0302 - Advanced history - 2023.07.17 |
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Comment: You may have noticed that characters in Forward refer to almost every human, including historical figures like Socrates, as "them". This is not because "he" and "she" have been outlawed, but because people in the twenty-second century assume that anyone who lived prior to the mid-twenty-first may not have been been able to verbalize (let alone come out with) nontraditional gender identities, and, therefore, the let's-not-assume nongendered "they" is preferred. I'm noticing more and more that people default to "they" when they're not sure of things, and it's not hard to see how, in time, that could become the default. Heck, I was recently "they"d by someone who evidently didn't see the "he/him" in my bio, and I don't particularly consider it to be a misgendering, just someone who wanted to opt out of the whole deal. I can't blame'em, having to declare someone else's gender identity every time you mention them in passing is weird. Honestly, it's weird that most of our common languages have gendered third-person pronouns to begin with, and it's inconvenient that it's only the third-person ones. This is part of the awkwardness of confronting someone for misgendering you - you have to butt in on someone who was, by definition, not talking to you. There'd be a lot less misgendering, I think, if first- and second-person pronouns were gendered as well (i.e., "Hi, mI'm Mason, it's a pleasure to meet fyou."). |
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