I am really posting this in good faith that it's a different topic connected to transgender things than old ones which sparked offensive comments, and that we have an umbrella of rules here that will make this a not-problematic conversation. I am not trying to poke a hornet's nest at all.

Oh, this is a really good piece, as one of the cringing olds who is trying to get it right but more importantly works for an institution that wants to get it right, and institutions screw this up in predictable ways.

Also, there is something odd about expecting people to introduce themselves with instructions about how to talk about them when they're not there. I mean, I get it! But it's weird that it wound up being a convention of introduction.

Young people are exhausting, but not as much as old people.

That's a good article, and I appreciate Heebie's framing of it. I'll definitely save a link to refer to.

I think it also makes clear that it's never quite as simple as, "just refer to people with the names and pronouns that they request." That is a good guiding principle and there is a lot of complicated social negotiation going on which isn't quite captured in that phrase.

I'm embarrassingly bad with names. It's really hard to remember them.

Aw man. I'm exactly the person on the other side of these conversations, a touch desperate and frenzied to not get it wrong. I don't think I am that bad in person, mostly because I give myself a talking to. "Civility is always appropriate, no need for more or less." and then I let it go. I hope that externally I look OK but internally I am the frantic person they're describing.

Brock seems gracious and understanding and maybe doesn't need my self-justification. But I do console myself that I've had a hell of a time adjusting to my monk-friend's new name and state. In my head, I still call him by the name I knew him from before. That is clearly not transphobia. It is actually hard to free someone from where they've been slotted in your brain, maybe especially if you're old. Courteous people do that, so I will, but privately I'll say it takes effort. Brock seems to graciously accept that.

I do think the over-vehement ally is a thing. Fortunately, I am not at risk of that.

The article gets close to but doesn't quite name a real tension between two positions. First, gender is a simple public fact that is core to a person's identity. It is a reasonable expectation that others will treat everyone as appropriate to their gender identity (for example, by using the right pronouns), and if people fail to do so they are being hostile or at least severely negligent about the misgendered person's identity. And most trans people and decent people generally hold to this position with varying degrees of rigidity around negligence and so on.

But there's also a position that this writer seems to hold in some form, that gender can be (and I'm going to phrase this poorly, I'm the wrong person to be saying this) a complex, shifting, problematic quality that may be private and that it may be intrusive or burdensome for others to inquire into. And a fair number of people seem to feel this way about their own genders. Saying that this is in tension with the first position doesn't mean one is right and the other is wrong, or that it's impossible to take both positions, but there are clearly going to be issues to navigate either w/r/t people who hold both positions, or when you're interacting with someone whose feelings about gender are unknown to you.

That gets close to a "too afraid to ask" question I have, which is: does your gender exist if no one is beholding you? Or is your self-knowledge of gender intrinsically tied to whether the perception of others aligns with how you perceive yourself? I feel like I'm writing a senior thesis at Smith here, but I do wonder it. Do you have a gender at those moments when you're alone and not thinking about yourself in any relation to anyone else?

okay maybe 7 is not close, but it's my springboard anyway, suck it.

Gender is socially constructed, but I don't think social constructs disappear when not being used.

Like genitals, they just get smaller.

I liked the article, but it didn't make me think Brock was a "poor kid". As far as I can tell, they seem to be doing fine.

I'm on the record as disliking the term non-binary -- I thin k non-binary should refer to the general condition that there are more than 2 possibilities. People should get to be agender or both-gendered or maybe something completely different. But this article made me think maybe the ambiguity of it is an appeal
"The sneaky magical thing about that word, nonbinary, is that it doesn't say what you are. It only says what you're not."

That was a good article and they seem chill. Still, a lot of it seems to be 'I'm young and forming a new identity and I'm UNIQUE!' And old people have seen multiple versions of X before and putting a label on it. It such a very young/old brains thing.

Do you have a gender at those moments when you're alone and not thinking about yourself in any relation to anyone else?

Can you ever think about yourself in isolation from society? Is there a pure essence of you that exists apart from your family, your upbringing, and Unfogged?

If you think that gender is socially constructed, then, no, it doesn't go away when you're by yourself - you're still shaped by and part of society.

Phenomenology is too hard for math, so social construction it is.

Maybe this is just being quite introverted and on the autism spectrum, but yeah the not-socializing me is quite natural, and the interacting me is ironic and strategic and effortful.

None of those things are really gendered much. I mean lots of men try to gender strategy, but that's pretty obviously wish fulfillment.

That's a good piece, and it captures several things that are going on right now that can be hard to put into words. Both of our twins are nonbinary, but they have interestingly completely different attitudes about pronouns. One uses they/them and is very concerned that people get that right. (We all fuck it up all the time, of course, but we do our best and they give us plenty of grace.) The other absolutely does not care about pronouns at all and refuses to state a preference even when asked directly about it. In practice this means he mostly uses he/him. I think both of these attitudes are well within the spectrum of what "nonbinary" means to different people, and it's an interesting window into what it can mean to reject the gender binary and the different ways that can manifest.

No I mean those are ways of experiencing gender and other social roles, not that those things are gendered.

Honestly, I've stopped talking about gender stuff to anyone. My work "encourages" people to put their pronouns in their email signatures, but everyone who actually does this is cisgender; if I do it, it flags my non-cis qualities for all to see. Further, I have a strong feeling that pronouns-in-bio stuff is just going to be a convenient way to round us up later on - fire us at best, do much worse things at worst.

I'm at least a bit more worried about young people than about myself, since an awful lot of the right's hatred of queer and trans people is about their resentment of perceived loss of sexual access, and they aren't going to be worried about losing sexual access to me. But the people who are making all this hay about gender inclusiveness now are the same kind of people who talk a good game about race but always vote for pro-cop mayors - ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if they need to get ahead. They'll be sad when we're all carted off to the camps and it will be the cops that they voted for and armed who'll do the carting.

But anyway. At this point, a lot of the "oh please tell us your pronouns" stuff just fills me with rage, because it's coming from people who will be perfectly happy to turn queer/trans people over to the cops and the military when the wind changes. My institution isn't going to go to bat for us, they're going to go to bat for their funding and the right is going to hold that hostage. I guess right now I feel like I just want them to stop pretending that they care.

I sort of feel like asking someone their pronouns is a bit intrusive. I am happy to listen to people tell me about themselves, but I rarely veer from excruciatingly polite small talk questions until offered a conversational foothold. I don't ask whether folks are married, have kids, etc. A few years ago, I asked one of my polite questions about whether a coworker had a nice weekend, and was rewarded with a sad story of how her uncle died suddenly out on their land and someone found him dead at the tractor wheel (or something) the next morning. It took me a while to dust that question off and try again. So yeah, asking people to tell me their pronouns when introduced feels rude. These details of one's life seem to come up organically over time, which seems easier. (Or when folks make Big Announcements, which is also helpful and still doesn't require me to ask anything.)

I ask people if they need term life insurance. I figure anyone who talks to me after that really wants to say whatever it is.

I have mixed feelings about asking people to state pronouns during introductions, particularly as it's become somewhat common at certain types of meetings or gatherings I've been to.* Unlike a lot of other pieces of personal information, you're more likely to use a pronoun to refer to another person you just met than you are to say something like, "I agree with the married person who just lost an uncle." So if getting pronouns right is important and people are uncertain about guessing, stating pronouns can serve a useful function.

On the other hand, you can quite frequently find an alternative way to avoid any pronoun use at all without it being all that awkward (people have names, it turns out), and over time I've gotten increasingly uncomfortable with everyone being asked to state their pronouns whether or not they want to share that with a bunch of people they just met. I also don't think the expectation of stating pronouns alone generally makes anyone feel safer about stating theirs if they don't feel safe already, and I wouldn't be surprised if some people routinely say whatever fits with conventional social expectations if they're not in a context where they feel comfortable expressing how they actually identify. A joint meeting to discuss work topic A is very different than a forum where people share personal experiences.

* I don't remember what the * was for.

24:. It feels like a lot of the 'pronouns first' move institutionally, at least for me (understandably) has been in academic contexts, which are precisely those where you might need to refer to someone you've just met in the third person (at a talk, in a classroom, in a discussion.). And there the justification was that if offering pronouns on a name tag or in course software was default, it would be easier on the enby/genderqueer/etc people not to be the only ones having to bring it up. It's a new norm that I imagine will get renegotiated, esp given the OP.

And it also became a massive political signal - not having pronouns in signature - probably old conservative dude who isn't going to be helpful.

I also don't feel like Brock is a poor kid; they're confronting tricky matters pretty ably and took a great photo in that dress. It is true that in many contexts, to be asked "what are your pronouns?" feels like getting told, "you seem to be a man in a woman's outfit, I am unsure how to proceed but let's please foreground my good faith vis-à-vis the predicament you present." It's not the worst possible response but one does appreciate a little more tact.

At the same time (and I am somehow embarrassed to admit this) it was an actual relief in the early months of being out at work when cis coworkers would put up pronouns in their Zoom captions. Not that everyone did it or had to do it, but I really did appreciate having some of it around. Of course everyone's going to roll their eyes when Biden and Harris do it, that's inevitable.

Further to the tension described in 7 and the question in 8 of "if a gender falls in a forest with no one around," the quote attributed to a student in the article--"That's all right; I misgender myself sometimes"--really is a thing, especially early in transition. TERF philosophers will hold up the straw man of "innate gender identity" as some kind of transparent Cartesian soul-like quality immediately accessible to introspection, but we all know it's not like that; whatever we carry around inside us is mediated by the social world and confusing and complex in the same way. I had some great go-rounds with a therapist last year where I'd lament "I DON'T EVEN FEEL LIKE A WOMAN" and the therapist would say, how do you know that how you feel isn't just how a woman feels? It all got easier as I got more new social experience, but building up a new way of relating to myself did take time.

I sort of feel like asking someone their pronouns is a bit intrusive.

Yeah, me too. It doesn't seem to be a norm in my own social and professional circles (unlike e.g. pronouns in signature) except in contexts like introductions in meetings where everyone is asked to do it. Meeting an individual person and immediately asking for their pronouns, rather than stating your own and giving them the option of how to respond, feels rude and intrusive, and also like the exact kind of thing that would happen constantly in certain self-consciously "progressive" circles.

I'm sympathetic to the article writer's view that asking up front for pronouns can be rude and intrusive, and basically amounts to "I don't know what gender you are. Please help me out." As expressed, more elegantly, by lourdes kayak in 27.1. I'm also sympathetic to LB's comment in 7. There are sometimes tensions between different positions that are not always straightforward to negotiate. I don't have any particular skin in the game, other than not wanting to be an arsehole to people, and to talk with and to them in the way they'd prefer.

But, a lot of the time, I struggle to see what problem the pronoun thing is solving much of the time. When I am talking TO someone, I'm not using gendered pronouns, I'm using their name, or I'm using "you". When I'm talking or writing about someone, to some third party, again, I'm often just using their name. I grew up speaking an idiolect where singular "they" was always OK, and I've always used it when I'm referring to someone whose gender is unknown (to me) or where I'm just talking about some generic singular third party, so again, not a problem. I understand that there are sometimes contexts where we want to use a third person singular pronoun and we want to not get it wrong, but it's not something I do that often.

I find using the non binary "they" hard. There's the casual "they said" or "they went" which feels totally natural, but when I say, "they are a preschool teacher and their husband works at a bank", it takes a conscious effort on my part, because gender is so ingrained in my brain. There's a non-binary person at a church, and it is so hard for me not to think of this person as a mannish woman. In my head I find myself defaulting to "she". Part of me wishes that "zie" would take off, because there are times when I really want to use a singular verb.

Like Cala, it's largely a classroom thing for me. I am constantly referring to one student in 3rd person to another, ie "Did everyone hear X's question? Can anyone paraphrase their point?" or telling someone to go work with someone else, or whatever.

What I do is put a question on a getting-to-know-you google form they have to fill out. I hadn't thought about the fact that this doesn't inform their fellow students, but it's at least a very low-key inquiry.

Well, full disclosure, Ace has started using "they/them" but I was trying not to announce it as though it was all about me. The siblings and Jammies were obviously on board and fine, but shortly thereafter I went to the hotel, and so I am extremely interested to know how well it's being implemented.

Interesting -- they made the change over the summer, so they'll have some time of having gotten used to it at home before the school year starts? That seems like good timing.

24.1: The point there was that I personally am a little allergic to asking people much about themselves out of the blue because there are so many things that can go wrong, even with what I consider a simple and safe topic. Kids? What if they lost one or are infertile, or any one of a number of reasons one might not want to talk about it? Married? Marriage crumbling, alone and lonely, unhappily stuck, none of my business! (I love to hear about people when they're offering info, of course! Tell me about your kid's swim meet!) I figure the pronoun thing is a question that almost always tips in the direction of "you're doing something noticeably different in presentation. Tell me about what society considers a fundamental part of who you are so I can treat you politely," when there are lots of other ways to treat someone politely, maybe by not pointing out that they're doing something you recognize to be different?

26.1: It's been a while since I fled academia, but I am wracking my brain for examples where someone would use a pronoun at a conference or seminar of the type I've attended. In my field, it's usually discussing the fact/data, or perhaps referring to someone by name. So, "why would you interpret X to mean Z when that violates Woodward-Hoffman rules?" "Because Q." "I agree that this is an unusual interpretation, but the additional data support the conclusion." Rarely, when it's a small and friendly conference, maybe folks will interact using first names, but the science bits rarely end up discussing the humans involved using pronouns. I don't think the signaling is bad (I think it's nice), but this seems like the sort of thing that will be due for an update relatively soon. (I'm exactly the sort of person being discussed as putting the world's most unnecessary she/her in my email signature.)

32: A friend's kid uses they/them, and identifies as nonbinary, but I was vaguely surprised to learn they were uninterested in using a less gendered nickname of their very gendered first name (think Samantha/Sam). I think a first name change is harder to get right, for me, even with practice.

re: 31

Interesting. I think, and it's been a while, that I already just defaulted to "their" in that sort of context, or even just "Did everyone hear _the_ question?" but that might be a dialect/idiolect thing. I've certainly been pulled up by pedants about it in the past, before conscious thought about pronouns was much of a public thing, and I didn't start doing it because of conscious thought on my own part it was just how I already talked.

I notice a lot more people presenting in a non-binary way. Bar staff in the pub wearing a dress who look (to me) "assigned male at birth", etc. Just as a matter of routine I think there's way more presentation that's less clear cut or gendered. But, pronouns (for me) have tended not to have come up in those contexts. I'm old, though.

35: Likewise, I recently learned that a friend's kid uses they/them and identifies as nonbinary, with no interest in changing away from a very unambiguously masculine name. My friend (the parent)'s take is that this kid had spent a whole childhood observing boys being assholes and concluded that they didn't want to be a part of *that*, hence the rejection of the social construct of the gender they were assigned at birth.

He (the father) also saw the gender identification providing a kind of entre into the LGBTQ community, in a high-school social scene that is still largely defined by jocks. As he put it, if you're a nerd, the jocks reject you; if you're LGBTQ, you reject the jocks.

He seemed to see his kid's gender identity in an instrumental kind of way that made me a little uneasy. Like, he was vocally supportive but seemed to have a hard time really accepting the idea that there might be something fundamental about who his kid is that drove this decision. Maybe that's not surprising in a guy who grew up in a conservative part of Ohio and is himself approaching 50, but nonetheless.

that I already just defaulted to "their" in that sort of context, or even just "Did everyone hear _the_ question?" but that might be a dialect/idiolect thing.

I don't think every example shifts to "their" quite as generically. I am thinking about he/she instead of his/hers in particular. Student A refers to Student B to me, "She says the answer is X" and I feel like I ought to know whether to keep using "she" or if Student B is being misgendered.

they made the change over the summer, so they'll have some time of having gotten used to it at home before the school year starts?

We talked about this, about concentric circles and how comfortable they are at different moments. Ace started with me, then Jammies, then siblings. I'm not sure how they handled their post-covid sleepover with their best friend on Sunday - I'm interested to ask when I get home this afternoon and check in.

The main conversation that I feel is pressing is that it's nice if concentric circles are ordered from most-supportive to least-supportive. However, on Friday we leave for Montana, and that is not a most-supportive environment. I want to help Ace think through how they want to navigate this so they have a sense of agency and control about it, but also aren't blindsided by what is likely to happen under different paths.

(I don't think adults will be overtly phobic, but I do think they'll do a lot of misgendering, and I think the cousins could potentially be vicious. I am happy to run interference for them, but I'd want it to be a collaborative plan from both of us, so Ace stays feeling in control.)

34: different field, but mostly the q&a/social afterwards, where a) someone might be new to you b) you might be talking about their work while they're nearby but not in conversation.

The classroom is also hard b/c students sometimes don't know each other's names and default to pronouns. It's not *common* exactly but I can see why pronouns-giving normed quickly.

A lot of these problems can be avoided simply by not knowing anyone.

37: he might not be wrong. Friends with kids that age are reporting that they're all experimenting with identity and pronouns and self-presentation. Gen Z is pretty chill about gender.

Gen Z is pretty chill about gender.

And how! The number of my friends with kids who now present either as nonbinary or different from where they started is much higher than I could have expected even just a few years ago.

42: Sure -- and that's fine, and I didn't go into a whole lecture to my friend. My unease was over the possibility that he might convey to his kid that he viewed this identification as a passing phase or otherwise not real, which seems worth avoiding even as kids are finding their own paths.

Good luck to you and Ace in Montana, heebie! I've been lucky so far to have experiences with family in Western states go so much better than expected - here's hoping you get an easier ride too.

The juxtaposition of apo's 43 and Frowner's 21 is whiplash inducing. I kind of wish I could dismiss Frowner's fears as unjustified, but, unfortunately that's just not the world we're living in. Yet. One can only hope that the forces of reaction fail to break rising generations.

41: Yes, I guess that's my solution too.

Interesting to remember the Pat character on Saturday Night Live. The whole premise of the skits was that of course you could never just ask anyone about their gender. Kids today wouldn't understand - why don't they just ask Pat about their pronouns? Oh, well... it was never actually funny anyway.

Oh god, Pat is a perfect example of a thing I think about frequently, which is how mean-spirited humor was - almost exclusively - until very recently. The 90s seemed so self-aware, and it seemed like an utter truth that the funniest things were mean-spirited. I loathe the part of myself that bought in 1000% percent to that. I just thought it was an unalienable truth, that being nice came at the expense of being funny, and being funny came at the expense of being nice.

And "nice" humor was just exclusively cringey and not funny in any way.

Now, obviously, there are still plenty of mean-spirited things, but there are so many truly hilarious things that aren't.

The Pat discussion leads me to strongly recommend the TV show Work In Progress. It's a huge plot point of the first episode and then some during the first season (I don't know yet about season 2), with Julia Sweeney actually being in the show as herself.

I'm still waiting to finish "The Office" before I start a new show.

FWIW (since I teach this kind of stuff now), I include my pronouns (she/her, not a surprise to anyone) in my sig, syllabus, Zoom profile, classroom name placard*, etc, for normalizing and signaling purposes. I tell students they can do the same if they want to, and change any of those at any time, but that no one has to disclose their gender identity or announce changes to it unless they want to. We also discuss reasons why someone might not want to disclose, because that's relevant to the course topics and because some students want to know why I don't have them all announce their pronouns as part of introductions.

I also model and explicitly ask for students to use one another's names whenever possible when referring to prior comments in class discussion, but that's always been more about creating a sense of community (though it has the side benefit of not needing pronouns). I wouldn't be able to do this without the name placards because I have a shitty memory, but with them I can say things like, "So heebie agrees with today's reading that XYZ but ydnew is less sure about point QRS. Any ideas for how we could resolve this?" Once I starting being really deliberate about cuing in that way, students responded quite well.

*I buy a whole bunch of colored card stock and poster markers at the beginning of the semester for these, and always bring spares to class.

I often think about the Pat skits, since of course it leads with mean-spiritedness directed at the character, but there's also this bizarre investigative compulsion driving everyone else - they have to know, cannot rest until they know, even though the uncertainty has apparently been going on for years without the world ending. The absolute anxious fixation on someone else's business really does seem to define our world.

The "having to know" thing makes perfect sense to me, although I think it's a norm that's in the process of evolving. I think it would be fair to say that, say, circa 1980 to pick a date, the following things would be broadly accepted social facts: (1) It is conventional to reference another person's, even a stranger's gender in the course of socially interacting with them (e.g., by addressing them as ma'am or sir, or using gendered pronouns to refer to them), and it's difficult and awkward to avoid doing so; (2) it is easy to accurately determine someone's gender by looking at them; (3) it is extremely rude to misgender someone, (4) it is almost as rude to imply that it is hard to determine a particular person's gender by just looking at them (for example, by asking about their gender).

If you take all of these as background assumptions, the Pat sketches make sense -- the other characters are desperate to know Pat's gender because if they don't know it, they can't safely interact with Pat without violating a big social taboo against misgendering someone. And what makes the sketch meanspirited is (4) -- the premise of the sketch is that it's legitimately difficult to gender Pat by just looking at them, and that's a very rude thing to say about anyone.

I think all those four statements were the next thing to completely uncontroversially accepted in 1980, and in a world where they're all true, it's pretty easy to be polite about people's gender (with a small number of exceptions). But they're not all uncontroversially accepted any more, and I think things haven't settled into a posture where it's easy to reliably be polite.

That is, (2) isn't true anymore (one could argue that it was never true, but it was certainly conventionally accepted as true). But if (2) isn't true, the combination of (1) and (4) is a big social problem -- you need to know everyone's gender to interact with them politely, but it's really rude to inquire into anyone's gender because inquiry implies that it's not obvious.

Where people seem to be going in terms of resolving this is dropping (1), and trying to work out modes of conventionally interacting with people that don't require referencing their genders at all, while sticking with (4), that inquiry into someone's gender is rude because it implies that their gender is unusually confusing or problematic. And that's workable, but I think to make it all the way to not-awkward there's going to have to be an across-the-board movement to treating everyone's gender as a piece of private information that isn't necessary for social and professional interaction.

Not just gender, but marital status for women. The world was really nosy.

It's interesting that gendered honorifics like "sir" and "ma'am" seem to be just generally passing out of conventional use rather than anyone bothering to come up with alternatives that acknowledge greater complexity in gender identity. Especially in contrast to pronouns, where there's been a lot of effort in that direction even though they're arguably not much more necessary in routine interaction.

As expressed most fully in the 'But at least I have a husband' scene of "Airplane!"

56: I'm stating the obvious here, but it's because in a more complex gender environment, you can't confidently gender a stranger. An acceptable genderneutral honorific ("Comrade!") would be great, but a list of multiple possibilities doesn't help because by the time you know someone's gender well enough to use a specific honorific, you're probably not referring to them by honorific anymore.

55: I saw a guy with a dog on the street the other day talk to a woman with what might have been a German Shepard. He asked her if she had a boyfriend. I thought that was the typical pick up line thing, but actually what he wanted to say was that he'd seen her boyfriend out walking the dog before, and their fluffy Shepard had been aggressive towards his dog.

56: I got called ma'am by a scheduler, and of course my gender is clear from my medical record.

58: Right, and it's also tied up into the decline of the norm that there are different rules for how to treat people depending on gender. A big part of the reason it was considered really important to know someone's gender is that that dictated how you were supposed to treat them. If the rules are the same for everyone, knowing someone's gender matters a lot less.

60: Yeah, they're far from totally gone. But much less routine than previously.

I suspect a lot of Trump support is older men who want everyone over thirty to call them "sir" in public.

the premise of the sketch is that it's legitimately difficult to gender Pat by just looking at them, and that's a very rude thing to say about anyone.

And also that Pat is a failure as a representative of their actual gender, and doesn't even know enough to be embarrassed about it.

And also that Pat is a failure as a representative of their actual gender, and doesn't even know enough to be embarrassed about it.

I didn't watch enough SNL to see the Pat sketches, so I just looked one up on youtbube.

FWIW, that particular sketch is very awkward, but doesn't present Pat as a failure and, really, presents LB's 1-4 in sketch format.

It's interesting to view these norms through the lens of privacy. 1000 years ago, people literally had their parent's name and job description as part of their name. [Speculative; mostly pulled out of ass] It was common practice to ask people for hyperlocal information about their exact place of origin. 50 years ago, a lot of that stuff is gone but you're still expected to identify your gender and marital status. Now that stuff is disappearing/gone.

Is privacy increasing at the level of personal identity as it decreases in the realm of... not sure what to call it, maybe "external reality" or "impersonal identity"?

65.2: I think it is just possible to interpret the Pat sketches as subverting gender norms. Pat always seems happy and to have no problems being Pat. It's all of the other people so worked up about being unable to label Pat that have a problem.

At age 16 or whatever, and a thorough asshole, I can at least say that I was laughing at Pat, and in sympathy with the co-workers or whoever. But maybe that didn't have to be a foregone conclusion.

(I feel like a jerk for admitting that, even! I'm generally sorry about it.)

Oh hm. This article is good and interesting and frustrating for many complicated reasons! I will now finish reading it.

I'm going to get to it sooner or later.

We're in Chicago right now, and gendered forms of address really are much more common here than in the Bay Area - it's all "sir" or "ma'am" or "ladies" in a group or "princess" for our daughter. I stay on the right side of things as long as I keep my mask on. If it's off then we can get weird interference patterns like everyone in the group getting an honorific except me. It makes me even more impatient for facial surgery, and also aware that my desired end state is really much more straightforward than it might be for an enby person.

72: Dumb, uninformed question. Is envy a common way to refer to non-binary people?

Envy isn't a healthy way to refer to others.

I have heard enby a fair amount. I think it's common. But also I live in the bay area where enby people are more common.

There's a whole household joke around this because the Envy character in Full Metal Alchemist(there are seven antagonists, named after the sins) seems pretty genderfluid; but I digress. "Enby" is common in the Bay Area and on Twitter, which are the limits of my expertise.

What gender is Lust?

Highly binary sexy lady, of course.

I googled while I waited. Young Morticia Adams with a wave.

Very cleavage-forward, like the movie "Clue".

71: Don't forget about Mort-

77: All of them.

74: autocorrect needs to be better educated. Let's see if I can override it without quotation marks. Enby.

Truth be told, I'm feeling a lot of envy right now, and I'm sure it's unhealthy.

53, 54: The "having to know" thing makes perfect sense to me, although I think it's a norm that's in the process of evolving.

I think I've related the story here before of how the urgency of the "need to know" the gender of of a newborn was brought home to me with the birth of our first child. My wife delivered about mid-afternoon on a Saturday. There was a party that evening and I a showed up a bit late by myself. I announced that the "baby was out" and was immediately met with a chorus of "What is it?" To which I (admittedly somewhat annoyingly*) replied "A baby!." Which was met with a hostile lynch mob vibe until I relented that "It's a boy." It is like people cannot even think the first thought about someone without having that clarified.

Fast forward 35 years to birth of our first grandchild. Happened in the middle of the night in a land moderately far away. First news from the kids was baby delivered and mom and child are fine. Gender not really specified until mid-morning the next day (however there was some mom-conclusive evidence..). Friends of ours (including some who were at the 1986 party) found that "delay" pretty odd or even hostile. And in fact *I*delayed relaying the news of the birth to my sibs until we had the gender just to forestall having the discussion.

*I was actually somewhat annoyed that those was the immediate response.

The city government in Buenos Aires, the nation's capital, last month banned teachers from using any gender-neutral words during class and in communications with parents. The city's education minister said such language violated the rules of Spanish and stymied students' reading comprehension.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/world/americas/argentina-gender-neutral-spanish.html

The city government in Buenos Aires, the nation's capital, last month banned teachers from using any gender-neutral words during class and in communications with parents. The city's education minister said such language violated the rules of Spanish and stymied students' reading comprehension.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/world/americas/argentina-gender-neutral-spanish.html

- not having pronouns in signature - probably old conservative dude who isn't going to be helpful.

Or, alas, me, in my fading professional-coder persona. I have to be able to prove that other people's code is wrong to be employable, if I do that marked female I expect to be attacked by someone online, and cannot ignore the possibility of the attack being serious. I'd much rather be unmarked as long as possible, and unmarked ... reads male.

Maybe I'm a they online. I have a lot of embattled loyalty to she, though, having spent so much time telling people that it's not that I'm bad at being female it's that their view of female is wrong.

I have to be able to prove that other people's code is wrong to be employable

For a specific piece of code, right? It would be pretty easy to just find any wrong code.

86: this is always going to be a problem when you try to forklift something from English, which long ago got rid of its grammatical genders, into a language where they're syntactically important. The equivalent movement in French and German is all about additional gender marking, adding funny-looking asterisks and capitalization and such to flag that the plural, which is unmarked in both languages, includes women or bzw/le cas écheant men.

Anything that looks remotely colourably like English speakers telling Spanish speakers how to speak their own language, of course, is a whole 'nother giant ball of wax likely to career downhill and run you over.

The problem is that Hispanic academics around here use Latinx, and Hispanic non-academics around here loathe the term, and it makes it hard for a woke white person like myself to navigate. I suppose the answer is just to code-switch.

Wouldn't it be easier if we just went back to calling them all "Mexican"?

Then we have tenure-track and adjunct Mexicans.

89: I wouldn't say at all that the gender-neutral innovations in Spanish have been forklifted over from English. They started in Spanish-speaking online communities decades ago and to my knowledge have been driven by native speakers every step of the way. Plenty of those native speakers would have been multilingual, sure, but it's not as if there was any ready-made solution to be carted over from English, precisely because Spanish morphology is more in-your-face about gender and so required much more visible adjustment than what English speakers were doing at the time. Buenos Aires of all places has a very long history of gender diversity independent of North American models.

From what I can tell the internal debate in Latin American countries is not very differently drawn from what heebie observes in 90; it's queers, kids and academics versus a conservative/religious old guard, and will refract in various ways politically. In peep's article it's the city government on one side and the national government of the other. Of course the Real Academia Española will disagree with me and say that the language of Cervantes and Quevedo is once again being corrupted from without, but like every such purist institution the Real Academia Española is on the wrong side of history 100% of the time.

84: I suppose the gender is not that big of a deal to me, but not hearing the name would feel weird, and not all names are obviously gendered.

It is simultaneously less important to some groups and more to others. I don't think gender reveal parties were a thing when I was born (maybe fewer people knew) or even in circles my parents frequented when I was a kid.

I can't quite read the google results clearly, but it looks like el Real Academia Española has come around on "aparcar".

Moby, you just misgendered the Academy!

Shit.

In German, a big part of the thing is that occupational words are gendered: Professor/Professorin, Bundeskanzler/Bundeskanzlerin, Pilot/Pilotin, etc. Since at least the 1980s, people have been struggling with ways to be inclusive without writing overly long sentences.* It's been especially tricky/awkward in plural form, and for occasions when someone is speaking to a group.

Some people went for an insterstitial capital I, so that you got PilotInnen (instead of Piloten und Pilotinnen), with the male plural subsumed into the female. Now I'm sometimes seeing Pilot:innen, which does the same thing just with a sideways umlaut. It's spoken as a very short pause. The other that's happening in contemporary German is nouning the adjectives: Arbeitende, as a short version of arbeitende Personen, itself marginally shorter than Arbeiter und Arbeiterinnen.

At least it gave us a marginally funny political joke to go with all the linguistic awkwardness: "Scholz - er kann auch Kanzlerin." It played on Merkel's long tenure as Chancellor having gotten everyone to think that the female version of Chancellor was the default.

* I'm not sure when (or indeed if) Germans started objecting to overly long sentences.