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My drill is the drill that will pierce the heavens! ✊
Do people outside the U.S. really do pronoun circles? I’m trying to understand what the point of them is.
When you are talking to people the pronouns are always you/yours. When talking about people…. Well don’t talk about people if you don’t know them.
Actually, My second person pronouns are You/Yours, with a capital letter.
Yes, officer! That’s Yours, over there! You’s the one that did! You was all by Yourself in that corner!
That’s… Not how second person works, grammatically speaking. “Officer” would be the addressee, so you should be using third person pronouns to refer to “the one that did”
no, me do pronoun grammer gooder
My third person pronouns are She/They/It, with a capital letter.
Also, to answer your question, people do use pronoun circles. Every adult should be experienced enough to change their perception of other people’s gender at will, so pronoun circles are a chance to make sure you’re perceiving other people correctly.
Isn’t it an incredibly hostile experience, a bunch of strangers looking at you, expecting you to perform your pronoun dance for them?
It doesn’t seem… welcoming.Maybe I’m way off base here, but every version I can imagine seems like true nightmare fuel, at least to my introverted ass.
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This comic is deliberately emphasising the bad parts of pronouns circles as an example of what not to do. You’re not supposed to interrogate people or debate with them about their pronouns. Decent people don’t act that way.
But there are problems with them that trans people have pointed out. Like, if you’re closeted, then you have to choose between outing or misgendering yourself. That’s what’s happening to Blue, who’s not ready to come out yet.
We don’t necessarily have a great solution for that one. The best we can do is make it optional to give your pronouns. But then closeted people who don’t give their pronouns can be perceived as transphobic chuds.
It’s just introducing yourself… Like, it’s as simple as “Hey, I’m Squirrelanna and I go by she/her or it/its. Both equally fine. Nice to be here,” and moving on. I’m an introvert to and it’s really not anymore hostile than the essential concept of standing up and identifying yourself.
idk if it’s an autism thing but i’ve always found “introducing myself” to be a god awful experience, why the fuck does everyone need to know a bunch of details about me? I’ve never “”“introduced myself”“” after i left school and i’ve been better off for it.
As someone who also has autism, that’s a you thing. Autistic people love to share things about themselves, especially pertaining to special interests. It’s one of the key ways you can try to connect with others without trying to assume a bunch of nonsense neurotypical bs. Straightforward “this is me, who are you”
in the little place in europe i live in, it is very common for political and queer groups as part of name rounds. the reason for it is the same as for the name round: so you know how to refer to the people in the round.
it’s not just done the first time but at the start of every meeting, so people got a nice chance to update everyone smoothly about name or pronoun changes without having to like do some big comming out. it’s really nice
it’s not common outside those spaces but mainly cause it’s a more new thing and society is really cis binary normative so most people just expect to be able to guess everyones pronouns correctly (they are not)
I’m in the US and I’ve never encountered this. Some people put them in their email signatures which is fine and has actually been useful a couple times with names that were unclear to me. Mostly we’re just trying to get the meeting over as fast as possible so we can get back to doing actual work. If someone did do this I’d never show up to their meeting on time again, same as I do for people I know are doing icebreakers.
Common in my circles any time you are also sharing names in a circle
Heavens no, absolutely not. Maybe in a meeting where everyone is introducing themselves, people might be asked to say their preferred pronouns with the rest of their introduction. Like hi my name is infinitesunrise, I’m the facility’s sex technician, I hail from west bumblefuck and my pronouns are he/him. In my free time I grow weed, play with my cat, and draw smut.
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Gendered pronouns are dumb, and by extention so are neopronounts. Language is about mutual intelligibility so making a new nondescriptive word for every possible form of gender identity is an exercise in futility. I’m so glad I live somewhere where gendered pronouns aren’t a thing. English should just switch to they/them for everyone and be done with it.
While gender-neutral languages are awesome, the fact that we are speaking a gendered language means we are often communicating gender. Having to communicate gender is the cost of speaking English.
If you refuse to use a trans person’s neopronouns, you will be intelligible as denying their gender. If you internally respect them, but externally misgender them or complain about their pronouns, then your internal intentions are unintelligible. Language is a two-way street. You have a responsibility to make yourself understood, by using the pronouns that match your intentions.
Also, consider that a neopronoun may be perfectly intelligible to everyone as-is. You certainly understand the meaning of Legend’s hex code, #LEG3ND, right? It’s intelligible. When it comes to neopronouns like Legend’s, I think you may be mistaken.; this might not be about intelligibility. In Legend’s case, at least, you understand neopronouns perfectly well. You simply disagree.
English has a gender neutral third person singular pronoun. Calling someone a they/them isn’t denying their gender. There is no reason not to use they/them. Gender isn’t built into the language like it is in some even weirder languages (A chair doesn’t have a gender in English).
I understand it perfectly well, but yes, I do disagree. Not about their gender identity, but about how pronouns work. The way I see it, the whole point with pronouns is to use a widely applicable shorthand to refer to something or someone. If everyone wants to be unique and have their own pronouns, then we might as well not use any pronouns and just refer to everybody by their name.
Edit: Oh yeah and as gendered pronouns are an attempt to communicate gender, then no, I have very little idea what sort of gender the pronoun “legend” is supposed to communicate. I understand the word but not what it means in this context.
When you have the choice to do something, and you don’t do that thing, you’re communicating that you don’t want to do that thing.
When you have the choice to gender someone correctly, and you don’t gender them, you’re communicating that you don’t want to gender them.
This is called de-gendering and many people will take your willful refusal to do the kind thing as a form of relative cruelty. Because kindness and cruelty are relative.
Also pronouns are usually shorter than names, so using neopronouns saves time over names.
Yeah no, I don’t want to have to juggle as many pronouns as there are gender identities, because gender is a spectrum and that would result in almost as many pronouns as there are people. Remembering peoples names is bad enough for me already. I don’t want to gender anyone unless it’s actually relevant to the discussion. It adds unnecessary complexity and increases the probability of accidentally misgendering people drastically. IMO people should be free to express themselves, but in ways that don’t require others to actively participate in that expression. You know, clothes and stuff that can actually achieve the kind of variety that gender expression necessitates. Profile pictures, usernames, banner images and profile bios online.
I do sympathize with people trying to break the mold of cishet normative gendered pronouns, but long term I think neopronouns are not a scalable solution and doesn’t affect the underlying problem of gendered language (unless one adopts the accelerationist position that people will make so many gendered pronouns that the concept looses meaning that way, but that might be a long shot).
I have the precise opposite opinion, I think society needs to take more responsibility for how we gender others, and not just in language.
We have some ability to control our perceptions. That ability can be trained, and we can learn techniques to do it better. So there’s no excuse for perceiving a trans woman as “non-passing”. The passing is a thing happening inside everyone else’s brain, not in her body! So we need to take responsibility for our own minds and perceive her as female-presenting. And if we can’t, that’s a harmful skill issue we need to fix.
Pronouns are one of the techniques we can use to hack our perceptions. We can use language to manipulate our minds. That’s why neopronouns were invented. That’s the benefit of them.
Apologies on the ninja edits on my previous comment (the latter paragraph is new).
Gender isn’t biological, so the passing is not happening in their body anyways. Gender is social. If they present themselves as female, then sure, they’re female presenting. If someone presents themselves as something more bespoke, then they do just that. Usually it’s just a vibe to me. I don’t see why it would need to be anything more than that, or why I should change the words I use to refer to them.
Though at the same time I concede that it’s probably different for people who have always been changing the way they speak depending on the gender of the person being referred to, and I suppose you’re right in that neopronouns have a use in shaking up that framework. Still, I maintain that in the long term ungendered language would be preferable.
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Well, no. In the context of gendered pronouns being available and the norm of the language, intentionally using they/them instead of someone’s identified pronouns is a disrespect. You are not bending the whole of the most widely-spoken language on Earth by yourself and even if you could, starting with the effective erasure of minority gender identity would be terrible form.
Isn’t it even more audacious to think that everyone should start referring to every queer person by their custom pronouns? Neopronouns are already an attempt to bend the language, and I’m just saying that it’s bending that language in the exact wrong direction because it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem, instead just building on top of that.
No language is being bent, in 99.9% of cases the pronouns being used have always existed in English, the remaining 0.1% are the ‘custom pronouns’ you’re thinking of and are an edge case that is effectively a non-issue to accommodate. I have a queer friend group and live in an extremely queer-friendly city and I literally know just one person who prefers a non-standard pronoun and am happy to accommodate that.
No language is being bent
Well that’s disappointing.
It’s as audacious as requesting to be referred to by a shortening of your name, or a nickname, or a changed name. To be honest, it’s less audacious than asking that someone use your name instead of some generic identifier.
Is it not just as audacious to expect everyone to fit themselves to the pronouns you want to use? How would you feel about others arbitrarily deciding to use a different pronoun for you?
My whole point here has been that pronouns should have nothing to do with gender, so somebody using a different pronoun to refer to me would not affect me beyond mild annoyance at somebody lying about me by spreading information about my gender if the gendered pronoun isn’t the right one. On the other hand a pronoun that doesn’t carry information about gender can’t misgender a person.
Though I’m pretty queer, I somewhat agree? If I could, I’d go back in time and change first names to demarcate gender identity in a consistent way so we could just use they/them, as you say.
That said, none of us can go back in time, and though we may have the same goal, a goal is not a plan. I’ve yet to see a better method than neopronouns of forcing people (who would usually rather not) to think about gender in new ways, and thus allow people to present how they wish under our language restricted social context.
Think of it like tossing in an outlier to more effectively pull the average somewhere. Every xey/xem pulls us closer as a society to giving a shit about this, and that’s the first step to making progress. Even if it seems to be pissing. A buncha people off in the process
Why would we need first names to demarcate gender identity in a consistent way in order to use they/them for everyone? In my native language we have some names that are more ambivalent about gender than others and we’re doing just fine with a single genderless third person singular pronoun.
I suspect that a lot of cis people would be pissed about being referred to as they/them as well, but they can suck it up. I said this in a different comment here, but I can see that being useful with people who are stuck on that he/she framework. But I still think of this as an unnecessary one step back to take two steps forward, when it could just be taking one step forward.
We wouldn’t. My point is that neither of us can change the past.
I remember typing random combinations of letters and numbers into the hex color field on my marquee span text on my Geocities site when i was a kid and marveling at how it always seemed to yield a different result.
Anyway, as an edgelord 8 year old with unsupervised access to the internet I discovered that my hexcode is #DEATH or some shit like that, I honestly don’t remember what it was but I was fascinated with the color it produced at the time.
My hex color is #b0bca7, it’s mostly greyscale but nooooot quite. Also it’s spicey and nerdy and fun.
It’s a nice color <3
I understand this is an allegory for pronouns/gender but I’m also dumb, is green supposed to be nonbinary? or are they being encouraged to use neopronouns they don’t actually want? Pls dumb down for me
Green is binary trans and is being told to use they/she instead of she/her because the cis people don’t actually accept her as a woman. Legend is nonbinary and uses neopronouns.
Speaking of hex, reminds me of this one cryptobro, forgot his name, who was on Twitter (as they often are). Had a user name. And in the real name field, “0xusername”. 🤦🏻♀️ That’s not how crypto addresses work, that’s definitely not how hexadecimals work.
I am really enjoying these, thank you.
I think #00FF00 is one of the few primary hexcodes you can encode in a JPEG with the YCbCr (default) colorspace because it lines up with a corner of it. I tried perfect red and blue but there are rounding errors. Higher bit depth or different gamut might help
I’m #975BAD because if you accidentally place a long distance phone call to Bhutan (country code 975), you will then get a phone bill so BAD that this is the color your face will turn when you see it :3
And it’s purple. A lovely shade of purple that always felt just right to me <3
