Lemvi
joined 2 years ago
Neither, we just tend to look at the past with rose-colored glasses, forgetting how shitty things have always been.
Yeah, time for them to join NATO as well! 😄
Gender neutral language simply doesn't have gender specific pronouns. It treats everyone the same, regardless of their gender identity. I don't see how that could be considered transphobic.
If anything it is cisphobic, as the default "they/them" (as in the example above) is used primarily by trans people, while the typically cis pronouns "he/him" and "she/her" are not used.
What's wrong with not listing pronouns?
/> judges women superficially
/> is judged superficially by women
/> angery
it didn't disappear, just got to small for you to see 😉
They/them is absolutely gender neutral, as it can be used for any person, regardless of their gender. See? I did it in this sentence.
Take my example from before: "A person is walking down the street. I approach them, asking for their pronouns. They smile and tell me that's none of my business." This works, regardless of the person's gender identity.
Now use different pronouns: "A person is walking down the street. I approach him, asking for his pronouns. He smiles and tells me that's none of my business." This one only works if the person uses the pronouns he/him. (Btw, shouldn't pronouns be sets of 3 like "they/them/their", "he/him/his" or "she/her/her"?)
Gender neutral language isn't about not recognizing peoples' genders, its about omitting irrelevant information. Having gender specific pronouns draws attention to the genders of the people referred to, even if the point of the sentence is not about gender. At some point during the development of the English language, the consensus emerged that it is important to always know/mention the gender identity of everyone involved.
This is an arbitrary selection of a subset of a person's identity however. For example, we don't have pronouns indicating whether people are parents or not, or indicating their marital status.
Actually, we did have the latter with "Miss" and "Mrs", until we decided that this distinction isn't very inclusive, introducing the neutral "Ms", equivalent to the "Mr".
Point is, you could make up all sorts of pronouns including every aspect of a person's identity. I'm saying that is neat and all, but if I just want to construct a sentence about a person going to the store, I might not know or want to include any part of their identity, be it their gender, marital status or age.