• DeathWearsANecktie@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    People generally shouldn’t get mad as long as you’re behaving in good faith. It’s like accidentally calling someone by the wrong name, you just apologise and correct your mistake.

    Trans and non-binary people often get portrayed as if they’re monsters, but most are reasonable people who can understand mistakes and are capable of accepting apologies.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The more I think about all of this, the more rude I find even using pronouns instead of their name in general… are there certain sayings in English that generally require defaulting to pronouns? I am having a hard time coming up with many.

      (Yes I am aware of the fact I used a pronoun to type this, but it’s not directed to a specific audience)

      • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Generally speaking, it’s awkward in English (or even weird) to constantly use the Proper Noun every single time you refer to a person.

        Simplest example is “Jim got into his car”. “Jim got into Jim’s car” is strange. And that’s within a single sentence. Properly in English, we use gendered pronouns for all unambiguous references to a person several sentences in a row. For example:

        “Jim got into his car. He turned it on, and hit the gas. When he saw a red light, he stopped quickly. Jim got impatient, and honked on the horn”. That would be entirely proper, and virtually none of those pronouns should be replaced with Jim’s proper name.

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Thank you. This explained how pronouns would be used, at first I always imagined you would be taking to “jim”, bur after reading I could see where you may be telling a story about “Jim” to others as a third party. I know that sounds dumb, but I never claimed to be smart.

          I appreciate you taking the effort to comment instead of just downvoting like some others.

          • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Not a problem. People don’t usually think about pronouns. We could circumvent a lot of confusion if there were an agreeable gender-neutral pronoun in English… But people have gone back and forth about the only one we have (“they”) enough that it rubs both sides wrong. Gendering a person in a sentence rarely disambiguates… it only maters if you have a conversation with exactly 1 male and female subject and ZERO genderable objects.

            A man and a woman sitting in a boat, for example, and “her” still might be ambiguous.