Comment by ghariksforge@lemmy.world on grammarphobia

You are a straightforward and practical people

This is the way all language should be. Gendered words of any kind serve absolutely no purpose

I couldn’t disagree more, many people may not fit into genders, but most people do and simply knowing whether someone is a man or a woman is very useful. Gendered nouns though, like in French, Spanish, Italian etc. serve no purpose but do encode redundancy into the language which can be very valuable for speaking in loud places

Other languages get around just fine without gendered pronouns. I bet there are other languages that feel like English is missing valuable concepts as well (not necessarily gender-related) , but we don’t miss them since we never had them.

I didn’t say they didn’t, simply that the idea that “Gendered words serve no purpose” is untrue, they are very useful.

They have their use, but I’d say in most sentences the gender doesn’t matter at all.

“She went to the grocery store.”: Here the gender of that person is as important as any other attribute like the color of their shoes.

Imagine we have pronouns based on shoe color, let’s say “de” for someone wearing white shoes. “De went to the grocery store.”

And now someone proposes we could ged rid of that pronoun and you say “knowing what shoe color people wear is very useful though!”

I would argue it does make a difference. Like I said, many people don’t fit gender norms, but most people do. So knowing it’s a woman shopping can suggest a array of things.

She will likely be buying some degree more female-oriented or marketed products, a strong example being tampons or a weaker example being beauty products
Her experience shopping will be that of a woman’s, i.e. she might get patronised in the hardware section or sales-bullied in the technology section, both of which are quite common for women even now

I really can’t think of an example where you interact with other people where a woman’s experience won’t be affected by her being a woman.

It should be unimportant, but some people kick up such a fuss about having to learn new things or changing what they claim is ‘natural’ that it is important to a lot of people. Gender is both a social construct, and a very real thing that does warrant discussion.

The fight over pronouns is just the first step in “othering” trans people. It helps to reinforce the idea that they’re strange, not like you, not traditional, not natural.

The next steps are to deny healthcare, access to equal treatment from discrimination, things like that. There are leaders in the USA making statements that transgenderism should be “eradicated.”

If you aren’t dealing with shit like this in your area, I’m genuinely happy for you and I hope this never comes near you. But for lots of people, it’s quite a bit more serious than a first world problem.

As I said, the pronoun conversation isn’t really about pronouns. It’s about tribalism and scapegoating.

How much time did you spend thinking about pronouns or trans people before gay and lesbian relationships began to be normalized and legalized in The West?

Trans people have a new target on their backs because most people don’t know someone who is trans and thus don’t understand them. They’re a scapegoat for right-wing groups to organize and fight against because they lost the ability to be quite so open with their homophobia.

Trans people are, according to some studies, as high as 4 times as likely to be victims of sexual assault and 3.5 times as likely to commit suicide.

Again, this is serious. Trans lives matter, Period.

PREACH! trans people are being killed for existing. and this priviledged person is all like “dOn’T yOu hAvE rEaL pRoBlEmS?!”

If it’s so silly and unimportant why do people bitch and moan about using the pronouns someone feels comfortable with?

I bet you have zero issues being corrected on a dog’s gender.

Nothing was said about forcing

I say nearly this same thing, which is probably similar to what every generation says about the next one. Wait until they “grow up” and find out what real problems are. Your pronoun won’t mean much if you lose your job and have to figure out how to pay the mortgage and for groceries before your kids starve.

Is a lamp more of a woman or a man…? Do I have a masculine microwave? How married is mrs Butterworth?

That always messed me up in Spanish class. Trying to remember the gender of objects so the rest of the sentence could be gendered properly.

Mine doesn’t either (Indonesian). We don’t have grammatical tense, we don’t have grammatical case, we don’t have conjugation, declination and we still have communicate effectively!

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