Gender personal pronouns

[Seattle]

For those with delusions of grandeur I suppose "Majesty" works for any gender.

 

[James R]

And English isn't even the worst. Consider French, where both singular and plural pronouns have gender.

What do the French do about this? Since everything in French is gendered*, there aren't any non-gendered pronouns equivalent to the English "they" or "them" or "theirs".

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* mind you, that means grammatical gender, which is different from sexual gender.

 

[iceaura]

Even if this is a bigger societal issue than I realize, isn't there a better gender neutral personal pronoun that we could come up with than "they" for a single person?

"They" is already common, accepted, and vernacular - one of those supposed grammatical "errors" that everybody makes and everybody understands. Shakespeare, everybody. It even makes sense, in a way: if the sex is unknown, the reference is sort of "plural" by implication.

There was a need, and English is very good at filling needs.

So "they" would not require conversion of the entire English speaking world to a new thing, or pushing an alien construction onto ordinary people. It would require only recognition and regularization by the academic elite of what already exists.

* mind you, that means grammatical gender, which is different from sexual gender.

In theory. The feminist argument that observation does not perfectly match theory in this matter - that grammatical gender is not neutral with regard to sexual gender - seems difficult to refute.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

My wife is an MD, has short hair and is 6' tall, so she often got called "mister" by the old vets she was taking care of. Fortunately she had an easy out - "call me doctor please." Most people don't have that out. (She still got referred to as "he" when they talked to other people though.)

several things comes to mind
1 authority sexism
2 sexual orientation insecurity
3 un developed sexuality(child in an adult body)
4 dementia
5 sexual insecurity
6 narcissism

Dogmattic gender label stereo typing exists inside cultures that are LGBTQ+ aware.
i see it in older people of such cultures.
i really wish to study it but it is such a tricky thing to navigate without unseating the persons self confidence & Ego.

 

[iceaura]

What do the French do about this?

They're screwed. They have to learn another language, to escape the influence, and even then - - -.

It's also interesting to learn how speakers of languages that do have that neutral pronoun - such as Finnish - deal with English. A friend of mine remembers being genuinely startled, set back in their chair at a company meeting, when a visiting Finnish executive glitched and used "she" to refer to the male boss of their division.

I made similar mistakes at times when trying to speak Spanish - remembering the gender of everything was a chore. According to my professors, people raised speaking Spanish almost never make such errors, and when foreigners do it clangs, much as someone saying "here she comes now" as the male boss of the division enters the room jolts a native speaker of English.

These things are built in deep.