I had an autistic coworker who could not understand using pronouns outside of the already established ones (he/she). She was otherwise very “progressive” but didn’t consider herself such. It had to do with he/she mapping to (99% of the time) defined biological features.

It was a very awkward lunch.

Most people agree with new pronouns etc due to peer pressure. You haven't convinced them rationally, rather you convince them that it costs more to fight the movement than just fall in line. But a person who needs rational reasons to change how they speak will be much harder to "convince", since they wont change anything until they fully buy into the new.

The peer pressured group might think they did properly think it through, but mostly all you need is an appeal to authority and they fall in line.

Yes, this is exactly how most people in the U.S. and the West more generally would relate to the whole "pronouns/grammatical gender" thing. SV is a bubble.

I think many people are reluctant to use non-traditional pronouns. I’m not trying to condemn or condone that, just pointing out that to me this example seems unrelated to autism.

Judging from how I was changing my opinion on similar matters when I was growing up, I guess she simply lacks the insight into why someone would feel the need to reject the established pronouns - she probably doesn't feel that need herself, so she doesn't have any frame of reference to be able to consider that until someone explains it to her, which makes her naturally gravitate towards seemingly unambiguous and clear grammatical rules that "make sense".

I'd guess that it's pretty common for autistic people to fight concepts like singular "they" just out of the sense of maintaining linguistic order, uncorrelated with whether they actually see the need for gender-neutral and non-binary pronouns or not (which can be a source of frustrating misunderstandings that assume bad intent when there's none).

For me, it only "clicked" once I understood that gender and sexuality are completely arbitrary and subjective social constructs that try to describe a whole spectrum of multidimensional behaviors and (potentially repressed) feelings, so there's little point in trying to objectively categorize them - it's all about the subjective impression of the person themself, which makes it obvious that the language should be able to actually express their identities and that it doesn't help anyone to try to force some categorization on them.

"For me, it only "clicked" once I understood that gender and sexuality are completely arbitrary and subjective social constructs that try to describe a whole spectrum of multidimensional behaviors and (potentially repressed) feelings, so there's little point in trying to objectively categorize them - it's all about the subjective impression of the person themself"

Sex is a fundamental property of living organisms; it is not determined by thoughts or feelings.

Sex and gender are different things. Neither is easily defined in a strict unambiguous manner, despite what we might be taught in high school biology.

To be clear, this isn’t a political view point, it’s a scientific view point, there’s no singularly accepted way of defining sex in human. Unfortunately nature has this amazing ability to conjure up exceptions to every seemingly reasonable definition of male/female, and it doesn’t give two shits about our desire to arrange the world into neat little categories.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/gender-benders-and-s...

Sex is almost always unambiguously defined, despite there being exceptions. There is no problem with having biological categories. It is not controversial in science that humans are a sexually dimorphic species.

To claim otherwise is definitely political.

Gender is entirely more complex social phenomenon and indeed isn’t directly related to sexual dimorphism, and evolving gender politics are totally legitimate.

Pretending humans aren’t sexually dimorphic isn’t.

I agree in the vast majority of individuals sex is clear cut and unambiguous. It’s also clear that humans are sexually dimorphic.

However that doesn’t mean that ambiguity in sex doesn’t exist, and that sexual ambiguous in individuals is impossible. Sexual ambiguity isn’t common, but equally it doesn’t represent an aberration or break some natural law.

So I take issue with the idea that determining sex is universally trivial, and those that dismiss real cases of sexual ambiguity as political correctness gone wrong. Its just that sometimes people are born who don’t fit neatly into commonly held categories, it doesn’t make them special, it just means they’re unique on axis that most people aren’t. Most of the time that nothing more than an interesting observation, but sometimes these people need help to understand how they fit in a world that culturally assumes they don’t exist.

> but equally it doesn’t represent an aberration or break some natural law.

The comment you are replying to never said it does.

> So I take issue with the idea that determining sex is universally trivial

the comment you are replying to never said this.

> sometimes these people need help to understand how they fit in a world that culturally assumes they don’t exist.

The comment you are replying to doesn’t dispute this.

It’s not clear how what you have written relates to the comment you are replying to.

I’m clarifying my position. Take it as you wish.

Doesn’t seem to have worked as a clarification since it isn’t a reply to what was written.

People make a distinction between biological sex (which can itself be more complicated than XX or XY), sexuality, and gender.

The person you're replying to is talking about the last two, not the former.

Of course, but that's not really related to what I said.

“Of course, but that's not really related to what I said.”

You said sexuality is a “completely arbitrary and subjective social construct” and that “there's little point in trying to objectively categorize” it. Sex has been studied since animal husbandry existed. So what you said was obviously wrong.

Now go read up on what the word "sexuality" means, and how it relates to "sex".

> so there's little point in trying to objectively categorize them

I think there's more than a little utility provided by the communication it enables. I'm all for non binary identities and letting people identify across them as they want, however with any change we must also recognize the utility in the previous norms so that we can preserve some useful aspects as we construct new norms.

Can you give an example of such utility? Frankly, I don't see it - in my opinion, the best options are either not having genderized pronouns at all (and that's the option I'd actually prefer), or expressing the whole range of identities with them. Going somewhere in the middle is nothing more than just asking for dissonance to happen, which isn't useful.

Sure, the current utility is that most people do currently comfortably fit into the binary. We should introduce language to account for people that don't, and if demographics shifted such that most people didn't feel like the current binary fit them then we should adjust, but currently the majority of the population is happily self identifying within the binary and it's a great shortcut for them to communicate some assumptions about their identity. Only assumptions, not hard rules, but there's still utility in that.

It's true that most people fit into binary, but I don't really see how that's relevant.

1) If we assume that it's essential to genderize pronouns, it doesn't really matter what the majority fits into because existence of other options does not influence that majority at all. The only case where it matters is when someone doesn't fit. The utility remains unaffected (in fact, it actually is increased because of better expressivity).

2) If we assume that it's not necessary to genderize pronouns, then it may be argued that we're losing some information that the vast majority of people was comfortably fitting into - but I don't really understand why do we actually need that information. When I refer to other people, it's extremely rare that I do it in a context that requires me to mention their gender identity (or even what do they have between their legs). In those rare cases where it's actually relevant, I wouldn't mind having to express it explicitly at all, so overall the utility seems dubious.

> It's true that most people fit into binary, but I don't really see how that's relevant.

It's relevant because it's efficient more than 99% of the time and removing it introduces ambiguity 99% of the time. The person you're responding to even said they didn't have a problem with adding more pronouns, just not making it worse by removing them.

> and removing it introduces ambiguity 99% of the time

My whole point 2) was about how it does not (most of the time it just removes irrelevant noise), so I'd appreciate a counterexample.

Your second point is wrong. Obviously it narrows specificity by half the room on average. I don't know why you'd argue against that obvious fact. It's basic math: If you have a set C that is the union of two sets A and B where A and B have the same cardinality, referring to "a C" gives you twice the possibilities than referring to either "an A" or "a B." So it's measurably twice as efficient to do the former. Since so many unrelated languages in the world ended up with such a system (or very close), it's reasonable to think that that efficiency was worth it. Since most of those systems are not much more specific, it's reasonable to think that being more specific wasn't worth it (one can always specify further using more words.)

Of course it narrows down specificity. My point is that in today's society, it seems mostly useless to me. Most of the time I don't need to narrow it down this way at all. This may have been different in a world where people were segregated by sex so intensively that half of the population didn't even have the right to vote, but today I fail to see the usefulness of it.

> but today I fail to see the usefulness of it.

Then you fail to see the usefulness of specificity and efficiency in speech, which is both weird and explains why it took you so many words to say that.

If I'll want to refer to you and this conversation when talking to someone else, I don't need to refer to your gender at all. Just like I don't need to refer to your race, your social class or color of your hair. Stopping to consider whether I should use "he" or "she" (or maybe something else) is the exact opposite of efficiency in speech.

It seems to me that it's actually you who misunderstands the usefulness of specificity. It's not useful to be overspecific.

Obviously it depends on your goals and the context. Both specificity and generality are useful. To ban one is foolishness. They coalesced into short words for a reason: people use them, a lot.

We can exchange truisms all day ;) But that doesn't change the fact that in my experience specificity related to gender pronouns is needed (or even helpful) only in a very tiny minority of everyday contexts.

For the record, my native tongue is much more gendered than English (it has gendered nouns, verbs and adjectives; not just pronouns) - I don't understand how it's useful at all, I don't miss it in English.

I think you're underselling the importance people find in their gender.

Personally I agree, for me gender holds little importance, if I'm being most true to myself I identify as non binary simply because I don't really identify with a gendered label. That motivation has also lead me to being ok with being gendered male, because it just doesn't matter to me.

I understand I need to look outside of my own experience to see the importance people place on gender though. You can say all you want that most people don't care, but I feel if you misgender people, a lot of them would be very upset. Trans people are very vulnerable to suicide because of this, to diminish the importance of gender (this includes the binary, of which many trans people want to fit into) to these people is to be at best lacking in empathy.

Now if you're approaching this from a gender abolitionist angle where you believe all this attachment to gender is socialized and that we should push to de-emphasize genders role in society, then I believe that's a far more defensible position, but I feel you need to at least recognize the importance gender has to people today (socialized or not) if you're to have any hope in bridging that gap with people.

To the contrary, I believe that people's gender is usually extremely important to them. What I find less important is having to specify their gender whenever I'm talking about them just because of language constructs. In English it isn't actually that bad, since it's limited to using correct pronouns; but in some other languages I have to be careful to not misgender anyone pretty much whenever I talk about them or to them - regardless of whether their gender is relevant to what I'm saying or not.

So I'm only a grammatical gender abolitionist :) I don't see the point of gendering people when I talk about them unless I talk specifically about their gender. As a happy side effect, this would also massively reduce the risk of accidentally misgendering someone.

The argument about gender (and pronouns) being an arbitrary social construct does not imply that it's the individual's unilateral choice - the fact that naming people and referring to them is a social construct means that the social consensus determines how people will be addressed and the individual does not get a veto vote - e.g. if someone asserts that their identity requires them to be called Your Majesty, the society will simply ignore that demand. So the demand for non-standard pronouns essentially is up to the society; someone may want others to use e.g. xe/xir, but it does not necessarily mean that this desire has to be honored, that is an arbitrary social construct which can plausibly be different in different subcommunities; in some communities these pronouns fit the social construct and it's mandatory to use them, in other communities it goes against the social construct and it's considered unreasonable to demand that they get used.

There are many other parallels - e.g. the criteria for using (and expecting/demanding of use) of formal vs informal "You" in many languages, the expectation on how mandatory it is to use specific prefixes or honorifics (Sir/Ms/Dr), etc; and in all those cases it's an arbitrary social construct and the wishes of the individual can be and are shunned whenever they go beyond what the locally prevailing social norms require.

In fairness, using different pronouns for different genders doesn't make a lot of sense in the first place.

Sure it does. We're a sexually dimorphic species that can only reproduce with one XY and one XX.

Differentiating between them is vital to the continued existence of the species.

Talking with your buddies of the same gender about how you were hanging out alone with one of the opposite was a tribally significant thing in the early days of speech. It still today implies you might be mating! And babies might be forthcoming.

Maybe for some people? Most of my buddies are of the opposite gender, and me hanging out with one of them doesn’t imply anything different to me hanging out with someone of my own gender.

There are definitely people it matters to, I sometimes get tired of the usual remarks and end up awkwardly using "they" or phrasing tricks to try to avoid them

I mean hanging out 1 on 1 with someone of the opposite sex is how like 99.999% of new humans get created.

Well sure, but equally 99% of hanging out with the opposite sex doesn't result in new humans being created.

We're sexually dimorphic, but linguistic gender is not based on biological sex, and sex identification is merely one of a literally infinite number of potential bits of information that one may wish to convey with language. The fact that an attractive woman in her reproductive prime is referred to with the same pronouns as your grandmother and the Titanic is indicative of how useful pronouns are for identifying who may be mating.

It reduces ambiguity, increasing narrowing specificity by half the room on average. I suspect that efficiency trade off showed up in so many unrelated languages because it was useful. It didn't get more specific because that wasn't useful enough. Languages evolve too.

My preferred pronoun is "the majestic one with no time for the nonsense of gendered pronouns".

It cannot be combined in a plural; I stand alone.

you know leftists call this "the one joke" because y'all can literally never come up with a different one when someone mentions pronouns.

"What are your pronouns?"

>"Did this person just assume xy possessive adjectives?"

Yeah, imagine getting upset when someone with a disease almost defined by being slow on the uptake and honest about it hasn't acquired a cultural change that happened during their adulthood.

I don't think that's a trait common to neurotypicals or any group in particular. All people lend greater trust to the opinions of others who think similarly/have similar experiences to themselves.