I’ve been interacting with a guy who is very transphobic and it has brought to light the concept for me. Something that has been growing on my mind is that fighting to keep a she||him dichotomy feels unnatural. What do I mean?
I remember when I used to have a facebook and they tried to force everyone to be who they seem instead of who they want to be, that it would make sense for people in conversations to say ‘she’ or ‘he’ depending on the sex they could perceive of who they were talking to. But facebook is a very small aspect of a much bigger internet. Even before facebook, I was on miscellaneous forums of the internet, where I would interact with people who’s names would imply they were dragons, or elves, or puppets, or abstract concepts, or words that don’t even have a definition, let alone a gender. And here we are again on a forum where individuals can purposely choose to give themselves an image or name that makes them seem to have a certain gender, but there is no force behind it, so the vast majority of people are not waving their sex in front of them when interacting.
And, in general, FREEDOM includes CHOOSING what information one shares about themself. So, upon moral growth of a world, assuming Freedom increases, English should drop it’s enforced telling of someone’s gender through she/he him/her hers/his. We are already in an age where it would be blatantly inappropriate if the language enforced divulging someone’s Ethnicity or Religion like it does Sex.
And through forums and other nondirect personal communication, there are many people we encounter, most of us daily, who are not waving their sex in front of them. How do we refer to these people? So, to me, Freedom seems a natural direction the language is to go; AND that the internet is catalyzing it.
And so, when watching a transphobe, it seems they ignore that the internet itself, unless entirely held by facebook, naturally grows ‘they them’ as the natural means of referring to others, with automatic ‘she/he’ comparatively more assumptive and thus less polite.
It seems very obvious to me that nature and the structure of the internet pushes growth specifically in this direction.
I actually try to use singular they for anyone who doesn’t specifically request otherwise because of this.
In fact my concept for a conlang has this,
1st person (I, Me), 2nd Person (You, Y’all), third person (They, Them) and “4th person” or Object (It, Those)
Part of me wants to make some of the related particles also act as evidentiary cases for the past tense, Participant (I did), Witness (I saw), Testimony (They told me they did/saw), and Hearsay (I’ve heard).
Agreed. English is a stupid language in many ways. Why do we shoehorn in gender when it is not relevant? Why does it deserve to be baked into the language? How the ever loving hell can you expect someone to understand someone else’s gender implicitly in arbitrary scenarios? Even when you can see someone face to face, if they’re not strictly following narrow gender norms, your accuracy is going to be dogshit. Why bother?
I understand the feeling that parading around pronouns and taking time out of our days to explicitly establish them (when it’s generally, again, not relevant) is tedious and confusing. I barely have the brainspace to remember names. The obvious answer is to use neutral language whenever it is sufficient in context. Which is, again, most of the time.
I think it goes beyond the Internet, and beyond trans inclusion. Even if you’re a bunch of cis folks talking face to face, it still makes sense to default to neutral pronouns. I don’t always know (and certainly don’t always care) what someone’s sex or gender is face to face, and that ain’t new.
The singular “they” is awkward, but it’s like two hundred years too late to come up with something better.
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