Would someone please help me understand when using "they" as a catch-all pronoun is transphobic?
Would someone please help me understand when using "they" as a catch-all pronoun is transphobic?
I've seen a few posts recently calling people out for using "they" when referring to someone with gendered or neo pronouns.
As a long time dumb guy I was under the impression that gender neutral pronouns were basically always acceptable and I'm now concerned that I have been unintentionally making people uncomfortable.
My current understanding based on context is that once someone has made their pronouns known, unless specifically included, 'they' is no longer acceptable. Thank you in advance for taking the time to help me out
right, if i don't know your pronouns then i'll use "they/them" as a non-gendered option. but if i continued to refer to you, acute_engles, using they/them pronouns when you've already made it perfectly clear that you prefer he/him pronouns, then i would be deliberately misgendering you.
Cis privilege here but when I see this happen to hexbear users I give the benefit of the doubt until they blow their chance to apologize. I have no argument against what you're saying, and I think there's almost zero chance I could make this mistake in real life, but I feel like I'm bound to mess that up on here at some point because I'm still really awful with only reading post content and basically ignoring the usernames. I'm here a bit, but I don't spend anywhere near as much time posting online as I did 10-20 years ago and I can easily see myself slipping back to the habit where everyone is ungendered until their post content makes it clear.
until they blow their chance to apologize
yeah if someone makes a mistake, the right move is to apologize, try to do better, and move on. people make mistakes, it's okay. my brother in christ, we're all sinners.
In my own anecdotal experience, some people, consciously or otherwise, will continue to refer to trans people as 'they' after it's been made apparent what their identity is.
It could be inferred that they're uncomfortable with stating a trans person's identified gender because they don't 'believe it', which implies their usage of they/them is not simply being overly cautious or polite but because they don't want to acknowledge said identity.
This would also apply to people using neopronouns too - refusing to use them essentially implies that you don't believe in them and don't acknowledge that person's right to determine their own identity.I do it for everyone, even cissies, because my brain is small but if you know someone personally or see their pronouns clearly displayed it's transphobic to not use them and be adamant about it. If you say they/them and they correct you just say sorry correct it and keep going
Yeah a lot of times I fallback to they/them, because I’m lazy and a dum dum, but for people who have marked/known pronouns the effort should be made.
It's only transphobic if you have someone purposefully using they instead of someone's preferred pronouns. Like they say as if they're confused at your gender even after you told them. This is a small enough language thing that if it only happens every once and a while it's barely noticeable, but if someone is using they in a transphobic way, it's easy to tell
I generally default to they/them for anyone until they explicitly tell me their pronouns or somebody else who knows them uses specific pronouns for them. I personally think people shouldn't instantly jump to accusations of transphobia when another person defaults to gender neutral pronouns – the whole point is to not assume anyone’s gender until informed otherwise.
Anyone who says this practice is transphobic is just being ridiculous
Who is saying that, tho? From my experience, the issue is always brought up when people use they / them in a context where they know it's misgendering somebody. And when i see that or when i'm bringing this up myself, the initial complaint is never "you're being a transphobe here", the complaint is always just "this person is using she / her and not they / them, can you please correct your post?" Unintentional misgendering is still misgendering and should always be corrected, even if you know the misgendered person is never going to see it. And if the misgendering was a perfectly understandable accident or not doesn't matter, either. When i know somebody's pronouns and see that they're not being used, i will bring that up. But why would i call people transphobes at that point, like who even does that?
Accusations of transphobia only enter the picture when people are being dicks about this. Which, unfortunately, happens a lot. Some people just prefer to enter full debate dingdong mode until they get banned instead of just hitting the edit button, correcting a mistake that can and does happen to everyody and saying sorry. Unfortunately, i've been part of such discussions on a fairly regular basis. And honestly, when people place their insistence that they cannot make a mistake towards a trans person over treating that person with respect, yeah, that reeks of transphobia to me, there's no way around that. That's just a cis person telling us when we're allowed to be offended and when we're supposed to stay quiet and remember where our place is.
That's all there is to this and i've literally not once seen somebody say that they / them for unspecified people, for groups, for people you can't know the pronouns of would be transphobic. And i'm saying this as somebody who is a hardliner on this question and thinks it's reasonable to either avoid pronouns entirely or to have people look up pronouns before writing about somebody. But that's just my highly subjective opinion about which ways to adress somebody we perceive to be the most inclusive. Gender neutral language by necessity is a part of that, but so is gender affirming language.
I’ve literally seen both Hexbear and Blåhaj Lemmy users go straight to calling someone a transphobe because they didn’t see a user’s pronouns due to their Lemmy app or instance not showing pronouns by default (I actually only found one Lemmy app on iOS that even had a toggle for showing pronouns awhile back when I was picking a client, which is a shame).
Back when I was on reddit, I also saw a decent number of trans people complaining there about being referred to with they/them by somebody irl when their gendered pronouns had not been expressed in any way. Like I understand that degendering is a problem, and it’s harmful asf, but I don’t think it’s right to assume that anybody using a gender-neutral default pronoun set is degendering a person.
If you normally assume people's pronouns based on appearance, then use they/them when you're "not sure", you could be effectively hinting to them that they aren't passing, which can obviously be hurtful.
But using the explicitly wrong pronouns would also seem to be hurtful.
And shy of asking everyone their pronouns - which often feels invasive - a generic pronoun seems the most polite option until it's clear one way or another.
The important distinction is what it means for it to "be clear". Unless someone has indicated what their pronouns are, using they/them for everyone is the polite option. But if you're using he/him for strangers just because they're "clearly a cis man", you're now imposing a transphobic bias on those whom you use they/them
The problem here is that they / them is only generic to people who speak English as a first language. In my first language, it's a neopronoun, one that you'll see being used if you know a lot of nonbinary people, but that's a good deal less common than several local neopronouns. And none of these neopronouns are so common that they would come off as gender neutral, all of them will come off as "i'm assuming that person has some heavy gender thing going on". Now, that's something that literally goes for almost everybody i hang out with, but still, none of all the genderdiverse people i know use a gender neutral default pronoun for others, not even the majority that at least sometimes uses neopronouns for themselves, not even the ones that are the most into gender abolition.
It's just not a thing we do around here, firstly because neopronouns are so personal and specific here, secondly because our neutral option is "none / use name". And when we don't know the name, we use neutral descriptors like "that person." And that option works just as well in English, so i seriously encourage making more use of it when we're still in a phase were all of this is in flux.
Yeah, that's definitely the impression i'd be getting in that situation, but that situation isn't exactly ideal to begin with. I know that there's edge cases like people who are questioning or closeted, which make practices like pronoun circles tricky for those people because that either forces a premature outing or a self-misgendering on someone. There's really no ideal solution that will cover all cases. But as a rule of thumb, i think we should just normalize stating your pronouns without making that something that feels coercive, and if that falls flat for some reason, i prefer pronoun avoidance over they / them, because that actually is a neutral option.
There are definitely people who use "they" about trans people as a way to be transphobic without seeming as hostile as if they were more explicitly misgendering them.
If done non-maliciously, and you're not singling out just trans or gender non-conforming people, most people won't mind, but it's definitely better to use their preferred ones if you know, just so people don't think you're doing that.
I will be making a greater effort in the future
If you know somebody's pronouns, using these pronouns and nothing else isn't "better", it's the only correct option.
Permanently Deleted
I have asked this a few times but never got an answer: what if I forget your pronouns and have to refer to you in third person to other people and you’re not around to remind me?
I have many students and sorry I will inevitably forget names and pronouns, it happens.
Probably fine, especially if you do it to everyone, could keep notes on your hand and it would be endearing
Haha good idea!
So off the internet, transpeople are pretty forgiving and recognize that everyone fucks up occasionally. Transpeople misgender each other, but you know shit happens, they correct themselves and move on. If you don't know the right pronouns you can just acknowledge it, and it's basically fine.
Systematically getting it wrong and failing to correct or acknowledge your mistakes is a problem though. Depending where you are, purposely and persistently misgendering someone can be seen as harassment. Even if it's not harassment in your jurisdiction, it's a dick move, and you should just try not to be a dick.
On the internet, on the other hand, you get it wrong once, and someone will stop by to tell you you're committing a hate crime. That's just the cost of being online.
I just use it to lessen the risk of slipping up