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Best guess on what percentage of the population chooses non-conforming pronouns (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter chet
- Start date
Sand
Footballguy
Sometimes the actions of the government are so egregious that the citizenry refuses to comply. This was one of those cases.
It is confusing as hell when someone asks to be referred to as they/them, especially in writing. Your mind has been trained since birth to see they/them as multiple people, not one person who identifies as non-binary. Believe me, I recently read several emails with a they/them and every time I saw it I had to stop, go back and reread it to see if I had missed something.
Juxtatarot
Footballguy
According to reports the settlement was for $400,000 plus legal fees. Sorry, I should have stated as such.
bigbottom
Footballguy
Grace Under Pressure
Footballguy
No idea. Was the actual point ever revealed? If the point is barely anyone does this, then ok?
Can't understand why people get offended about this stuff.
Can't understand why people get offended about this stuff.
Juxtatarot
Footballguy
Actually, I think you are right. I misread.
“A public university in Ohio will pay $400,000 in damages and attorney fees after punishing a professor for declining a male student's demand to be referred to as a female.”
https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-public-university-to-pay-400000-in-damages-after-punishing-professor-for-misgendering-student
BladeRunner
Footballguy
Agreed. If people don't want to participate then they shouldn't have to and you should be okay with that.
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Grace Under Pressure
Footballguy
Is that the point? People are being forced into using pronouns? Sure, of course that's dumb. Please feel free to use pronouns, and also please don't force people to use pronouns, IMO.
I guess I don't get easily offended so I still don't really get the thread. Could be just me, wouldn't be the first time.
supermike80
Footballguy
I wouldn't. And if that person decided to use that against my business they should be ashamed of themselves and are terrible people. However, as we have seen from some other threads, not giving in to this madness gets you called names and totally attacked by those that think you should. So it wouldn't surprise me that it happened.
the moops
Footballguy
supermike80
Footballguy
I'd use a name most likely. And I wouldn't go out of my way to not use this person's preferred pronouns.
knowledge dropper
Footballguy
I imagine sitting in a conference room with a co-worker and a vendor and telling my co-worker that “they” have a request while only one person is sitting at the table. That’s so bizarre.
bigbottom
Footballguy
Another hypothetical. A new woman is hired in at your company. She looks like a woman. Dresses like a woman. You call her by her name and use the feminine pronouns as does everyone at work because everyone assumes she’s a biological female. A year in to her employment, you learn that she is a trans woman. Do you switch to using male pronouns now on principle?
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Been mulling on this particular for some time now but in another way, which public restroom is Renee Richards supposed to use these days?
The General
Footballguy
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You'd use one set of pronouns before coffee and another set after? Well now I've heard everything!
supermike80
Footballguy
bigbottom
Footballguy
This is a situation that is likely to happen to all of us at one point or another. I guess my goal is to have you think about how you might approach such a situation. Do you have a sense for how you would?
supermike80
Footballguy
parasaurolophus
Footballguy
I would use their chosen name and chosen he/she.
I would never refer to said person as a plural or any other look at me pronouns.
parasaurolophus
Footballguy
Amused to Death
Footballguy
Even Lou Reed knew when "he" became "she".
bigbottom
Footballguy
Snotbubbles
Footballguy
the moops said:
I'm having a hard time determining what you want an individual to do here. Your examples, gay politicians and inter-racial marriages were offensive to people. Should those offenders, not run for office or get married? I'm confused. Also, you use the term "simple thing
the moops
Footballguy
Using he or she or they depending on what the person is asking you to use. It is quite simple
supermike80
Footballguy
Thing is I don't want to be a *s*tick about it. I'm just not a fan of the entire thing. I generally am civil toward anyone and I wouldn't make it a point to go against what they want. Beyond how difficult I may come across as on this board.
Van Dyman
Footballguy
If you're using they as a singular pronoun wouldn't it be "they has a request"? I'm honestly not sure.
Van Dyman
Footballguy
Personally this usage of they/them sounds incorrect in both verbal and written communication. I understand that non-gendered pronouns would be useful for this situation, but "they" and "them" are terrible choices. Those words not only have well-established meanings, they are so commonly used that assigning both singular and plural usages just creates avoidable, unnecessary confusion. English is already a messed up language...this would just make it slightly worse.
I would GREATLY prefer we just come up with new words for this. I honestly don't care what the new words are, just hopefully short ones that are easily pronounced. My opposition to they/them has absolutely nothing to do with respecting/disrespecting people, nothing to do with agreeing/disagreeing with their POV, etc.
I would GREATLY prefer we just come up with new words for this. I honestly don't care what the new words are, just hopefully short ones that are easily pronounced. My opposition to they/them has absolutely nothing to do with respecting/disrespecting people, nothing to do with agreeing/disagreeing with their POV, etc.
Caveman33
Footballguy
There are neopronouns. That is what I was referring to earlier when I said that it seems like a trend among teens. I'm rarely around teens so I've never encountered neopronouns, only read stories about them. There are a lot of neopronouns like ze, em, zir, xe...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/style/neopronouns-nonbinary-explainer.html
A personal pronoun is a form of speech that stands in for a person or group of people. She is having opinions online; they are fighting in the comments; and, of course, as in the Prince song made famous by Sinead O’Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
Nonbinary pronouns, as well — often the singular “they” and “them” — have become widespread. A 2019 Pew Research study found already that one in five Americans knew someone who uses nonbinary pronouns.
And then there are neopronouns.
A neopronoun can be a word a created to serve as pronoun without expressing gender, like “ze” and “zir.”
A neopronoun can also be a so-called “noun-self pronoun,” in which a pre-existing word is drafted into use as a pronoun. Noun-self pronouns can refer to animals — so your pronouns can be “bun/bunself” and “kitten/kittenself.” Others refer to fantasy characters — “vamp/vampself,” “prin/cess/princesself,” “fae/faer/faeself” — or even just common slang, like “Innit/Innits/Innitself.”
How prevalent are neopronouns?
Not very — yet.
A recent survey of pronoun use among 40,000 L.G.B.T.Q. young people by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing suicide among queer and trans youth, found that one-quarter of them used nonbinary pronouns. (Participants were recruited from late 2019 through early 2020 by ads on social media.) Most said they used common pronouns like “he,” “she” and “they.”
Just 4 percent said they used neopronouns, including “ze/zir,” and “fae/faer,” often in combination with other pronouns.
So, is this for real?
Yes. And: Around any leading edge behavior online, trolling, high jinks and bad faith collide indistinctly. For those unfamiliar with the culture surrounding neopronouns right now, it’s likely impossible to distinguish between what’s playful, what’s deeply meaningful and what’s people being mean.
Many neopronoun users are dead serious, and are also part of online communities that are quick to react swiftly to offenses. They are deeply versed in the style and mores of contemporary identity politics conversations.
A popular Twitch streamer who goes by AndiVMG recently apologized after jokingly tweeting that her pronouns were “bad/af,” which led many neopronoun users to accuse her of transphobic invalidation of their identities.
AndiVMG did not respond to a request for comment for this article but wrote on Twitter: “It wasn’t meant to mock people who use neopronouns. However I have since educated myself on the matter and spoken to people who use neopronouns and I see why what I said was hurtful.”
Critics persist. “I’m not going to call u kitty/kittyself or doll/dollself just bc u think its cool,” one TikToker wrote in a video caption. “Pronouns are a form of identity not an aesthetic.”
But what’s the difference between an aesthetic and an identity anyway?
How do you know someone’s pronouns?
Neopronoun users may publish strict boundaries and preferences around behaviors, enthusiasms and hatreds. Many of them have defined lists of behaviors they find unacceptable around privacy or cruelty — sometimes referred to as “DNI” lists, short for “do not interact” — which they often outline in posts on Carrd, a service that makes single-page websites.
Carrd grew in scope during the protest movements of 2020; these days, many of its more than two million pages are used primarily for expressions of fandom and personhood. So, a social media bio will often include a link to an identity résumé on Carrd, often with a pronoun usage guide. (One sample: “Bug likes bugs.” “Those things belong to Bug.” “Bug wants to work by Bugself.”)
One Carrd explains neopronouns at length. In its FAQ section, it provides a response used often in the neopronoun community when talking to people who claim neopronouns “aren’t real words”: “Yes, literally every word is made up! Neopronouns are real because they carry meaning and are understood by others.”
Many people who use neopronouns don’t just use one set. They select a handful, and show off their collections on websites like Pronouny.xyz, a site that provides usage examples for neopronouns. Users make their own Pronouny pages, like this one, which includes xe/xem/xyr, moon/moonself, star/starself, bee/beeself, and bun/bunself. “Sorry if I have too many pronouns,” the page’s creator wrote. “You can use just one set or just they/them if they’re too many!!”
Why are neopronouns so heated right now?
Online conversation gathered steam in November with some contentious TikToks about neopronouns. (“Bro, neopronouns are gonna break the English language,” said a young TikToker in November who goes by @Pokebag in a video that racked up hundreds of thousands of likes.)
But noun-self pronouns are not exactly new; they emerged from an online hotbed for avant-garde ideas around gender expression. “The noun-self pronouns emerged on Tumblr, starting around 2012, 2013,” said Jason D’Angelo, a linguist and queer scholar who has a substantial following on TikTok for videos about gender and identity issues. “They’re a unique way of exploring people’s understanding of their own gender.”
Mx. D’angelo (who takes the nonbinary references themself) said the social media discourse around neoprounouns “died off” to some extent around 2014, before resurfacing recently; they theorized that increasing interest may be a result of the coronavirus forcing people indoors.
“When we go about in the world, we have to perform gender in ways that are typical and normative over and over and over again, but because a lot of us have been in our houses for the last year, we haven’t had to perform them,” they said. “So the link between the performance and the self is weakened.”
I think this is weird or not OK!
That’s OK. Horror at noun-self pronoun usage is so common that it has spurred a meme in the neopronoun community. In it, people compare neopronouns to all kinds of things we take for granted.
Neopronoun users say new terms allow them to engage with gender — or other aspects of identity — in a way that aligns with how they feel.
In some cases, neopronouns are met with frustration because their use shows people divorcing themselves from continuing, unfinished gender business between men and women. Neopronoun users are trying to “construct something new and different that doesn’t have the same societal issues,” Mx. D’angelo said, as the traditional gender binary: “It’s almost like gender abolitionist.”
How can a pronoun address identity beyond gender?
Considering their Tumblr origins, it’s not surprising that many noun-self pronoun user interests’ overlap with fandoms, including anime, K-pop and Minecraft YouTuber stars like Dream. Intense fandoms are rife with neopronoun use.
Neopronouns are also prominent among some communities of young people who identify as neurodivergent, which includes diagnoses or descriptions like Asperger’s syndrome and autism.
Mx. D’Angelo said that one reason people on the autism spectrum may use neopronouns could be “because they feel like their relationship with gender is different than the neurotypical one.”
Neopronouns give people who feel different from the rest of the world a way to avoid all its boxes at once.
But pronouns are permanent and must never change!
In his book “What’s Your Pronoun?” Dennis Baron, an English professor at the University of Illinois, describes a series of attempts to create a nonbinary pronoun. (In 1808, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested “it,” which flopped; it is now beginning to have a small moment in the sun.) In all, Mr. Baron identified more than 200 gender-neutral pronouns proposed between the 19th century and the 1970s.
As nonbinary identities have become more widely accepted in recent decades, so did the requisite pronouns. In 2015, Harvard began allowing students to choose their preferred pronouns from a list that included gender-neutral terms like “ze, hir and hirs,” as did administrators at the University of Tennessee — before that university withdrew a guide to pronouns, amid conservative pushback.
Countries including Australia, Iceland and Argentina have given citizens the option to use nonbinary passports, and several U.S. states have done the same with driver’s licenses, including California and Oregon.
What do neopronoun users say about all this?
We wanted people to tell us in their own words about why and how they used neopronouns. Because they are very young, we agreed to let them use only their first names.
“Being neurodivergent, I tend to perceive how a word makes me feel rather than just seeing the word,” the noun-self user Gum, 13, wrote in a direct message on Twitter. “I chose my bink/bonk pronouns because they remind me of clowns. Clowns and harlequin dolls make me very happy.”
“Being neurodivergent, you are more likely to have a complicated relationship with your gender identity and expression, and pronouns are just one part of gender expression,” Elijah, 17, wrote.
“When I first encountered them I actually didn’t agree with them,” wrote one 15-year-old neopronoun user. “Eventually I met a lot of people online who used them and decided to educate myself further and realized that they were perfectly valid and just another way of expressing your gender to others. I chose the ones I use as I feel a connection to them, EG vamp/vamp pronouns — I feel a connection to vampires and that in a way feels connected to my gender.”
What are the limits of neopronouns?
Limits? What are those? Some people even use emojis. A 2018 post on the Tumblr emojiselfpronouns explains how the paw emoji may be used as a pronoun: “Where is? Did
And how would you say that anyway?
“They were not meant to be said in the first place,” the post explained. Emoji-self pronouns “are meant to be fun, and are meant to stand against what we see as ‘normal’ and ‘typical’ pronouns.”
But there actually are some limits. Neopronoun users have shut down the notion of using terms related to Black Lives Matter, like “BLM,” as neopronouns, arguing that it is inappropriate for people to use these terms in this way. Others have claimed that using “fae” as a neopronoun is culturally appropriative from pagan communities (this claim, as they say, is disputed).
And not everyone in the wider queer community supports noun-self pronouns.
“As a trans man, I think neopronouns are getting way out of hand,” Asa Pegler, 17, said in a TikTok from November.
In an interview, Mr. Pegler specified that his beef is not with gender-neutral neopronouns. He felt like elevating objects and animals to human pronoun levels was dismissive.
“I couldn’t stomach why anyone would want to identify as an object?” Mr. Pegler wrote in an Instagram direct message.
“They dehumanize us as trans people,” he added. “We are people! Not objects or animals. So that’s why I stated that they are out of hand, because they make us look like a bit of a joke.”
The neopronoun community comprises mostly internet-native young people, and is agile when it comes to facing down criticism and mockery. Social media posts affirming the validity of neopronoun identities are a constant refrain:
“If you use neopronouns, you are extremely valid and I love you,” one person wrote on Twitter.
“Neopronouns are so valid and if you disagree hard block me rn /srs,” another wrote.
“There will always be people IRL that will have something negative to say, whether it’s because they just don’t understand or they are genuinely just a bigot,” Elijah, the neopronoun user, wrote. “They know nothing about your personal experiences and have no business policing your identity.”
Pickle Rody
IBL Representative
Sure but, since you are not the one making the request to be addressed a certain way you do not get to choose. As such, you are left with two choices. Simply comply with the request regardless how you feel about it. Or, refuse to honor that request because of how it makes you feel. In reality, what you prefer does not matter.
Van Dyman
Footballguy
Thanks. Haven't read your entire post yet but I'm aware of neo-pronouns. I'd be 100% on board with that. The problem, of course, is getting people to agree on which ones so we can all be on the same page.
GordonGekko
Footballguy
ekbeats said:
At my companies, everyone is called by their last name. That last name is the one used for payroll. No nicknames, no stage names, no time for some debate over things that don't apply to the actual work.
If I hired you and your last name is Martin or Williams or Chan or Omar or Ocasio Cortez or Gaetz or whatever, that's what you get called. It's always been that way and it's going to always be that way, long before all this social justice/woke/identity politics extortion started.
I tell my people all the same thing. Off duty, if you want to be called some other name, then I'll accommodate that. If I see you in a drug store or a hardware store, and you want to be called Daffy Duck or Marvin The Martian or Bob instead of Roberta, then OK. But at work, it's your last name on payroll. I've also told my people that if someone has worked side by side with you for a decade and now you've made some lifestyle and/or physical changes and/or preference changes or whatever changes, you can't expect people to automatically make some kind of magical shift overnight. That's not reasonable. The entire "dead naming" movement has been co-opted. I recognize there are people who use the name game to incite the LGBT movement. But that's not the rule, it's not the majority. Most of the time, it's often used like a battering ram.
If someone knew you for a decade and worked with you for years and years and knew you as Bob, and now you want to be Roberta, don't go into full John Wick deleted scene mode if a person calls you Bob in the first few weeks or few months of some kind of large scale change. The majority of people are not racist and not bigots and not xenophobes and aren't looking to hurt other people. Most people are too busy with their own problems and their own lives to care about you.
If you want tolerance, you actually have to give tolerance. You cannot achieve tolerance through social extortion or cultural terrorism.
I've employed people for a very long time. I consider myself a very good employer. I'm proud of the fact that I've created opportunity for people to build a career or some kind of financial stability for their families when possible. Work is stressful enough as it is for the average person. Cornering people about identity politics isn't going to make their day any easier.
I also want to recognize there are a lot of the LGBT movement/lifestyle/choice/etc/etc who aren't looking to punish other people around them. They also have their own problems are just trying to get by in life and do the best they can. The unhinged radical zealot fringe is exactly that, a fringe element. Here's what I do see all the time. The most zealot oriented that want to squeeze people down to the nickel and corner them relentlessly and hammer fist people with identity politics are almost always people who have never ever run a business before. Because when you are on the other side of that coin, it's not easy either. I find many of my most balanced employees are those that used to run their own businesses in the past in a different timeline. They understand even what look like small changes can have a lot of overall complexity to it.
Most of the fringe in the identity politics movement are haters. Haters don't build anything. They don't create anything. They don't innovate. They just latch on and try to burn someone else's hard work to the ground.
Let's be real about this. Some LGBT are going to have a hard time in the workforce and in the employment marketplace. Some industries are very very small and very very niche. People talk. Once you get a rep as a high conflict personality type and a HR nightmare and a constant lawsuit threat, doors start closing. The same conditions under which Kapernick and Tebow found options disappearing isn't that much different. Your value in delivering wins and producing elite work output product needs to be sky high to offset some of the kind of self inflicted drama that some people bring into their workplaces.
When you go into work, you aren't entitled to have everyone else bend over backwards to make you feel good about whatever issue you have about how society functions. It's work for a reason. People who deliver wins get more push/pull. That's not some identity politics concept, it's a Life 101 concept. Barry Bonds was a lethal hitter for a ver long time. So he got a lounge chair in front of three lockers all to himself. That's how it works.
I recognize the LGBT community has many real struggles. I'm not here to minimize them. But the reality is, esp for their fringe elements, that there's often this unchecked arrogance that many of them feel they are the only one with problems and life and those problems need to everyone else's main priority. Everyone suffers. Your problems aren't going to stop the world from spinning.
"No one really cares about your problems."
You aren't a victim if you face that. It just means you are just another person, like everyone else.
bigbottom
Footballguy
the moops
Footballguy
dkp993
Footballguy
Peter Page: Yeah, I think the pronouns are really confusing.
Gary King: I don't even know what a pronoun is.
Oliver Chamberlain: Well, it's a word that can function by itself as a noun which refers to something else in the discourse.
Gary King: I don't get it.
Andrew Knightley: You just used one.
Gary King: Did I?
Andrew Knightley: "It" is a pronoun.
Gary King: What is?
Andrew Knightley: It!
Gary King: Is it?
Andrew Knightley: Christ.
I was just confirming that it's trendy among everyone to use pronouns. The quote is from a movie I watched on Sunday night, so it was fresh in my mind. (The World's End. It's fun, especially if you know nothing about it going in.)
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Caveman33
Footballguy
Yes but only the cool kids are using non-conforming or neopronouns. Bug and bugself are good ones.
GordonGekko
Footballguy
^
I consider this a completely ridiculous example.
There are three practical pathways to this issue
1) Social interactions which are completely voluntary
2) Work interactions with other people in your specific workplace i.e. coworkers as peers or management or owners, etc, etc.
3) Work interactions with clients/the public/customers of which you must interact to do your job and perform your stated duties required of said employment
When you are work, you follow work policy. Or you have to work somewhere else or get fired. There are very very very few type instances in America where someone might be in a situation where they are legally compelled into some kind of work situation.
If the workplace has a policy and your refuse and you just don't want to do it and it's enough of a deal breaker for you, then go find somewhere else to work.
If it's a social situation, you can just say "No" and walk away.
"I want you to call me as 'They or X or Y or Z'"
"No, I won't"
How do you even begin to regulate social situations? If you have two people of different value structures and they disagree, then they can part ways. We teach this to children - You are not going to get along with every last other single kid in the entire world, if you two can't get along, then don't play together, avoid each other.
I don't see why this is so damn complicated. I've already discussed my position as an employer. Just use the last name of the person that's listed on their payroll. If it's good enough for them to use to get paid, it's good enough for everyone to use in the office. If you are dealing with clients or customers, follow work policy on the matter. If there isn't work policy on the matter, ask management and do what they say or quit and find a new job that accommodates whatever situation you think is better. When you are on your own time, you are on your own time. You are under no obligation to accommodate or submit to someone's request on your own time where there is no actual business context involved. ( I'm sure this is where one of the exhausting 7th tier lawyers who wave their law degrees around will want to start splitting hairs. Yes, I'm compacting this down to broad strokes but broad strokes are generally going to work here)
It doesn't make someone a bigot or a xenophobe if they say "No" to a pronoun request on their own time. They don't agree and it's OK if they don't agree. Part of good management is understanding when an employee's time is actually yours to use and deploy. And when it's not. Many of these cases don't sound like a failure of empathy but it appears to be a failure to understand practical boundaries.
Let's just be real about this. There is a subset of fringe LGBT who are constantly looking for a fight over their identity politics issues. All of them? No. A majority? I don't see that. But some? Sure. And they want to keep needling and finding some angle to incite other people who have their own problems and their own lives to handle.
There is a fringe subset of LGBT who just need to hear it plain - It's not all about you. Hearing 'No' when people have an actual choice isn't your own personal Chernobyl.
If some people out there don't want to be defined by the world around them for being LGBT, then they have to come to terms that they also shouldn't define their entire life around some external validation seeking quest about being LGBT. People don't really care about you. You aren't that important. If you disappeared tomorrow then most people would yawn and have a Coke. That's the human condition, not some identity politics induced war footing.
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