maybe still not for transfeminine people, but that's for them to decide.

 

I'm actually kind of uncomfortable calling the Low Saxon dialect a dialect instead of a language. The line between those concepts is blurry, but afaik linguistically it depends mostly on whether it's mutually intelligible with the other 'dialects' (though politically speaking a language is a dialect with an army and navy ;) ). People who speak Low Saxon dialects understand standard Dutch because that's what's being used in schools and media, but the other way around... no way I understand Low Saxon without first learning to. I think it should be counted as a language in its own right. Considering it a dialect of Dutch kind of devalues it imo, like it's warped and incorrect Dutch instead of its own thing.

 

(I major in Chinastudies, this isn't completely out of the blue) All languages spoken in China are considered 'dialects' of standard Mandarin, even the languages that do not even belong to the same language family. Tibetan is politically considered a Chinese dialect, but linguistically that makes about as much sense as calling Korean a dialect of Spanish. All languages other than Mandarin were forbidden in schools for a long time, and now they're dying out. Of course this is an extreme example, but I think the same has been happening with Dutch 'dialects'.

 

Also spoken Mandarin has no gendered pronouns, it just has the one 'ta'. In written Mandarin they've copied Latin languages in that the male pronoun is standard and the female the deviation. (I say copied because written Mandarin was developed in the early 20th century, and they literally copied that bit from Latin languages. There was no actual need to gender written pronouns as it's not a feature of the spoken language. Before this era they used Classical Chinese as a written language.) So you can use 他 for anyone, but 她 only for women. If you're talking about mixed groups, you use the male one. So I think that's similar to what you were talking about in the Low Saxon dialects right?

 

 

 

Anyways so I was thinking about the thing with 'het' as a personal pronoun, and then I remembered something. My dad sometimes refers to his sister as 'het'. I'm not sure if that's just a him thing, or if it's a thing in West Frisian. I don't speak West Frisian unfortunately. When he does this, it's usually to express exasperation at something she does. Like, she gets verrry disappointed when she doesn't like food she's ordered, and then my dad would tell us afterwards 'het was weer eens ontevreden.' 'It was dissatisfied again.'

 

Do I have a point in telling you this? No I don't. I'm just nerding out about it, I think it's interesting. :) 

 

West Frisian has a lot of really funny constructions that standard Dutch doesn't have. I like it a lot. Like, when there's a lot of traffic lights in one area my dad goes 'nou nou wat een stoplichterigheid hier' 'Lots of trafficlightness over here' which is just the funniest thing to me. As if there's a level of trafficlightness in any given area that goes from 0-100. But again, this could just be a him thing and not a west frisian thing. I'm not actually sure.

 

 

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3 hours ago, Rynn said:

I'm not even going to apologize for the length of this. I told you I was a language nerd. You knew what you were getting into when you started talking about dialects.

Good, that's settled then. :)

 

3 hours ago, Rynn said:

That's not really what being nonbinary is about. It's not a sentiment or a choice, the same way that being gay is not a choice. Though I guess you can choose to stay in the closet forever. 

But surely, how to express it is something cultural, unlike homosexuality. I mean, male/female gender roles are culturally set, so is language. I thought enby simply meant to not conform to the established division. Perhaps I'm overlooking something?

 

3 hours ago, Rynn said:

it describes something that is as old as humanity itself.

True, true.

 

3 hours ago, Rynn said:

That's really interesting. So you can call a woman 'hee' and it's completely normal?

Yes, some places it's the default neutral third person pronoun for everyone. The feminine word "see" is used reservedly to emphasize the feminine side of a married couple. This wikipedia article is pretty neat: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedersaksisch#Voornaamwoorden

Quote

Net als in het Oudsaksisch en Oudengels wordt in sommige streken 'hee' voor zowel 'hij' als 'zij' (ev.) gebruikt. Dit kan soms tot verwarring leiden: wie wast wie in 'hee wast 'm'? Hij zich? Hij hem? Zij zich? Hij haar? Of zij hem?

So in this sense it's similar to Old Saxon or Old English. Low Saxon has been officially acknowledged as a language in The Netherlands as well as Germany, but I speak of dialects as there are many local varieties. I like the standardization efforts as they help preserve the language, but of course there is the drawback that some of the nuanced meanings are lost. The dialects are much older than standardized Dutch or German and still carry much of the original meaning.

 

3 hours ago, Rynn said:

So with 'this' being uncivilized you mean referring to everyone with the masculine pronouns? I don't see why that would be uncivilized. Not sure why you would think that.

Well, the point was that what's now considered as masculine exclusive was originally neutral, but yes. I think emphasizing femininity became the default in the age of chivalry in the cities in the west. The rural dialects didn't go with the trend and moved much slower.

 

3 hours ago, Rynn said:

I do think that transfeminine people would have a problem with being referred to as 'hee', so I don't think it's an ideal solution.

If women are referred to as 'hee', I don't see how transwomen could be offended? I mean, everyone gets the same pronouns.

 

3 hours ago, Rynn said:

Would like to know what feminists who grew up with that language think about it.

I'll ask if I ever run into one. I think feminism is more concentrated in the cities, though. I do know of some unmarried non-conforming women who I think are feminists without realizing it. :P

 

3 hours ago, Rynn said:

In standard Dutch, i don't see a genderneutral 'hee' working, but if that's what people do in Low Saxon dialects, then I think that could make sense for them

I'm very disappointed that my fellow Dutch don't want to reclaim 'hee'/'hij' as neutral ground!

 

4 hours ago, Rynn said:

I think it should be counted as a language in its own right. Considering it a dialect of Dutch kind of devalues it imo, like it's warped and incorrect Dutch instead of its own thing.

I agree, I didn't mean it was a dialect of Dutch, but that it is an unstandardized language with many dialects.

 

4 hours ago, Rynn said:

(I major in Chinastudies, this isn't completely out of the blue) All languages spoken in China are considered 'dialects' of standard Mandarin, even the languages that do not even belong to the same language family. Tibetan is politically considered a Chinese dialect, but linguistically that makes about as much sense as calling Korean a dialect of Spanish. All languages other than Mandarin were forbidden in schools for a long time, and now they're dying out. Of course this is an extreme example, but I think the same has been happening with Dutch 'dialects'.

 

Also spoken Mandarin has no gendered pronouns, it just has the one 'ta'. In written Mandarin they've copied Latin languages in that the male pronoun is standard and the female the deviation. (I say copied because written Mandarin was developed in the early 20th century, and they literally copied that bit from Latin languages. There was no actual need to gender written pronouns as it's not a feature of the spoken language. Before this era they used Classical Chinese as a written language.) So you can use 他 for anyone, but 她 only for women. If you're talking about mixed groups, you use the male one. So I think that's similar to what you were talking about in the Low Saxon dialects right?

I don't know enough about Mandarin to know the context, but probably there's similarity. That's a very interesting study, though! I still plan on learning, at least to some degree, Mandarin and Sanskrit.

 

4 hours ago, Rynn said:

Anyways so I was thinking about the thing with 'het' as a personal pronoun, and then I remembered something. My dad sometimes refers to his sister as 'het'. I'm not sure if that's just a him thing, or if it's a thing in West Frisian. I don't speak West Frisian unfortunately. When he does this, it's usually to express exasperation at something she does. Like, she gets verrry disappointed when she doesn't like food she's ordered, and then my dad would tell us afterwards 'het was weer eens ontevreden.' 'It was dissatisfied again.'

Haha, 'het' makes people sound like phenomena. :D

 

4 hours ago, Rynn said:

Do I have a point in telling you this? No I don't. I'm just nerding out about it, I think it's interesting. :) 

It is. I'm covertly pretty nerdy too.

 

 

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Been removing pronouns from everything online after I  just felt comfortable and encouraged to put them up a month ago. Not worth the conflict I get from people. Gave up ever correcting or caring about real life, because passing... ugh.

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18 hours ago, Pandark said:

But surely, how to express it is something cultural, unlike homosexuality. I mean, male/female gender roles are culturally set, so is language.

True

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

I thought enby simply meant to not conform to the established division.

Nope, that would be gendernonconformity. That is gender expression, not gender identity.

Rather than retyping an explanation, I'm just going to do the old copy paste :) Keep in mind that the theories are extremely simplified.

Spoiler

There are a lot of different aspects to gender.

  • Gender roles/norms/expectations are unwritten rules society has for how men and women should behave. (Men can't wear make-up. Crying is for girls. Women shouldn't be too assertive.) These are not part of an individual's identity. They are part of a society's culture.
  • Gender expression is what your gender appears to be to other people. (Includes gendered things like clothing, colors, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking, how intensely emotions are expressed etc)
  • Gender identity is a very complicated concept and it is the core of what we are talking about when we’re discussing trans issues. Before you can know what ‘transgender’ is, you need to know what ‘gender identity’ is. 

So there are two main theories on what 'gender identity' is.

 

First you've got the (in my opinion outdated) theory put forward by Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and the like. They resist the idea that any aspect of gender identity can be innate. As de Beauvoir says "One isn't born a woman, one becomes a woman." This basically means that you feel like a woman because it's what you're used to. You behave like a woman because that's what's socially acceptable. In this view people act how they're supposed to act according to the gender roles in their culture. The constant repetition of doing what they're supposed to do gets etched into their brains and becomes their gender identity. For Butler and de Beauvoir, gender identity is the internalization of culturally imposed gender norms and expectations.

(Disclaimer, Butler is still alive and has changed her mind)

 

Then there's a newer theory about gender identity. This one builds on the first one and accepts it as partially correct, but asserts that gender identity is also partially innate. If it wasn't, then it would logically follow that trans people simply can’t exist, because your gender identity would entirely depend on what you were raised to be.

Joan Roughgarden, a transgender evolutionary biologist who wrote a whole book on the science of lgbt identities, is a proponent of this one. According to her, ‘gender identity’ is a deep-seated sense of self that's been established from the time you were born. In her book 'Evolution's Rainbow', she writes:

 

I envision gender identity as a cognitive lens. When a baby opens his or her eyes after birth and looks around, whom will the baby emulate and whom will he or she merely notice? Perhaps a male baby will emulate his father or other men, perhaps not, and a female baby her mother or other women, perhaps not. I imagine that a lens in the brain controls who to focus on as a “tutor.” Transgender identity is then the acceptance of a tutor from the opposite sex. Degrees of transgender identity, and of gender variance generally, reflect different degrees of single-mindedness in the selection of the tutor’s gender. The development of gender identity thus depends on both brain state and early postnatal experience, because brain state indicates what the lens is, and environmental experience supplies the image to be photographed through that lens and ultimately developed immutably into brain circuitry. Once gender identity is set, like other basic aspects of temperament, life proceeds from there.

 

So a cisgender female baby instinctively emulates women, a transgender baby with a female body instinctively emulates men, and a non-binary baby instinctively emulates both. Simple. 

 

The innate part of gender identity is the part that decides which of the two genders (or both or neither) you will instinctively emulate during your life. The behavior of that group of people then supplies you with the learned aspect of your gender identity. So the innate part tells you which gender(s) to imitate and the learned part is what kind of behavior you're actually imitating and internalizing.  

 

Gender identity as Roughgarden describes it, is a deep-seated, immutable sense of belonging or kinship to a gender (either to the social construct or to the group of people). A sense of "I belong with those people, or the other group, or maybe both or not really with either."

 

You can't change this sense of belonging by raising someone differently. There have been cases where a doctor made a mistake while circumcising a baby boy and then cut off the entire penis. For example, there’s David Reimer. That boy was raised as a girl instead, from birth, but still always felt like a boy.

 

Gender identity is at least partially innate and biological, not just cultural, so the argument that your gender identity can't be anything but 'man' or 'woman' because that's the only two genders that exist in our culture is not applicable. Gender identity =/= gender as a social construct. Gender identity is to which degree you instinctively identify with those two culturally established genders.

 

Some brains are simply somewhere in between male and female. Some people feel a sense of belonging to both genders, and others to neither. (The concept of male and female brains is flawed, all I'm saying here is that it would make sense for there to be an in between.)

 

Wm1KqL3.png

 

My guess is agender people don't feel at home in either group, genderfluid babies could emulate their dad during some activities (like boxing) and their mom in other situations (like socializing), and neutrois people sort of feel stuck in between the two groups, but I don't know. The only way to know is to ask them. Our neurobiology science skills aren't advanced enough to read people's minds yet.

Gender Identity versus Gender Expression

Of course everyone has a feminine and a masculine side, but that's not what we're talking about here. For example, a man can be feminine, he can like wearing make-up and dresses, talk in a stereotypically feminine way, and still identify as a man. Is his feminine side a 'deep-seated sense of identity', 'a cognitive lens that determines which gender(s) a baby will emulate from the minute they're born'? I doubt it. I think it's gender expression, not gender identity. For a nonbinary person, that's different.

 

A nonbinary person is not someone who simply dislikes the gender role they're put into. A guy who likes to break gendered expectations by wearing dresses is a crossdresser, a drag queen or a gender-nonconforming person, not a nonbinary person. Those are terms for people who have non-standard gender expressions. A nonbinary person is a person who has this innate, deep-seated, unchangeable sense of belonging to both genders, or to neither. If their body or the social role people ascribe to them doesn't line up with their inner sense of what they are, this leads to dysphoria. Dysphoria is an integrally important sign of ‘transgenderness’.

 

Gender dysphoria is either a feeling of discomfort/distress with gendered aspects of your body (meaning you'd feel a need to change your body = transition) or a feeling of discomfort/distress because of what gender people perceive you to be (meaning you'd want to take steps in order to be perceived differently = transition).

 

Gender euphoria is the opposite of dysphoria, it's feeling extremely 'right' when you're seen by others as how you perceive yourself. Euphoria can also be the thing to clue people in on their gender identity, sometimes instead of dysphoria.

 

Gender expression includes gendered things like clothing, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking etc.

The innate part of gender identity doesn't have anything to do with any of those things.

Are NB’s trans?

                                                                Trans people

                                                       ↙                                  ↘

                                    binary trans people                nonbinary trans people

They're all trans.

 

Nonbinary people can transition, so even if you were (in my opinion incorrectly) basing your definition of ‘transgender’ on whether or not transition is possible, you still wouldn’t have a reason to say NB’s aren’t trans. NB’s can transition medically (through hormone treatment and surgery) as well as socially. Social transition isn't easy. It should be taken seriously. http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Social_Transition

 

An NB transitions for the same reasons a binary trans person transitions, in order to have their body reflect their inner selves more, and in order to be perceived differently. It's true that in this culture NB's won't 'pass' as their true gender, because not enough people know that nonbinary identities exist, so they won't automatically recognize someone as 'Oh, that person doesn't look quite male or female, they're probably nonbinary,' as they would (most of the time) correctly recognize a woman to be a woman and a man to be a man. However, that's a problem with our culture, not with nonbinary people.

 

'Binary trans' and 'nonbinary trans' are two different types of being trans. If individual nonbinary people don’t identify as trans, then there's probably a personal story for why they don't, or maybe they just aren’t aware that nb’s are trans, or maybe they’ve made the common mistake to confuse gender expression with gender identity and they’re actually gender-nonconforming. You won't know until you ask them.

 

NB's not identifying as trans is kind of like black feminists not identifying as feminists. Some black feminists don't identify as feminists because they don't feel represented by white feminism. They feel white feminists aren't committed enough to ending all forms of oppression, instead of just to ending sexism. I believe they call themselves womanists. They're feminists, but refuse to identify as such for personal or political reasons.

 

That's what it's like with nb's too. They're trans, but some refuse to identify as trans for personal or political reasons. These reasons are very diverse. For example, indigenous folks don't conceptualize their genders in the same way western societies do. It's not as medicalized or othered. Personally I could understand why they'd rather identify with the concepts they had before ours came along.

 

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

This wikipedia article is pretty neat: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedersaksisch#Voornaamwoorden

Thanks :) 

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

Well, the point was that what's now considered as masculine exclusive was originally neutral, but yes. I think emphasizing femininity became the default in the age of chivalry in the cities in the west. The rural dialects didn't go with the trend and moved much slower.

Right, I got you now. I'm going to do some googling later to find out if gendered pronouns really only became a thing in the age of chivalry in the majority of Europe. That is super interesting.

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

If women are referred to as 'hee', I don't see how transwomen could be offended? I mean, everyone gets the same pronouns.

Yeah, so I think it could definitely work in Low Saxon, but I think for trans women who grew up with 'hij' and have very painful memories associated with that word, it will be very difficult to accept 'hee' as their new pronoun. I think it would drag up a lot of old trauma.

 

Also imagine what the right wing bigots will say 'The transgenders are erasing sex with this new nonsense of everyone having the same pronouns! If you want to change your pronoun, you can do that in the privacy of your own home! But you aren't changing my pronoun! I'm a 'she' goddamnit! It's 1984 newspeak! They're getting rid of our words now! My free speech! I'm being silenced!' 

 

I just think it'll be harder to reduce the number of pronouns people can use than to increase it. You can ask people to refer to you as 'die' but you can't exactly ask people to stop using the word 'zij'.

 

Also, minor detail, but 'trans' is an adjective. It's not part of the noun. Saying transwoman is kind of like saying blackwoman. It kind of gives the impression that you think black women are some separate category of human, and not just women who happen to be black. You know what I mean? I'm sure you didn't mean to do that though. For some reason the spelling 'transwoman' seems to have caught on among cis people.

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

I'm very disappointed that my fellow Dutch don't want to reclaim 'hee'/'hij' as neutral ground!

Aww I'm sorry haha. I wish we could have just one genderneutral pronoun. It would mean I could have a genderneutral pronoun without having to come out, and I have social anxiety, so to me that would be a major plus. But I just don't see a path towards getting there. At least not in my lifetime. 'Die/hen' is something I can do right now, without having to convince Van Dale to change the entire Dutch language. :( 

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

I'll ask if I ever run into one. I think feminism is more concentrated in the cities, though. I do know of some unmarried non-conforming women who I think are feminists without realizing it. :P

Please do :) 

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

I agree, I didn't mean it was a dialect of Dutch, but that it is an unstandardized language with many dialects.

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for clarifying :) 

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

I still plan on learning, at least to some degree, Mandarin and Sanskrit.

Nice nice, can recommend Mandarin. It is really fun.

 

Sanskrit I have no idea, never tried. Seems difficult, because there's no recent sanskrit media like TV shows or music you can use to passively absorb the language instead of putting effort in lol. (only half kidding, you always need lots of effort in the beginning, afterwards, fck yeah tv shows and fantasy novels in your target language)

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

Haha, 'het' makes people sound like phenomena. :D

Haha it really does. I was trying to think of more scenarios in which it could be used and came up with some. 'Ja en dan zeurt het hè?' or 'Ja dat keuvelt dan zo maar een beetje door.' So 'dat' can also be used as a personal pronoun, and both can also be used to refer to groups of people rather than a single person.

 

Oh, ps, keuvelen is wandelen, ik weet redelijk zeker dat dat woord west fries is en geen nederlands.

 

The construction seems to be used to put distance between the speaker and the person/people being referred to, like you don't necessarily agree with what they're doing, but you also don't care enough to make an issue out of it. It's not meant to be mean, but it is a bit dismissive.

 

I still have to ask my dad about it, because my Dutch is pretty standard so I don't use those constructions and I want to be sure I'm getting it right haha. I'm basing this off of experience and language instinct pretty much. 

 

18 hours ago, Pandark said:

It is. I'm covertly pretty nerdy too.

High five :) 🤚

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On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

Nope, that would be gendernonconformity. That is gender expression, not gender identity.

Expression ties in closely with identity, though? I mean, the only reason for such expression is not having a sense of belonging to established groups and their expected behavior.

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

Gender identity as Roughgarden describes it, is a deep-seated, immutable sense of belonging or kinship to a gender (either to the social construct or to the group of people). A sense of "I belong with those people, or the other group, or maybe both or not really with either."

 

You can't change this sense of belonging by raising someone differently. There have been cases where a doctor made a mistake while circumcising a baby boy and then cut off the entire penis. For example, there’s David Reimer. That boy was raised as a girl instead, from birth, but still always felt like a boy.

Did you write all the copy/pasted text? That's pretty good, clear language.

 

Identity through sense of belonging, I can follow that. I don't feel like I belong to a gender, it's a bit of a black and white concept for me. Like in chemistry, there are left-spinning molecules and there are right-spinning molecules. This ties in with the traditional view of masculinity being associated with the right and femininity with the left. This can also be seen in traditional clothing, even in modern fashion, women's clothes have buttons on the left and loops right, men have buttons on the right and loops left. For most it comes naturally and culture and biology accommodate for each other.

 

Where I'm from I'm often the most feminine guy when in company of men. In other places not so much. On the whole I feel like I need to balance masculinity/femininity to keep in touch with both sides. Following the theory I could be considered gender neutral, so I'm fine with however I'm perceived. It feels kind of banal to me that we don't talk about people as simply sentient entities, that such primal differences have to be included in every sentence. I guess it's a result of humanity having become hyper-sexualized. I would like a way that prevents further estrangement.

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

Gender identity is to which degree you instinctively identify with those two culturally established genders.

 

Some brains are simply somewhere in between male and female. Some people feel a sense of belonging to both genders, and others to neither. (The concept of male and female brains is flawed, all I'm saying here is that it would make sense for there to be an in between.)

That's well said.

 

Hypothetically, how would people feel in a culture where the norm is for everyone to wear baggy dark brown robes? Where no one has facial hair and people drank the elixer of life so they'd stay young forever and thus abstained from reproduction? Where everyone could do whatever work they wanted without being judged for their appearance?

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

Also imagine what the right wing bigots will say 'The transgenders are erasing sex with this new nonsense of everyone having the same pronouns! If you want to change your pronoun, you can do that in the privacy of your own home! But you aren't changing my pronoun! I'm a 'she' goddamnit! It's 1984 newspeak! They're getting rid of our words now! My free speech! I'm being silenced!' 

Haha, evidence suggests it's the contrary of newspeak, but yeah. A reverting change could be taken as badly as a progressive one.

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

Also, minor detail, but 'trans' is an adjective. It's not part of the noun.

Alright. I'm a bit heavy-handed with my communication skills, I'll try to pay attention.

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

Aww I'm sorry haha. I wish we could have just one genderneutral pronoun. It would mean I could have a genderneutral pronoun without having to come out, and I have social anxiety, so to me that would be a major plus.

Well, you get it at least and I don't blame you. I'm glad we're on the same page.

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

But I just don't see a path towards getting there. At least not in my lifetime. 'Die/hen' is something I can do right now, without having to convince Van Dale to change the entire Dutch language. :( 

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

I just think it'll be harder to reduce the number of pronouns people can use than to increase it. You can ask people to refer to you as 'die' but you can't exactly ask people to stop using the word 'zij'.

Most probably there's going to be an official extra set of singular pronouns. Oh, I didn't mean for people to stop using 'zij'. I meant making 'hij' acceptable as neutral and let slow cultural progress determine what happens next.

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

The construction seems to be used to put distance between the speaker and the person/people being referred to, like you don't necessarily agree with what they're doing, but you also don't care enough to make an issue out of it. It's not meant to be mean, but it is a bit dismissive.

The sentiment I get from it is someone's a bit of a cat and I'm putting on some verbal gloves. 😜

 

On 4/16/2021 at 10:17 AM, Rynn said:

High five :) 🤚

Klap 🤚

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25 minutes ago, Pandark said:

Hypothetically, how would people feel in a culture where the norm is for everyone to wear baggy dark brown robes? Where no one has facial hair and people drank the elixer of life so they'd stay young forever and thus abstained from reproduction? Where everyone could do whatever work they wanted without being judged for their appearance?

I think many people wpuld look for a way to empasise their gender to feel attractive. People care so much for otgers' approval. Imo, this fuels most of the emphasising gender stuff. People want sexual attention for the approval. 

 

On 4/16/2021 at 4:17 PM, Rynn said:

Also imagine what the right wing bigots will say 'The transgenders are erasing sex with this new nonsense of everyone having the same pronouns! If you want to change your pronoun, you can do that in the privacy of your own home! But you aren't changing my pronoun! I'm a 'she' goddamnit! It's 1984 newspeak! They're getting rid of our words now! My free speech! I'm being silenced!

This is exactly what TERFs say, just not about pronouns, but the words "woman", "cis" and "trans". 

 

 

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14 minutes ago, Pandark said:

Did you write all the copy/pasted text?

Minus the Roughgarden quote in italics, yes :) 

I originally wrote it about 5 years ago in a thread about whether nonbinary people were trans or not. The person in that thread wasn't very open-minded about our existence, so I've had to slowly edit out all of my snark towards them haha. And of course I edited new bits of info I got along the way in. I've copy pasted it in Gender Discussion threads probably over a hundred times by now. People seem to still find it helpful :) 

 

2 hours ago, Pandark said:

Expression ties in closely with identity, though? I mean, the only reason for such expression is not having a sense of belonging to established groups and their expected behavior.

It's definitely correlated, yes. But there are gendernonconforming cisgender people. Butch lesbians, feminine gay men, metrosexual men, drag queens, and well any other people who just prefer a gender-nonconforming expression but don't identify as anything other than their sex assigned at birth.

 

So being transgender is not the only reason for gender-nonconforming expression, but it is a prominent reason.

 

And of course you've also got closeted transgender people, who do have a transgender identity, but who do not have a gender-nonconforming expression.

 

2 hours ago, Pandark said:

I don't feel like I belong to a gender,

This is a reaction I often get. But of course aces are statistically very likely to be gender-nonconforming and trans-ish, so I guess that shouldn't be a surprise given where I tend to post the explanation.

 

I still need to edit a bit about cis-genderless people into my copy-paste document. I've been meaning to do that. 

 

So I'm not saying you are cis-genderless, you could very well be genderneutral. Obviously identify as what feels right. Only you can know.

 

It seems that a sizeable chunk of the human population doesn't necessarily have this 'sense of belonging' to a gender, or at least they can't easily access it. I suspect that's because their gender hasn't been an issue for them, so they've never had to think about it. Kind of like how you can't feel your appendix, until it becomes inflamed and then suddenly you're like 'oh holy hell I have an appendix and it is an issue that needs to be dealt with right now!' (my awesome metaphor for gender dysphoria: appendicitis lol.)

 

Right so cis-genderless = someone who doesn't have an issue with their gender or sex assigned at birth, but if they woke up in a different body tomorrow, they could roll with that just as easily. 

 

So yeah basically you're not alone in feeling kind of detached from gender. I think it's fairly common.

 

3 hours ago, Pandark said:

It feels kind of banal to me that we don't talk about people as simply sentient entities, that such primal differences have to be included in every sentence.

100% agreed. I sometimes really wish we could just eliminate or de-emphasize gender, but I'm agender, so.. yeah. It would benefit me personally a whole lot haha. I don't think it's possible though. RIP the dream.

 

3 hours ago, Pandark said:

I guess it's a result of humanity having become hyper-sexualized.

Hmm not sure. Gender has definitely been around for longer than hypersexualization. I haven't Googled the age of chivalry thing yet. But it would be interesting if the degree of sexualization/ openness about sex (though how are you going to measure and research that throughout history lol) is correlated with whether or not gendered pronouns are a thing. My instinct says probably not, but well that's just instinct, not worth much.

 

3 hours ago, Pandark said:

Hypothetically, how would people feel in a culture where the norm is for everyone to wear baggy dark brown robes? Where no one has facial hair and people drank the elixer of life so they'd stay young forever and thus abstained from reproduction? Where everyone could do whatever work they wanted without being judged for their appearance?

Well obviously that's impossible to know, but I think people would be pretty quick to break the norms and reinvent some kind of self-expression, starting with tying the brown robes differently, then cutting patterns into them, then etcetera etcetera. I do think gender expression would re-emerge as well, because some peope would naturally relate to each other more, and form social identities around that. Gender may not even be the first social identity to form though. Maybe you've got introverts versus extraverts first. I think you might also end up with more than 2 genders, but I don't think it'll be less than 2. Looking at cultures all over the world in different eras, there are/were a lot that have/had more than 2 genders, but as far as I'm aware, I don't think there are any cultures in which gender isn't a thing. But we can't know everything, so it could have been a thing somewhere sometime. Who knows.

 

3 hours ago, Pandark said:

Oh, I didn't mean for people to stop using 'zij'. I meant making 'hij' acceptable as neutral and let slow cultural progress determine what happens next.

Haha yeah I think most trans people aren't going to be sitting around waiting for slow cultural progress to determine what happens next. We want to be seen and referred to as ourselves in this lifetime if at all possible :) 

But it could be a long run plan B I guess haha.

 

3 hours ago, Pandark said:

Alright. I'm a bit heavy-handed with my communication skills, I'll try to pay attention.

Your communication skills are fine, don't worry. It's a common misspelling :) 

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On 4/17/2021 at 3:42 PM, Rynn said:

This is a reaction I often get. But of course aces are statistically very likely to be gender-nonconforming and trans-ish, so I guess that shouldn't be a surprise given where I tend to post the explanation.

I think there's definitely a correlation with asexuality. Speaking for myself, during childhood I wasn't one of the boys, nor was I one of the girls. Children are ruthless. You deviate from or can't keep up with the norm, you're out. Only as they mature do they become more tolerant. Now I can get along just fine, though I don't have that sense of belonging. Perhaps had I been raised in a friendlier environment it would have been different. I'm glad I'm not a complete misanthrope. I've met great people and am quite interested in cultures as you've noticed.

 

On 4/17/2021 at 3:42 PM, Rynn said:

Hmm not sure. Gender has definitely been around for longer than hypersexualization. I haven't Googled the age of chivalry thing yet. But it would be interesting if the degree of sexualization/ openness about sex (though how are you going to measure and research that throughout history lol) is correlated with whether or not gendered pronouns are a thing. My instinct says probably not, but well that's just instinct, not worth much.

If you put it that way, I had a different association with hyper-sexualized. The neutral pre-masculine pronoun is definitely a (Anglo) Saxon thing. I can only speculate that the strong emphasis on the gender division comes from influences from the Romance languages. In The Netherlands I could only guess this became the default during the Spanish rule. Another thing you might be aware of is the similarity between the Romance and Slavic pronouns. Possibly has something to do with the Catholic/Eastern Orthodox churches having the same origin? Historically much of written language was spread by monks, much spoken language derived from what was spoken in church. edit: looks like this originates long before the establishment of the church.

 

On 4/17/2021 at 3:42 PM, Rynn said:

Well obviously that's impossible to know, but I think people would be pretty quick to break the norms and reinvent some kind of self-expression, starting with tying the brown robes differently, then cutting patterns into them, then etcetera etcetera. I do think gender expression would re-emerge as well, because some peope would naturally relate to each other more, and form social identities around that. Gender may not even be the first social identity to form though. Maybe you've got introverts versus extraverts first. I think you might also end up with more than 2 genders, but I don't think it'll be less than 2. Looking at cultures all over the world in different eras, there are/were a lot that have/had more than 2 genders, but as far as I'm aware, I don't think there are any cultures in which gender isn't a thing. But we can't know everything, so it could have been a thing somewhere sometime. Who knows.

Ha, that's an excellent response, though I think it's very much from the viewpoint of a strongly individualized society. Yes, I think gender is always a thing, hence I added the life elixir part. Without immortality people reproduce and those who like it best will generally have the most offspring. In regards to hyper-sexualization, I suppose the more complex a civilization, the greater lengths people will go to to maintain the primal aspects of it. What sometimes frightens me a little is people forgetting that we all have the same essence.

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