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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Never mind the ESL-er, I can’t make hide nor hair of mixed pronouns, and I’ve spoken English all my life. What does “she/them” even actually do for anyone, other than get her them outsized attention? Neopronouns I at least sort of understand, even if I find them ridiculous and annoying. But mixing and matching? That’s just obnoxious.

At least one explanation I've seen that it tries to convey that it's ok to use both she/her and they/them. Presumably there's a bunch of potential ways it's used.

My brother's girlfriend was using she/them for awhile, and I asked exactly this question. Her response was something to the effect that she was trying to convey that, while she was certainly a woman, she wasn't like a woman-woman. (Perform your own diagnosis of notlikeothergirls.jpeg/pickme/internalised misogyny here.) More specifically, she hoped that if she was in a foreign country with more rigid gender roles, that introducing herself with mixed pronouns would help to convey the idea that she doesn't fully adhere to certain expectations of how women are supposed to behave.

I pointed out that the people in said countries aren't going to give a shit about how she "identifies", and will simply clock her as female and treat her accordingly. Progressive Anglophone nations are literally the only parts of the world in which "I identify as X" is even understood by a meaningful proportion of the population, never mind respected. She seemed to sort of recognise that I had a point, if begrudgingly.

This conversation was probably two years ago. My brother said she isn't really insistent on the mixed pronouns and never demands that people refer to her as such in conversation. It literally only comes up when prompted for her pronouns on a social media or professional network.

notlikeothergirls.jpeg/pickme

Still don't understand these two memes. I see them everywhere and I still just don't get it.

Even worse, pronouns are for when you talk about someone, not to them, so they really make no sense. They're for identification of a third party between you and someone else, the third party's feelings about what you call them are largely irrelevant because they're generally not even present when pronouns are used.

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