this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

I mean, I am a queer person, but ok.

If you are gonna decide to guilt trip me by saying someone might potentially kill themselves if I refer to them as... them or he or she instead of bun or jae, then I'd say you're being emotional abusive.

Also, judging by the votes I've gotten so far, it seems you're gaslighting me when you say no one wants to listen.

Its not that neo-pronouns seem silly.

Its that they convey no useful meaning to anyone who does not already know that person, personally.

Sometimes you have to write things down in a manner that conveys useful information to say, apply a person for a government grant or aid of some kind. Sometimes these things are gender or sex specific.

Sometimes people who don't know a person need to read things about them and make decisions that could prevent them from starving to death, being murdered from a domestic abuser or living on the streets.

Writing bun repeatedly in correspondence or on a government form isn't going to work.

You cannot have a potentially infinite list of pronouns that you somehow expect everyone to just learn, and make this work in any kind of wide system where people don't know that they even are pronouns.

Pronouns are kind of a fundamental, fixed element of English.

Its different with a noun or adjective as there are many of those, and it is far, far easier to learn new ones and use them correctly.

Like, I'm an anarchist, but not to the point of total linguistic anarchy.

He/She/They is fine, and won't confuse the hell out of everyone. We have pronouns in English that are not gender deterministic, nor dehumanizing, and they are They and Them and Their and Themself.

Hell, when I was managing the databases for the non profit I worked at, I went through a ton of work to add in the ability for clients to be able to indicate their preferred pronouns and have it be reflected system wide.

No one, out of thousands, used it. Not one, and that includes tons of people who identified as trans, gay, lesbian, bi, pan, asexual.

After 6 months we reverted to he/she/they because, in addition to no one using it, having 4 open string fields instead of a key value indexed to a lookup table was slowing down the server and potentially a security risk if someone decided their pronouns include ;"DROP TABLE *" or something like that.

If neo-pronouns are ever going to make sense, they are going to need to have agreed upon and fixed definitions.

If you want to say that ok, from now on, She and He are for straight cis people, and i don't know, Je and Ke now refer to lesbian women and gay men, and you go on like that, as long as these terms actually have fixed agreed upon meanings, so on, they aren't easily confused with existing words, then maybe something like that could work.

You would need a defined system capable of being taught to PreK through 5 students such that they could learn it.

I don't see anything like that. I see a tiny minority of terminally online people making up new pronouns, unable to define them, and often changing them at a whim.

On a personal, colloquial, relatively close relationship level, neo pronouns can work the same way and inside joke or lingo amongst a tight knit group of people can.

Not on the scale of millions or billions, not without meaningful, at least initially fixed definitions.

EDIT: I just now realized you are the passive aggressive anti-realist solipsist, "I believe in magic but I can't define it" person who argued that atheists are jerks by telling them what they define magic as.

Nothing quite seems to irk my autism like people who break language, congrats I guess on riling me up again.

[–] Ifera 7 points 5 months ago

If I could, I would hug you and give you a pastry. Thank you for being amazing, giving good explanations and keeping your cool in the face of that dumbass jerk. Hell knows my queer, autistic ass just can't cope.

Language is important because it helps convey things. If a language is mangled to the point where it can't be understood, it is no longer a language at all, and the person you have been responding to seems to either be a troll, too profoundly stupid or actively unwilling to engage in proper communication.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You cannot have a potentially infinite list of pronouns that you somehow expect everyone to just learn

Ackchyually yes, we do, they're called names. A bit different, they're nouns not pronouns, but functionally there's gigantic overlap and best of all if the name is short enough it's actually not much of a bother to never use pronouns to refer to that person. Most of all, it's regular because we already conjugate names ("bun arrived", "bun's pants", "the letter is for bun"). "bun brushes bun's hair" not to mention "bun dresses bunself" sounds a bit strange but is perfectly cromulent.

...still if you get your panties in a twist over being addressed "they" instead of whatever you're used to or, strictly speaking prefer, I think you're off the mark. I'm cis call me they all you want: Being generic doesn't take away from anyone's identity. It's like being upset that you're being referred to as a human instead of a barber.