nonbinary gender pronouns

can we get this sorted?

yes/no

i think it's easy to just use they/their/them unless the person prefers another one

That is my serious answer

I'm all for having terms denoting a third, non-binary gender to the English language. Let's do it. I'll call anybody whatever they want to be called, what do I care.

That being said, on a grammatical level the they/them construction drives me nuts. I realize that a million different constructs have been put forward (I can recall hearing "shiz" for gender-neutral possessive as far back as '98) but find it baffling that the they/them/their one - which is quite clumsy, confusing, and imprecise - has appeared to develop the most currency.

case in point (which prompted this) - one of my children goes to a school with identical twins. One of the twins has determined that they want to be referred to as they/them. The other is cisgender. Discussing the two twins in conversation is now virtually impossible.

also lol DJP :)

As someone who's studying Swedish, I'm intrigued by the pronoun they came up with ("hen" as opposed to "han" or "hon"). Unfortunately, the English words ("him" "her") aren't close enough to create one that's right in the middle that way - "har"? "hum"?

this also came up in a book I'm reading (Lindsay's "Journey to Arcturus", 1920) which briefly features a gender-neutral character referred to as "ae" (possessive = "aer" etc.). It worked on the page at least.

I am really into using Mx. as a non-gendered honorific. I think it looks great.

Discussing the two twins in conversation is now virtually impossible.
― Οὖτις, Friday, September 13, 2019 8:26 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflagli

can you not use their names

I was reading an "about the author" sort of thing in a book last week, and I kept seeing sentences like "they live with their dog and cat" and it took me forever to realize it was one person and I didn't miss some important piece of domestic information.

xp don't be dense, twins have the same name, that's what makes them twins

can you not use their names

lol I can't even tell them apart, much less remember their names

That being said, on a grammatical level the they/them construction drives me nuts.

no one gives a shit shakey. they/them has been in use as an indefinite pronoun f o r e v e r

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/744121321/even-a-grammar-geezer-like-me-can-get-used-to-gender-neutral-pronouns

like as someone who goes by they/them and is a writer, it's not particularly torturous

Earliest citation for singular 'they' is 1375 - https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200700

Honestly, it really isn't that clumsy and confusing. They is an actual existing pronoun, for one (as opposed to Zhe or Shiz or some of the alternatives). In plenty of other languages (that are common languages) there is a non-masc/non-femme 3rd person singular.

And dude, think about the four decades you have spent talking about people/referring to them, and what I will call the "Chris problem" ... (younger generations might not have this, but I feel like Gen X America, the Chris problem is pretty standard) -- growing up, in your 20s and 30s, how many people did you associate with named Chris? Many. There were always multiple Chris-es. There would often be at least one female Chris, but even assuming all the Chris-es were dudes. How did you verbally distinguish one Chris from another? You did so, right? You came up with ways to refer to the numerous Chris-es in your life without much confusion? ... If you can do that, then you can deal with your they-twin and cis-twin convos.

hm NPR article makes a fair point

xps

Don't understand the controversy as I feel I've always used it in this way - but grew up in a hippy commune so maybe my experience wasn't usual.

obviously each person gets to choose their preferred pronouns but i'm puzzled when people complain about the grammar of "they/them" which feels like a longstanding uncontroversial usage in spoken English including for cis people unless i'm missing something

sorry realise CaAL has just made the same point, was skimming a bit

lol @ "Chris Problem". I suspect for prior generations it might have been the "Jean/Gene Problem"

xp

Is this the reason for the thread? https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a29037895/sam-smith-changes-pronouns/

I have no idea who that is, so no

lol wrongfooted an editor

Smith explained how the decision to change their pronouns are the culmination of their path towards self-acceptance.

I myself enjoy the “challenge”, such as it is

I like using words like themself and theyself, gender neutrality is both serious and fun

otm i was about to say I have used they/them my entire life because I like to be evasive and play coy.

the thing with the twins just ties my head in knots because if you say "they/them" you could be referring to both of them or one of them, and without being able to tell them apart/keep their names straight ... eh I just won't say anything

"You! You ... two!"

xp - as long as you don't refer to them as Thing 1 and Thing 2?

I’ve understood and used “singular they” since I was a very small child, without knowing anything about nonbinary gender - feel like ppl who say it’s confusing are either lying or thick

It is IMO a giant nontroversy

it's def a nontroversy, just an odd language thing. my mind unconsciously/automatically goes to they/them as plural (guess I'm thick, sorry), although obviously as pointed out there's a long history of singular usage in the language.

using the pronouns people tell you are their correct pronouns is p. basic common decency and respect, etc. seems like a noncontroversial no-brainer to me at this point. maybe if you'd asked me in high school or something, i'd have been uptight about grammar and "words mean things, man!" but i feel like that whole line of thinking has been debunked in so many other capacities anyway.

anyway i'm not sure i even understand the challenge ostensibly posed by the twin case. what's an example of a sentence where (1) it's essential that you use a pronoun and not the person's name, (2) you're speaking about them in the third person, (3) it's not immediately clear from context that you're talking about a single person and not the pair of twins?

well, with my kids the sentence "I told them to put their pants back on" could very easily be singular or plural

I kinda get what Shakey is trying to figure out -- the plural/singular confusion -- like I am in a volunteer group with two people who are roommates, one is a woman and one is non-binary, and one of the group's projects involves the house where these two people live. I have to think about phrasing in a way that I wouldn't if "they" obviously referred to both roommates, as opposed to just the singular non-binary roommate.

Yeah we use singular they/them all the time in life when we dont know the gender,extending it to be also used when we know the person doesnt identify as male or female doesnt seem a lot.

My issue is being a dumbass and using feminine pronouns when referring to the assigned female at birth mon binary people I know which I thankfully dont do very often and they (plural) haven't been too upset about

And I will either use both their names, or "they and female person's name" or "they and she" or "she and they" or "they plural"

here's an example:
my daughter discussing the twins at her school and it not being clear if she was referring to one or both of them when saying that they were upset about something

xp

When we use "you" when addressing two people it is uncertain as to whether we are talking to one or both

the assigned female at birth mon binary people I know which I thankfully dont do very often and they (plural) haven't been too upset about

heh, my non-binary fellow group member was FAAB and gets pissed when they are mis-gendered as "she"

my daughter discussing the twins at her school and it not being clear if she was referring to one or both of them when saying that they were upset about something

You couldn't just ask her "who was upset? was it nb twin or both of them?"

well yeah there's where the conversation went

so? I mean, that's normal? Imagine if she had three friends named Chris, and said, "The Chris-es were mad" ... you might want to know if it was all three or just two of them or ...?

so...

Agree "they" has long been an acceptable gender-neutral pronoun, but there are still situations in which it is ambiguous or confusing (and in which it wouldn't likely previously have been used as a singular). E.g. I was recently with friends who have a non-binary teen and there were a lot of times when I couldn't tell whether the parents were discussing the teen or the teen plus one or more other people (e.g. a friend). A relatively harmless but mildly confusing example: after the parents picked me up at the train I heard them say "They asked us to pick up food for them on the way home." I wrongfully assumed they were referring to the teen having a friend or friends over. I mostly just use the teen's name though and it's basically all good.

When we use "you" when addressing two people it is uncertain as to whether we are talking to one or both

This is why English has words like "youse" and "y'all" (though "y'all" can be singular, thus creating the need for "all y'all").

guys i think we sorted it out!

yes we should all just speak scouse

Which is why we have 'youse' in Scotland, eh Jim?

guys

was this really necessary

(though "y'all" can be singular, thus creating the need for "all y'all").

haha yeah ... all y'all being another good usage to avoid the dudes/guys problem where previously it had been "acceptable" to use in a gender neutral way, but now it's not

this is how I break it down to an extent - trans and non-binary people are some of the most marginalised people in our societies. any accommodation we can make to make their lives easier, however small, should be investigated and employed, notwithstanding the edge cases which may make our lives marginally more ‘difficult’

yeah I agree w that

again I'm not making out like this is a huge problem or unbearable burden, I just a) didn't understand/hadn't thought about why they/them was the most common usage (this was quickly answered in this thread - thx all!) and b) like to puzzle out grammar/language stuff and this came up recently

“I'm intrigued by the pronoun they came up with ("hen" as opposed to "han" or "hon")” doesn’t this make hen faps confusing?

I am pretty good about pronouns and they/them these days, but it is proving very difficult to break myself of "guys". It's really in there as my go-to plural when addressing a group (of any gender).

xp

Which is why we have 'youse' in Scotland, eh Jim?

― The Inner Mounting Phlegm (Tom D.), Friday, September 13, 2019 2:03 PM (seven minutes ago)

aye, i use youse

but most speakers of british english don't have such a term

won’t be saying fkn “guys” because not from the west end

maybe i'm really dense but i have no clue what it is about twins that makes this extra difficult.

anyway tho, sure, in the abstract 'they/them' may seem stranger than the attempts to create new, exclusively singular pronounces like ze, etc., which wouldn't present even these fairly minor hurdles of clarification. but the very fact that they/them's become so widespread suggests that these pronouns work very well for a ton of nb folks. and that they, at least, hit these singular/plural confusion points, likely much more often than cis people do, and are able to surmount them. so as a cis dude i feel like i can roll with that.

won’t be saying fkn “guys” because not from the west end

― prorogue mahone (||||||||), Friday, September 13, 2019 2:12 PM (two minutes ago)

troops

Also always defaulting to they/them/neutral options is easier so you don't assume the gender of someone's partner/spouse. I have found it also annoys people who are really into being "not gay" and that it always fun.

since (a) singular they is a kludge, (b) but it can surely be fully naturalized given time since language dgaf, (c) point-by-point dialectics about whether it's juuuust right or whether there might not be soooomething else that serves better seems idle, (d) as does moral scorn directed at doddering dinosaurs like shakey who are trying to be cool but just aren't quite sure, (e) although obviously deliberate misgenderers can and should be hounded from all forae.

i think really misgivings about the kludginess of proposed alternatives stem from the sense that language is basically being de-naturalized, which there are evident reasons for (it is in concert with the coercive binary gender system being denaturalized so it can be seen as coercive / so that a possibility of permitting the recognized exercise of autonomy over one's gender is freed up), but also understandable bridling at, since speakers rely on a presupposition of 'fit' between their language and the way the world is articulated.

doddering dinosaurs like shakey

tried to be clear that this thread was well intentioned but

yes that's why i portrayed you as a kindly huggy dinosaur

such little arms, such big love

doyouthinktheysaurus

I didn't see nothin

sorry i came in with guns blazing shakey, i've just heard the "aagh my precious grammar" argument (which is not what you were saying but you can understand how i made the mistake) from a lot of secret bigots

no apology necessary c'mon now

My preference would be to use singular they/them for everyone

but yeah while some people choose neologistic pronouns (for reasons I am essentially uninformed about) they/them is accessible to every native speaker and really only sounds weird if you are thinking about it harder than you would in an ordinary circumstance

maybe a non-English speaker can answer this - is there a push against the gendered nouns of other languages (thinking French here with it's la/le/les)?

that kind of thing always struck me as a step beyond the gendered pronouns/possessive pronounes in English, in terms of embedding gender binaries into the language.

In Chinese 'he' 'she' and 'it' sound exactly the same, though they do use different characters.

you will see people write lxs or l@s en castellano for that purpose from time to time

How does this work in gendered languages?

xp. which is fine orthographically but doesn't change the spoken language. like i like latinx fine too but how do you say it? LAH-TEEN-ECCIES?

it would be impossible to unpick. adjectives have to agree. and what are you gonna do, get rid of the feminine forms? that seems like a bad move!

it's pronounced latine-ecks

this is in common usage at my kids' school (which is like 80% latinx)

xp

I'm not a native Spanish speaker and not clued into this discourse in el mundo hispanohablante but like…the grammatical gender of improper nouns doesn't remotely register as pertinent to this issue to me. "La noche" and "el día" have different grammatical genders but it's not like they're sexually dimorphic, the night isn't subject to gender-based oppression.

yeah. I say it that way too. Same with Mx. xpost

as a dumb nerd I'm always gonna regret that latinx took over latin@

against using english x for cultural nationalist reasons personally as a latinx individual. i guess i can deal with it

"La noche" and "el día" have different grammatical genders but it's not like they're sexually dimorphic

really? Even though the presumed reason that they're gendered goes back to classical gender stereotypes that are millenia old (moon/women/menstruation/darkness/artemis and men/the sun/light/apollo for example)?

xp

i like the @ sign in place of o, used to see it used a lot by chilean and spanish left a few years back.

xp ok well like what about "la silla" and "el cuchillo", the genders of common nouns aren't metaphors they're just particles usually determined by the word-ending

I remember tripping out on the gendered noun thing after being introduced to it in high school French - some of the designations were clearly meant to reinforce gender stereotypes (granted, others seemed really random, like the word for "chair" being gendered at all for ex.)

xp

In Chinese 'he' 'she' and 'it' sound exactly the same, though they do use different characters.

It's not that they sound the same (i.e. they're homophones), but they literally are the same word. However, written Chinese can indicate gender, but I *think* that's a relatively new development (possibly with the simplification movement?), but at this point it marks the feminine form and recasts the traditional form as masculine (not too different from "man" standing in for "human" in English).

Ok, good to know, have noticed people seem a little confused when writing 'ta', that may explain why.

does traditional chinese not have three different 'ta'?

the grammatical gender of improper nouns

some radical types do care about this — i remember once i had a german teacher, a while before the contemporary cultural moment, who said someone in the department had caused trouble because they insisted on degendering all nouns' articles, for feminist reasons, but this conflicted with the department's responsibility to do language instruction for the german 101 kids or whatever.

Ah ha:

Following the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement in 1919, and to accommodate the translation of Western literature, written vernacular Chinese developed separate pronouns for gender-differentiated speech, and to address animals, deities, and inanimate objects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns

The same thing holds for second-person pronouns as well.

yous and y'all are good, why not theys

Good piece

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/sep/13/pronouns-gender-he-she-they-natalie-wynn-contrapoints

never use pronouns, imo

whats wrong with ye

nothing; mookieproof is fine

obviously each person gets to choose their preferred pronouns but i'm puzzled when people complain about the grammar of "they/them" which feels like a longstanding uncontroversial usage in spoken English including for cis people unless i'm missing something

The longstanding usage is only for when "they" is used for unknown persons, right? "If anyone needs a receipt, they need to come to the front desk" is pretty standard usage. "If Dave needs a receipt, they need to go to the front desk" is far less so. I'm fine with calling people "they" if it's what they prefer but I do think it requires a grammatical shift.

"If Dave needs a receipt, the **** needs to go to the front desk". There you go, problem solved.

All the examples in the OED entry are of the first sort. xp Tom D. OTM

we want hon fap

ye want yon fap

ye want yon fap, hen

my first ever evening in Glasgow was spent at a gig where a local spent the entire show bellowing "Y'ARIGHT HEN?" at my pal, an expression of perturbation for her mental well-being prompted her trying to listen to & look at the band instead of answering his other enquiries

HEN FAQ

*prompted BY her, bah

"maybe i'm really dense but i have no clue what it is about twins that makes this extra difficult" . because saying "they" might refer to both twins or just one of them. that's all he's saying.

My wife has found this difficult to adapt to as well as an english major although there are obviously times when people naturally say this to refer to only one person. It's just extending that usage.

gendering of articles and stuff in languages is right, not sexually dimorphic. the last paper I wrote for college was on the disappearance of gendered articles in English (they were there at some point).

but this would apply to two siblings who aren't twins.... right? am i crazy?

the twins thing is such a forced problem im struggling to see the problem meself tbh

hi my twins saw a creepy clown and they were scared

they the two of them or they the one thats using they

huh what a weird reaction didnt u hear me theres a creepy clown out there scaring kids

is the clown only targetting twins or kids using they

what, no listen i think youre getting bogged down here

i just need clarity on who exactly was scared here

can i request another 911 operator please

another message board i'm on (and maybe this one too but i've so far managed to avoid that thread) is having a heated pronoun argument on the topic of sam smith

anyone who is so committed to gendered pronouns that you will have an argument over sam smith involving them has problems i am not equipped to deal with

at this point any THEORETICAL discussion about pronouns is not a discussion i am interested in having

I haven’t read this whole thread

But it might be fun to note that I have two identical twin gender neutral siblings; they both announced their gender on the same day two and a half years ago

I love them both very much they are amazing intelligent academic types

a tangential issue: as a closeted gay kid I found myself instinctively using nonbinary pronouns (they/their/them) to hide my own identity.

not proud of that in retrospect

people have a hard time letting go of what they always imagined was a simple and obvious set of categories. the first step to resolving this is their realizing that that imaginary simplicity was a misleading illusion. expecting them to jump straight to pronoun switching before their grasping how inadequate their old narrow categories were skips a necessary step, and until it is accomplished they'll fight to retain their accustomed ways, because learning new stuff is hard.

though "y'all" can be singular

this is offensive

singular y'all is formal, like for if you're talking to the pope

.lol

yall holiness

aka "the royal y'all"

hoagies are for them and her and him, but most importantly, me

"e" —Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

I remember tripping out on the gendered noun thing after being introduced to it in high school French - some of the designations were clearly meant to reinforce gender stereotypes (granted, others seemed really random, like the word for "chair" being gendered at all for ex.)

In German, the moon is masculine and the sun is feminine.

In French (and Romanian and likely other Romance languages), the most common slang term for 'dick' is feminine, whereas 'vagina' is masculine.

The arbitrariness of the sign covers grammatical gender as well. For the most part.

l'all

Sie'all

I hope it's OK to use this thread to mention that I do not understand, nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of, the preference in some circles for "folx" over "folks"

Isn’t that just a jocular variant spelling like saying “that sux” or “comix”

The contexts I consistently see it deployed in suggest not but I could be wrong

This thread made me think the Danish version through, and I think I finally got it! It's a bit tricky in Danish, since 'de' both means 'they' but was also the formal way to talk to people you didn't know, like 'vous' in French. So it could also go: 'How are they?' 'I'm fine, but come on, we've known each other for years!' Etc. But we would get used to it.

The nonbinary pronoun 'they' has been added to the dictionary. https://t.co/tadl1VdfB0

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) September 17, 2019

In French (and Romanian and likely other Romance languages), the most common slang term for 'dick' is feminine, whereas 'vagina' is masculine.

The French words "moustache" and "barbe" for "moustache" and "beard" are also feminine. "Soins" ("care") is masculine, while "guerre" (war) is feminine. I'm not sure gendering of nouns is based on gender stereotypes at all; tbh, it would be much easier to learn if it were.

Yeah, I heard that David Sedaris story about learning genders in French. It's actually much simpler than he makes it out to be. Abstract concepts are typically feminine (la masculinité), definite objects are masculine (le vagin).

Obv there are lots of exceptions but it's not really hard to grasp

The idea that linguistically we're taught that the feminine gender is associated with the abstract and the masculine gender is associated with the concrete sounds like Kristeva could have a field day on this topic if she already hasn't

except i don't think that's true at all? there are plenty of definite objects that are feminine in French - la chaise, la lampe, la chaussette etc - and plenty of masculine abstract concepts - le futur, le bien-être, etc

Pacifisme, socialisme, capitalisme, etc = all masculine. If anything, it's more useful to look at the endings of words. Words with "té" and "tion" endings tend to be feminine, ones with "age" and "isme" tend to be masculine, but there are still exceptions.

Oh no, for sure, it's not a hard-and-fast rule but it's usually my fall-back when I'm having to guess a gender on the fly in conversation and the noun itself doesn't end in a decisively gendered way

There's a case to be made that guitars are more abstract than pianos, actually.

best thought of as being related to word ending than to anything else it seems

Fwiw I know it seems odd when your mother tongue is English but it's best not to think about this stuff at all when learning a 'gendered' language. 99.9% of the time it scans as neutral to native speakers, just like in English. Which isn't to say that it can't and doesn't get political in some cases, but when it comes to objects and ideas, 'gender' is all over the place, really – to such an extent that it probably shouldn't be called gender at all (although it is true that 'isme', 'ion' and other such suffixes often give you a clue as to whether said word is masculine or feminine in French).

It's mostly the way we talk about human beings that matters (cue Heidegger arguing that 'Mädchen' aka 'young girl' or 'maiden' is grammatically neutral in German because she isn't a fully-fledged human yet), and that's where pushback becomes une nécessité. In 19th century France, 'madame le maire' meant the mayor's wife; then the female mayor; now 'la' maire is quite common and 'mairesse' is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged in Quebec. This incidentally reminds me of an exchange I had with LL a while back: she balked at my use of the term 'poetess' in English, whereas in French quite a few (although not all) women poets would insist on being described as such (and tbf this is also the case in certain English-speaking feminist circles). Conversely, I'm still uncomfortable with the widespread use of 'female' in English because it just sounds… zoological?

Anyhow, this is all too simplistic, no doubt, but I think it's best to focus on how we describe each other regardless of language, in which case I'd like to add that French (to say nothing of Romanian) is indeed fucking terrible at expressing the experiences of nonbinary people, and at some point it will have to evolve.

My favourite is "sénatrice" as in news stories about "Sénateur Bernie Sanders et Sénatrice Elizabeth Warren".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns🕸

The same thing holds for second-person pronouns as well.

just want to insert this: taiwanese singer jolin tsai did a massively popular pro-trans/genderqueer song last year, which contains this lyric:

你是你或者妳，都行

which translates beautifully to:

“you‘re you (male) or you (female), both are okay”

so, using these specific second-person gendered pronouns (which are common in taiwan) to make a point which sounds nongendered but has a pretty clear meaning.

why is listing multiple pronouns the norm

like, is anyone she/him or they/her

is anyone she/him

zooey deschanel and m. ward

some people do want to indicate that they can be called both gendered and neutral pronouns, I don't think anyone's pronominal gender varies based on part of speech. listing two or more declensions is useful if you use neopronouns

i deserved that xp

like, is anyone she/him or they/her

― mookieproof

i've seen the latter, yes

zooey d and m ward more like shee/it amirite

all my friends are they/she's

'call me anything except 'he''

Japanese has a wonderful array of gendered and no gendered pronouns which can be used in all kinds of ways to indicate gender, position relative to others in the conversation, mood and other things.

In the first person you have the masculine and slightly thuggish 「俺、Ore」、「僕、boku」which is used casually by men and boys and has been a somewhat tomboyish signifier for girls but I hear more and more young women using it. 「私、watashi」is pretty neutral but also not often used in spite of the fact it is the one generally taught to foreigners learning the language.

https://people.umass.edu/partee/MGU_2009/papers/Ponamareva.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-quakers.html

The Quakers thus declared themselves to be, like God, “no respecter of persons.” So they thee-ed and thou-ed their fellow human beings without distinction as a form of egalitarian social protest. And like today’s proponents of gender-inclusive pronouns, they faced ridicule and persecution as a result.

But there is also an important difference between the Quakers and today’s pronoun protesters. While modern activists argue that equality demands displays of equal respect toward others, the Quakers demonstrated conscientious disrespect toward everyone. Theirs was an equality of extreme humility and universally low status. Even the famously tolerant founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, couldn’t stand the Quakers and complained of the “familiarity, anger, scorn and contempt” inherent in their use of “thee” and “thou.”

zooey d and m ward more like shee/it amirite
― Famous Anus (rip van wanko)

there should be a godwin's law analogue: anyone criticizing the use of singular "they" will reflexively use singular "they" somewhere in their comment. it's uncanny how often it works

are there gender neutral terms for mother/father brother/sister aunt/uncle other than 'parent' 'sibling'?

I like parent, sibling, nibling. I call my two gn siblings "my sibs" with a certain amount of enthusiasm.

what's a nibling? personal pronouns are important because everyone needs to use them; i don't really see words for familial relations in the same need category at all. they show a relationship. if you want to sever your relationship, that's up to you. one cannot sever one's pronominal relationship to oneself.

LL, many relationship-showing words are inherently gendered, e.g. niece, nephew, aunt, uncle. There is no standard non-gendered equivalent for these words, so it's impossible to reflect a relationship without gendering a person who is simply not of that gender.

"Nibling" is an ungendered niece/nephew child-of-siblings word.

Have heard a few for siblings-of-parent but don't much like any of them. Any other suggestions?

the siblings of your parents are your 0th cousins once removed. (your siblings are your 0th cousins.)

oooooh duh
i forgot about that bc i don't have siblings and my aunts/uncles are not a part of my life bc we haven't spoken in years

silly mistake
nevermind! sorry

your siblings are your 0th cousins

whoa

they's all kin

Huh, I didn't know the current usage of 'sibling' was so recent.

1903, modern revival of Old English sibling (“relative, a relation, kinsman”), equivalent to sib +‎ -ling. Compare Middle English sib, sibbe (“relative; kinsman”), German Sippe. The term apparently meant merely kin or relative until the 20th century when its necessity for the study of genetics led to its specialized use. For example, the OED has a 1903 citation in which "sibling" must be defined for those who don't know the intended meaning.

The word 'sib' or 'sibling' is coming into use in genetics in the English-speaking world, as an equivalent of the convenient German term 'Geschwister' [E.&C. Paul, "Human Heredity," 1930]

Iceland came up with an official patronym for nonbinary folks this year (-bur):

https://www.icelandreview.com/news/icelandic-names-will-no-longer-be-gendered/

so parents still have to petition to give a girl a "boy" name and vice versa unless they identify the child as gender-neutral? weird progressive/regressive juxtaposition there.

No, all first names are available to everyone now irrespective of gender "claimed" on birth certificate, but your choice on your birth certificate determines the suffix you must use for your surname (-son, -dottir, or -bur).

"Nibling" is an ungendered niece/nephew child-of-siblings word.

I feel like it's a significant enough thing to have a non-gendered term for, but Nibling makes me think of gifs of cute rodents eating carrots, or cute rodents eating carrots in Viking helmets singing Wagner

Family words are so confusing for me — tbh I wish we could all just go by our first names instead of foregrounding the family relation. Pronouns are necessary syntactically but to constantly refer to someone as their familial relation is different and not syntactically necessary.

https://twt-thumbs.washtimes.com/media/image/2018/10/12/election_2018_utah_senate_fact_check_24824_c0-233-5568-3479_s885x516.jpg?9568f5f5f6044ba51ec7d024630fbd9c34c30ce5

well said, friend

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/05/teens-argentina-are-leading-charge-gender-neutral-language/

In Spanish, a language in which all nouns are assigned a gender, the word for soldiers is masculine: “Los soldados de Perón.”

The lyrics Mira sang were different: “Les soldades.”

To most Spanish speakers, the “e” in both words would sound jarring — and grammatically incorrect.

But here, teenagers are rewriting the rules of the language to eliminate gender. In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine “o” or the feminine “a” with the gender-neutral “e” in certain words — in order to change what they see as a deeply gendered culture.

this whole entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Universal_Friend

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/amia-srinivasan/he-she-one-they-ho-hus-hum-ita

Ethics requires that we embrace a practice of naming that makes people’s passage through the world more bearable. But ethics is not exhausted by such a practice. A true ethical relation requires that we see the other, just as we see ourselves, as ultimately beyond names and categories: not because (as liberals like to say) we are ‘all human’ or ‘all persons’, but because each of us exists, finally, beyond the reach of mere words. We all know this instinctively in our own case: that feeling of exceeding, bursting beyond, all the words that can be truly applied to us. What does it take for us recognise that this is true, too, of everyone else: of him and her, of them, of you?

Reading this now..

is this ... meta-woke?

It's a very good essay on language and politics and better than Sharkey's concern trolling.

I was just kidding, it seemed like an overreach to start with pronouns and blast through to “why is language dealing with the ineffable anyway?” Spose I’d better read it now.