Conversation
Notices
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I hate this pronoun bullshit.
The paperwork for the health inspector @ the cafe listed the inspector's preferred pronouns.
WHY?
We'll never see that person again and there's zero chance I'll ever speak of them in the third person in their presence and use the wrong pronoun.
I don't need a picture of them. Or their pronouns. Or their favorite food, or a list of their kinks, their favorite bands, or their spirit animals. Please stop this madness.
Listen, I will never intentionally use the wrong pronoun for someone to hurt them. That is cruel and stupid behavior.
Expecting everyone to memorize your pronoun and being upset if they don't know it is selfish behavior, though.
Here's how things always worked and how to fix it. We had three methods of concluding the correct pronoun:
1. You infer their gender by their appearance.
2. You infer their gender by their name
3. You have their gender documented (Official paperwork, database, whatever)
Let me provide an analogy:
Society is a large SQL database. The "people" table has over 7 billion rows. You're asking to add a "pronoun" column because we can no longer infer pronouns with the data from the "gender" column, so you want it to be explicit. This transaction is going to lock the table for a long time and piss off a lot of people who are just trying to live their lives and get work done.
Let's put on our "senior engineer" hat on and optimize this properly: deprecate his/her pronouns with elimination from English by 2025 and substitute "they" for everyone.
Problem fucking solved.
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Think about it. We're going to get nicer to each other over time as society advances; that's how it works: get smarter, get nicer. The default pronoun guess will have to be "they".
Science Fiction is more pronouns.
The Future is one pronoun.
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I fear for gendered languages. I find them frustrating as the rules don't make sense and it feels very misogynist anyway, but if they don't adapt they may die in protest.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk