Gender Roles

[Jarhyn]

So on other words, "newspeak" when said by a conservative (rather than someone who actually read the book and understands the concept) is a dog whistle used to complain that English is a living language, and usage of words change...

It's a complete DARVO for attempting to use old language to accomplish newspeak as per the actual usage in 1984.

It's almost reminiscent of DBT complaining in the free will threads that compatibilists use a different philosophical foundation for "free will" than "libertarian free will", and complaining that our argument fails because it makes too much sense.

How dare we understand the foundations of common words at an academic level!

Plenty of argument has been made to demonstrate than "man" and "woman" are social concepts only loosely linked to physical realities, and that even sex is a pure statistical concept that is not prescriptive to any reality of binaries.

This has been beaten into the ground ad nauseum.

 

[Janice Rael]

Someone is posting without searching first. I hope they read this Wikipedia link.

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

Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:

"Somebody left their umbrella in the office. Could you please let them know where they can get it?"[1]

"My personal rule is to never trust anyone who says that they had a good time in high school."[2]

"The patient should be told at the outset how much they will be required to pay."[3]

"But a journalist should not be forced to reveal their sources."[3]

This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.[4][5][2] It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.[6] Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language.[7][8] Some early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing.[9][10] However, by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.[11][12][13][14]

In the early 21st century, use of singular they with known individuals emerged for people who do not exclusively identify as male or female, as ias in, for example, "This is my friend, Jay. I met them at work."[15]

 

[Bomb#20]

Someone is posting without searching first. I hope they read this Wikipedia link.

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

Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
...

Which part of "indeterminate antecedent" didn't you understand?

 

[Jarhyn]

Someone is posting without searching first. I hope they read this Wikipedia link.

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

Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
...

Which part of "indeterminate antecedent" didn't you understand?

Which part of "typically" did you not?

 

[Janice Rael]

Someone is posting without searching first. I hope they read this Wikipedia link.

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

Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
...

Which part of "indeterminate antecedent" didn't you understand?

Which part of "typically" did you not?

Is he really fighting the English language and Wikipedia? Just how much of the world and life does "Bomb20" fail to grasp and understand here?

Is he going to go back in time to change every dictionary ever printed?

 

[Jarhyn]

Someone is posting without searching first. I hope they read this Wikipedia link.

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

Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
...

Which part of "indeterminate antecedent" didn't you understand?

Which part of "typically" did you not?

Is he really fighting the English language and Wikipedia? Just how much of the world and life does "Bomb20" fail to grasp and understand here?

Is he going to go back in time to change every dictionary ever printed?

I don't think there is a failure to understand. I think there is a failure to want to be wrong. There are many consequences to being wrong when it's such a politically motivated position.

I'm just disappointed that he sees attacks against a politically held position as political. For me it's not politics, it's just my life.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'll note that the dictionary, or wiki, or even linguistics as a field do not really act as constraints on the use of language.

Generally, the desire to be understood is the greatest and only constraint on real language excepting when someone seeks to make language political.

That's the real rub here in that it's not actually making language political to point out that people can and do accomplish "understandability" with use of "the anodyne they" as a pronoun. That's just a simple fact that people are using language some way and nothing about the usage breaks understanding. People wanted to use language in a way that allowed discourse to more accurately reflect some reality of the situation.

I argue that it is "newspeak" to apply controls and restrictions to the evolution of language so that people can't have that discourse cleanly or efficiently, to demand that it be burdensome. It is distinctly political.

With regards to man/woman, it's not even changing the meaning so much as pointing out the implications of a usage of "cluster concepts" in general. Namely, as to quote my link "no non-explanatory noun-phrase plays any important role in scientific or everyday discourse".

In short, the very idea of "man" and "woman" are linguistic and intellectual crutches, for limping past some lack of understanding or available effort; they are proxies for hand waving past some deeper discussion which is unwanted or impossible in the moment.

It is distinctly political (as opposed to scientific) to attempt to constrain such vague terms so as to deny the very existence of people.

In some ways I'm guilty of using these crutches too... "Transwomen are women" is such an example, where woman in both "transwomen" and "women" are stand-ins for "people whose bodily process led to a brain configuration and/or an outcome of behavioral patterns or emotional interests more shared by those who cluster around the male mode than the female mode of the bimodal distribution within a species are more cleanly handled by proxying them as 'women' in the majority of situations, because the majority of concerns handled in discussions of 'men' and 'women' come down to behavioral patterns and emotional interests".

That's a lot of words, and many people would be unable to digest such a concept, and the core meaning still comes across regardless. For special cases where "woman" has been used to discuss something else (like hormonal performance advantages, or the ability to impregnate, or some combination of those things), arguably the lack of specificity of "woman" is itself an issue. We really owe it to ourselves and our neighbors to be more specific in those discussions so that people can't dance across conflations or equivocations and play stupid games.

 

[Bomb#20]

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Oldspeak is Newspeak.

 

[Jarhyn]

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Oldspeak is Newspeak.

"Waah, I'm being called out for my equivocation games, and for treating Cluster Concepts as if they had explanatory power."

Grow up. Cluster concepts do not have explanatory power.

 

[Politesse]

The longer you talk to a "classical liberal", the less liberal their views turn out to actually be. Ever notice that?

 

[TomC]

The longer you talk to a "classical liberal", the less liberal their views turn out to actually be. Ever notice that?

"Progressive" liberals like you and Jarhyn I find even more so.
Tom

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It seems to me your analogy breaks down here. When I say I "went to Europe", that does not set my audience off searching for a city other than Paris. The whole reason saying "they" might set my audience off searching for a different antecedent is precisely because using "they" on a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male causes a grammatical mismatch, not just incompletely collaborative communication. That's not just based on my own grammatical intuition -- the Lagunoff dissertation you linked backs me up on this. Using "they" for such an antecedent is not English.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

They is "wrong" because the referent is known to be male? The whole point of "they" is that they aren't male!

 

[Jarhyn]

It seems to me your analogy breaks down here. When I say I "went to Europe", that does not set my audience off searching for a city other than Paris. The whole reason saying "they" might set my audience off searching for a different antecedent is precisely because using "they" on a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male causes a grammatical mismatch, not just incompletely collaborative communication. That's not just based on my own grammatical intuition -- the Lagunoff dissertation you linked backs me up on this. Using "they" for such an antecedent is not English.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

They is "wrong" because the referent is known to be male? The whole point of "they" is that they aren't male!

Not to mention that "they" is almost always proceeded with a contextualizer. It seems like a massive kvetch over literally nothing.

Nobody just says "they went to Germany" without saying it in response to a context token of some kind, even if that context token is a solidly pointed finger as opposed to a gestured finger across or around a set.

The audience to the use of a pronoun will be set up on a context.

Further, it seems like a lot of drama to throw at a situation wherein "Jarhyn and their friends walk into a bar" where "Jarhyn" is available and acceptable as a proper noun for communication, as well as using "they all" or "the group". It strikes me as a kvetch about the desire to maintain linguistic laziness, which is itself used as an excuse to maintain the power to conflate and equivocate with the different dimensions of a cluster concept rather than isolating only the pertinent individual dimensions to any given concern, and actually focusing on those dimensions to the exclusion of the others.

 

[Bomb#20]

It seems to me your analogy breaks down here. When I say I "went to Europe", that does not set my audience off searching for a city other than Paris. The whole reason saying "they" might set my audience off searching for a different antecedent is precisely because using "they" on a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male causes a grammatical mismatch, not just incompletely collaborative communication. That's not just based on my own grammatical intuition -- the Lagunoff dissertation you linked backs me up on this. Using "they" for such an antecedent is not English.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

They is "wrong" because the referent is known to be male? The whole point of "they" is that they aren't male!

No. Nobody said "they" is "wrong" because the referent is known to be male. You assumed somebody was arguing that because you dropped context. Jokodo and I are discussing an observed linguistic phenomenon that bears on the thread topic by a complicated chain of inferences, and offering competing explanations for that phenomenon. When you ignore all that context and just think about complicated arguments as if they were structureless collections of statements each of which was intended to directly support some overarching conclusion rather than making the case for one of the lemmas, you guarantee that you will misunderstand what was said.

(And, by the way, we were talking about Benjamin Netanyahu and Robert Sapolsky. They are male.)

 

[Bomb#20]

The longer you talk to a "classical liberal", the less liberal their views turn out to actually be. Ever notice that?

"Progressive" liberals like you and Jarhyn I find even more so.
Tom

In America we've been abusing the hell out of the word "liberal" ever since McCarthy took up persecuting vanilla progressives and democratic socialists and they renamed themselves "liberals" as protective coloration. It didn't make them liberals, and it didn't give them any understanding of what sort of views are "actually" liberal.

 

[Bomb#20]

Someone is posting without searching first. I hope they read this Wikipedia link.

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

Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:

"Somebody left their umbrella in the office. Could you please let them know where they can get it?"[1]

"My personal rule is to never trust anyone who says that they had a good time in high school."[2]

"The patient should be told at the outset how much they will be required to pay."[3]

"But a journalist should not be forced to reveal their sources."[3]

This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.[4][5][2] It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.[6] Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language.[7][8] Some early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing.[9][10] However, by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.[11][12][13][14]

In the early 21st century, use of singular they with known individuals emerged for people who do not exclusively identify as male or female, as ias in, for example, "This is my friend, Jay. I met them at work."[15]

Which part of "indeterminate antecedent" didn't you understand?

Which part of "typically" did you not?

I take it you feel the kibitzer's rejoinder was cogent. If you think the "typically" modifier to "indeterminate antecedent" was actually relevant to the facts you pointed out about the usage emerging by the 14th century and having been commonly employed in everyday English ever since, then can you perhaps point us to a corpus that shows examples of singular "they" occasionally being used for determinate named antecedents from the 14th through 20th centuries?

 

[Politesse]

The longer you talk to a "classical liberal", the less liberal their views turn out to actually be. Ever notice that?

"Progressive" liberals like you and Jarhyn I find even more so.
Tom

I guess answering one cheap shot with another is fair enough, but I assure you that liberty, democratic rule, and individual franchise sit at the very center of my political philosophy. No one has a right to tell someone else what they are or what they are allowed to be. No one ever granted Christian theocrat types (or atheistic fools who thoughtlessly and self-defeatingly enforce their cultural views) an unchecked right to police the social identity of others. They have done nothing to earn or justify such a role, and no one is ever going to volunteer to give it to them. Throwing science in the dustbin so as to make way for their unique cultural views on masculinity and femininity is not the role or purpose of a democratic government. They are free to do as they like within their congregations or in their kitchens, but not in a public sociology class.

 

[Emily Lake]

Legislation based on "biological sex" can only be enforced by the involuntary violation of women's privacy and bodily autonomy. Without the cooperation of the accused, there is no way to "prove" that a person was born male or female, except by non-consensual exposure of their body, or non-consensual requisition of bodily samples.

Humans are sexually dimorphic. At the end of the day, sex is defined based on the type of reproductive system a person has. But that's far from the only way to discern a person's sex. There are a plethora of secondary and sex-correlated traits that are obvious and apparent in the vast majority of cases. FFS, do you really think that nobody at all has any idea whether Jason Momoa is a male or a female? It's all just a guess in your mind? That's just downright rhetorical misdirection and intentionally misleading argumentation.

So you believe that sex discrimination should not require any determinant of sex except for the arresting officer's stupid fucking opinion?

No, I think that the question of whether or not sex discrimination has occurred should be based on apparent sex, not on someone's internal beliefs about their gendered soul.

A woman can be sent to prison for life in a men's prison, just because someone else thinks she "looks like a t*****"?

No, a female should be sent to a female prison regardless of how they think about themselves, or how anybody else thinks they look. Male should be sent to male prisons regardless of whether they feel like they have a masculine soul or a feminine soul.

Me, I don't think anyone has a right to tell Jason Momoa what pronouns to use except for Jason Momoa, and for what it's worth, I'm 100% certain that Jason Momoa agrees with me. He's a good guy, actually, and good to his fans. All of his fans, not just braindead Christians.

I don't give a crap what pronouns Momoa wants to use for himself. At the same time, however, when I'm talking to my friends about what a complete and utter hunk Momoa is, I'm going to refer to him as "he" even if he insists he's really a woman on the inside. Because every single bit of Momoa is male.

 

[Emily Lake]

It's never women insisting this - it's always males who are demanding that if women don't submissively accept any male who says they have gendery feels as being just as much a women as they are then we're hurting women.

Are you... seriously denying the very existence of non-bigoted women? I assure you, not every woman is a 19th century schoolmarm. I certainly don't remember my mother ever teaching me to hate anyone for being different from me. In fact, I think she'd disown me if she ever heard me talking about someone else the way you talk about people who believe different things from you. Her mother, either, and she was a probation officer, so in her case it certainly wasn't due to never having met a trans person...

I don't hate anyone, Poli. It's disingenuous of you to pretend as if my observation that male humans are male humans is somehow hateful.

It is not hateful to acknowledge that sex is real and material, nor to recognize that we have eons of discrimination and oppression on the basis of that very real and material sex, and to understand that there is a conflict between the wants of some transgender people and the dignity and safety of women.

 

[Emily Lake]

Are you denying the very existence of women who want a man free place for personal business?

Obviously not. Everyone knows that trans exclusionary feminists exist, they are as loud and public about their beliefs as a person can be. But no faith group should be allowed to conduct the affairs of others.

As opposed to the faith group that insists that if a male feels like he has a gendery soul then he is magically transformed into a female human being and nobody can tell the difference?

Seriously, you're pretending like the reality of sex in an isogamous species is "faith" but somehow "woman soul inside a man body" is hard fact.