Banning Gender Pronouns Because They’re Microaggressions

[Hakurei Reimu]

Will they, though? I don't know of any studies where that particular avenue was explored. It would certainly be interesting to see the results. If hue perception is affected, I would expect to see more 'mistakes' in a culture with fewer standard color names, where a 'mistake' would be associating an intermediate color with the reference color further from it in terms of wavelength. This would have to be due to associating the intermediate color and the chosen reference color in the same 'chunk.' Still, I'll admit that the confounding factors in all studies of this sort are hard to parse through as they are all so intertwined. An ideal study would examine two different language groups with highly similar cultures, environments, and lifestyles, which is a tall order to fill.

Color perception is more complicated than "wavelength." Magenta does not exist anywhere on the color spectrum, yet we are able to perceive it. It is thus extremely difficult to define what a "mistake" means here, because the color associations are arbitrary to begin with, and that's the problem with such experiments. It's also rather pejorative.

Man, I envy you. I can never tell the difference between all those shades of white.

Neither can I, when they're all out on their lonesome. When placed side-by-side, it's obvious.

[Just going to define some terms here as used in the study - languages with a regularly used future tense are strong-FTR whereas languages with no or sparsely used future tense are weak-FTR.]

Yes, it does ignore all those factors, as it should. The more factors you account for in a statistical analysis, the more errors and fluctuations compound. That's not to say that we should ignore those factors, just that it's important to isolate the effects of each variable as much as possible before attempting a synthesis. The study didn't just see the effect in Japanese - it saw it in Finns, Germans, Chinese, and more. The important thing is the trend. The range of percent of households saving in countries with more weak-FTR speakers is shifted significantly higher than the range in countries with more strong-FTR speakers.

The reason why the correlation fallacy is a fallacy is exactly because of those unaccounted for factors. A causation can only be established when you control for those factors. Remember, a language has a strong- or weak-FTR for a reason, and it may be that underlying reason that may be the true cause of the correleation. Until it is established that strong- or weak-FTR is the proximal cause of this effect, any conclusion that may be drawn from this is speculation.

Also, formally, German inflects its future tense in exactly the same way that English does. It is also true that German substitutes present for future more often than English ("Wir sehen uns morgen." - "We'll see you tomorrow."), but the use of present tense in English to denote a clearly future event are not unknown: "If he finds your sweets, he will eat them." "The bomb will explode where it lands." etc. Therefore, I do not see how any language can be unambiguously categorized as "strong-FTR" or "weak-FTR", because it's a matter of degree, and if it's a matter of degree, then there should be a dose-response curve, not a sharp demarcation.

That's the kind of thinking I suspect people are doing when a conversation starts with "So I was talking to my roommate and he/she...." Whatever comes after that is automatically and unconsciously interpreted through a very different lens. This isn't inherently a bad thing - as you have pointed out, men and women are clearly different. That's why we have the words man and woman, boy and girl, male and female. But our lenses almost invariably contain falsehoods and biases, even (especially) ones we would never think consciously, just as the westerner would never consciously think to go and lean on a rice paper wall. These lenses exist for a reason, and parts of them are useful and informative. But when the second part of that sentence at the beginning of the paragraph doesn't contain anything that can be usefully interpreted in the context of gender, the only changes the lens can make to our interpretation are at best benign and at worst disastrous - we fall through the rice paper wall through no fault of our own. That's why ditching the gender pronouns seems like a potentially good idea to me.

Language is digital â€" you are expressing a continuous world through the use of a finite number of symbols. The kind of distortions ("falsehoods and biases") you talk about are inevidable because you're always trying to fit a square peg through a round hole.

English has a residual grammatical gender, so people think that the function of grammatical gender is to categorize humans and animals into male and female. However, we see in languages with more developed gender systems (like German and French) that this is not its purpose, because these languages assign male and female (or whatever) gender to sexless objects, or even a neutral gender to a clearly sexed animal. What we find is that the role of a gender system in a language is to reduce ambiguity. By dividing the world into a number of gender categories, you increase the chance that two objects you are talking about will belong to different genders, and thus you can refer to them with different pronouns. I can't tell you the number of times I've been frustrated when talking about two "its" in the same sentence, and finding myself wishing that English had a more developed grammatical gender system.

Furthermore, it's not as if identity politics twits are completely on board with eliminating 'gendered' pronouns â€" some of them want to add more pronouns to emulate the subtlety of their sexuality.

When I say "So I was talking to my X and he/she....", I clearly mean that "my X" is a man/woman in sex depending on which pronoun I use. Even if I make a mistake in referent â€" if I use a pronoun that the antecedent doesn't want me to use, it's not as if it's not easily corrected. I can see the use of an ambiguous gendered pronoun for when writing a general announcement, but their use while talking about a specific person? No, that's making a mountain out of a molehill. So what if I can't get away with not communicating the gender of my roommate? Big deal! I've experienced what happens when having two people I'm talking about being referred to with the same pronoun, so I'm glad for any distinction I can make. Further, getting rid of "he" and "she" would invalidate a whole mess of literature as outdated. People would have to learn them and their meanings just to be able to read their favorite novel, or the English classics. I certainly want my child to read Winne the Pooh or Alice in Wonderland without being confused about the gendered pronouns.

My final thoughts on this matter is that this whole action is based upon microagression, that someone may be offended by the use of "he" or "she" or even "he/she". Sure, someone may be offended by this, but they aren't, are they? It's not as if "he" and "she" were invented a few weeks ago; they've been around in general use for centuries. To me, this is just another instance of SJW speaking as if they were the mouthpiece for some group they don't actually belong to as if they know what will and what won't offend people. This is highly presumptuous of them. And the most shameful thing about this episode is why the University of Kansas didn't just tell these clowns to take a hike.

[Baruch]

Technicality ... language is not digital.  Some constrained communications channels are digital.  Information theory is an abstraction (it implies that all distinctions can be made thru a series of binary yes/no questions) ... but an abstraction is not the same as what is being abstracted.  Binary isn't even enough to describe the real number line ... it can only define a countable subset of integers ... let alone real life.  In communication, it is what is in the mind of the sender and receiver that is crucial ... the communication channel is a series of semaphores (which originally is something other than binary, but a set of colorful flags) that causes a mental event in the receiver that more or less corresponds to the original mental even in the intention of the sender.  Actually face-to-face communication involves tone of voice and facial gesture ... which cannot be reduced to binary.

[Hakurei Reimu]

Digital data (in information theory) is a discrete, discontinuous representation. The symbols of language are discrete and discontinuous. 'Hat' is not closer in meaning to 'hate' (1 change) than it is to 'boat' (2 changes). You have neither an infinite number of symbols in your vocabulary, nor do you have an infinite number of symbols in each message. Language fits the definition of "digital."

Although the voice and face may have infinite range of motion; that's just the context in which the words are evaluated in, and not available in all venues.

[Baruch]

Digital data (in information theory) is a discrete, discontinuous representation. The symbols of language are discrete and discontinuous. 'Hat' is not closer in meaning to 'hate' (1 change) than it is to 'boat' (2 changes). You have neither an infinite number of symbols in your vocabulary, nor do you have an infinite number of symbols in each message. Language fits the definition of "digital."

Although the voice and face may have infinite range of motion; that's just the context in which the words are evaluated in, and not available in all venues.

I don't think we disagree, unless you are saying that Information Theory is the theory of everything.  Information theory is useful, just as statistics is .... but the universe can't be reduced to any one abstraction ... however useful in limited circumstances those abstractions may be.  To the point ... language, even as a denumerable infinity of symbols ... is not commensurate with the rest of human experience, let alone to reality, whatever that may be.  The fact that one can even conceive of the continuum ... defeats all finite symbol systems of course.  And actual thought or speech is a continuum ... even if we choose to interpret it as a finite symbol system.  The world is analog, not digital.  One can approximate an analog signal with digital sampling (even a phonogram that is more than one dimension) ... but I don't think you are denying the existence of the real numbers, are you?

[josephpalazzo]

He = ghaH
She = ghaH


tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh'a'

[Baruch]

He = ghaH
She = ghaH


tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh'a'

Yes, but do you have ridges on your forehead, and eat fresh gach?

[missingnocchi]

[spoiler]

Color perception is more complicated than "wavelength." Magenta does not exist anywhere on the color spectrum, yet we are able to perceive it. It is thus extremely difficult to define what a "mistake" means here, because the color associations are arbitrary to begin with, and that's the problem with such experiments. It's also rather pejorative.

But there are colors which are associated with pure wavelengths, and they are represented on Newton's color circle (minus the purples which were added later in a misguided attempt to "complete" the circle). The experiment could go on using only these colors and thereby demonstrate clearly if the perceived difference between colors is correlated with the language. I don't think the term 'mistakes' in this context is at all pejorative, it would simply describe a child incorrectly identifying which color is closer to the intermediate.

Neither can I, when they're all out on their lonesome. When placed side-by-side, it's obvious.

As before, I'm jealous. I've had experiences where someone asked my to choose between two paint colors on a card and I honestly couldn't tell there were two. Only with whites and blacks though, everything else is fine.

The reason why the correlation fallacy is a fallacy is exactly because of those unaccounted for factors. A causation can only be established when you control for those factors. Remember, a language has a strong- or weak-FTR for a reason, and it may be that underlying reason that may be the true cause of the correleation. Until it is established that strong- or weak-FTR is the proximal cause of this effect, any conclusion that may be drawn from this is speculation.

Actually, the reason the correlation fallacy is a fallacy is due to the plurality of explanations possible for a correlative relationship, including but not limited to:
A causes B
B causes A
C causes A & B
A & B correlate by coincidence alone
Controlling for variables can only increase certainty that there is a correlation, but it still does nothing to establish causality. I totally agree that any proposed explanation is speculative, but unfortunately that's part of how science is (supposed to be) done. Establishing the causality can never be done with perfect certainty, so what we have to do is propose hypotheses and design tests to falsify them. The simplest possible hypothesis which has passed all attempts at falsification to the present date gets the almighty designation of theory unless and until it is falsified. Of course, in practice most scientists only bother with a very superficial level of falsification, so it's not exactly working out the way Popper envisioned it. He won the battle against Kuhn but he's losing the war.

Also, formally, German inflects its future tense in exactly the same way that English does. It is also true that German substitutes present for future more often than English ("Wir sehen uns morgen." - "We'll see you tomorrow."), but the use of present tense in English to denote a clearly future event are not unknown: "If he finds your sweets, he will eat them." "The bomb will explode where it lands." etc. Therefore, I do not see how any language can be unambiguously categorized as "strong-FTR" or "weak-FTR", because it's a matter of degree, and if it's a matter of degree, then there should be a dose-response curve, not a sharp demarcation.

He determines most of the "weak-FTR" languages by referring to previous research where there is a consensus that a future tense doesn't exist. In languages which do contain a future tense, he delineates them by comparing the percent of the time when the future is being referenced that a future tense verb is used. Only the North Germanic languages made the cut to be considered weak-FTR by that measure, so the vast majority of them simply lack a future tense. 22 of the 29 languages marked strong-FTR used it 70% of the time or more. Of course, I agree that the study would be better suited with a spectrum, and it's possible that the results would change, but there's little about his designation that could be considered arbitrary.

Language is digital â€" you are expressing a continuous world through the use of a finite number of symbols. The kind of distortions ("falsehoods and biases") you talk about are inevidable because you're always trying to fit a square peg through a round hole.

Yes, as I mentioned there are a million areas where things like this occur and it is futile to fight them in most cases. I simply think that in this particular case we might be trying to put the peg through when we don't need to.

English has a residual grammatical gender, so people think that the function of grammatical gender is to categorize humans and animals into male and female. However, we see in languages with more developed gender systems (like German and French) that this is not its purpose, because these languages assign male and female (or whatever) gender to sexless objects, or even a neutral gender to a clearly sexed animal. What we find is that the role of a gender system in a language is to reduce ambiguity. By dividing the world into a number of gender categories, you increase the chance that two objects you are talking about will belong to different genders, and thus you can refer to them with different pronouns. I can't tell you the number of times I've been frustrated when talking about two "its" in the same sentence, and finding myself wishing that English had a more developed grammatical gender system.

An interesting theory, but have you considered that the correlation between the gender system and reduced ambiguity does not imply causality?  I suspect you're right about that, actually, but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect the way people think. In fact, based on what you just said this may be a unique opportunity to truly test objectivism vs relativism in psychology of language. In situations where the original conditions that resulted in a particular construct of language are the same as the current conditions, such as with color in England and Namibia, it's hard to say whether differences in color perception would be due to which colors are important for living in the area or which naming categories are available, because the former caused the latter and so there is insignificant difference between the set and distribution of colors pertaining to either metric. And, of course, it's perfectly possible for both to be true and reinforcing. In the case of gender, though, the force that created the category is distinct from the apparent meaning of the category. It would be interesting to find a set of nouns in German and French which mean the same thing but have different gender in each, and see if there is a noticeable difference in the way a speaker describes each thing which isn't there for words sharing gender. If enough differences existed to carry out the experiment, it would be even better to use very close languages like Spanish and Portuguese.

Furthermore, it's not as if identity politics twits are completely on board with eliminating 'gendered' pronouns â€" some of them want to add more pronouns to emulate the subtlety of their sexuality.

When I say "So I was talking to my X and he/she....", I clearly mean that "my X" is a man/woman in sex depending on which pronoun I use. Even if I make a mistake in referent â€" if I use a pronoun that the antecedent doesn't want me to use, it's not as if it's not easily corrected.

Yeah, my reasoning is independent of theirs, so I have no disagreements with you there.

I can see the use of an ambiguous gendered pronoun for when writing a general announcement, but their use while talking about a specific person? No, that's making a mountain out of a molehill. So what if I can't get away with not communicating the gender of my roommate? Big deal! I've experienced what happens when having two people I'm talking about being referred to with the same pronoun, so I'm glad for any distinction I can make.

I guess the point is that it's a much easier step than stamping out sexism altogether, which isn't saying much considering the latter task is impossible. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution isn't going anywhere.

Further, getting rid of "he" and "she" would invalidate a whole mess of literature as outdated. People would have to learn them and their meanings just to be able to read their favorite novel, or the English classics. I certainly want my child to read Winne the Pooh or Alice in Wonderland without being confused about the gendered pronouns.

I don't think it would be that confusing. If you've read your Shakespeare, you know that the hard parts are the archaic figures of speech and words which have changed meaning. The thees, thous, and thithers are pretty simple to get past. Still, your point does make me realize that the change would be far harder to make than I was considering, not because people would have a hard time reading, but because they wouldn't - the vast majority of all the works they would ever read would make copious use of the words, so the movement would have to significantly outlive the current generation before it would ever be embedded.[/spoiler]

[Baruch]

Japanese is an example of a language that doesn't have a strong future tense.  It is considered offensive to be too confident regarding future events.

Most languages have much stronger gender specificity ... in fact usually for all words if there is no neuter.  Newspeak is more imaginable in English than in say French.  Mandarin and English have weak gender typing, because they are not proper languages at all, they are creoles created from feral children in England after the Black Death, in the case of Middle English, and from feral children in N China after similar catastrophes in the case of early Mandarin.  In each case, a creole is a hybrid language learned by children under the age of 6 ... by necessity in dire circumstances, because their parents are dead and they are being raised in mixed ethnic circumstances.  Hybrid languages used by children or adults after the age of 6 are pidgins.  Most famously by stereotyped Chinese immigrants in the Old West, which were Cantonese/English.  Creole languages have to drop grammar complexity because the contributing languages often have incompatible grammars.  This is also why such languages, pragmatically ... develop position sensitive grammar eventually ... native languages have declensions that allow a greater freedom of position in a sentence.

[FaithIsFilth]

I don't really like "they",or at least "their" when used after a person's name. They is fine and sounds good sometimes but not when used in certain ways. I don't use Facebook, but apparently now if you choose a non male or female gender, it says "Sam changed their profile picture". That just does not sound good at all imo. Why not just reword the sentence to say "Sam has changed profile pictures" or "Sam has an updated (or new) profile picture"? Those sentences sound a lot better than the one Facebook is using. When I think of "has changed their", that is what is used when talking about a group or company.

I think Miley is ok with she, but just to be safe and since I'm not a big fan of they, I'm going to go with calling her bae... I mean calling bae bae. I messed up already. This is not going to be easy.

[Hakurei Reimu]

But there are colors which are associated with pure wavelengths, and they are represented on Newton's color circle (minus the purples which were added later in a misguided attempt to "complete" the circle).

You don't perceive pure wavelengths. Your perception of color is accomplished through the combination of the signal strengths of a number of color cones of different species in your eye. Of course, most people are trichromats, and some are dichromats. The cool thing is that up to 25% of people are tetrachromat â€" they have a forth color cone able to distinguish more color nuances. I somehow doubt that someone with such a gross anatomical anomaly would really have that beaten out by the peculiarities of their language. In fact, people with the extraordinary ability to distinguish color would find they would have to invent terms just to describe the subtleties of what they're perceiving.

The experiment could go on using only these colors and thereby demonstrate clearly if the perceived difference between colors is correlated with the language. I don't think the term 'mistakes' in this context is at all pejorative, it would simply describe a child incorrectly identifying which color is closer to the intermediate.

While an intriguing experiment, I think it will be a definitive negative. See, this speculation that language somehow colors color perception doesn't square away with a peculiar fact about color words: that color word categories always follow a particular pattern

• 2 words: black and white,
  
• 3 words: add red,
  
• 4 words: add either green or yellow,
  
• 5 words: both green and yellow,
  
• 6 words: add blue,
  
• 7 words: add brown,
  
• 8+ words: add purple, pink, orange, and/or gray.
  

up to a maximum of 11 color categories. There has never been a language that has more than eleven color categories. While individual languages may have other color words, they will always be considered to be subshades of a more basil color. Furthermore, the focal hue of that category always correspond to roughly the same shade in the Munsel color system. This pattern is strongly suggestive that it is the psychophysics (yes, that's a real scientific dicipline) of color that determine language, rather than the other way around.

Regardless of how else you think about color words, this is very highly suggestive that there is no large effect on how people perceive colors, but how they are categorized. Just because you're limited in vocabulary doesn't mean squat. For instance, in black and white manga, I'm able to tell that the stark white faces of the characters are supposed to be closer to bronze, and evoke that sort of sense in the back of my mind, and the pitch black splotch of ink on the page is actually blood, and thus a similar red sense. The limit of the color vocabulary of the manga page is at best a minor incovenience.

As before, I'm jealous. I've had experiences where someone asked my to choose between two paint colors on a card and I honestly couldn't tell there were two. Only with whites and blacks though, everything else is fine.

Huh. I don't know what to make of that. Thanks.

Though this does pose a problem for your experiment. Obviously, dichromats, trichromats and tetrachromats would genuinely perceive different colors due to their differences in sensory systems, so who gets to decide which colors are "closer" to each other? After all, the different chromacies are determined by genetics, which can differ between populations.

Actually, the reason the correlation fallacy is a fallacy is due to the plurality of explanations possible for a correlative relationship, including but not limited to:
A causes B
B causes A
C causes A & B
A & B correlate by coincidence alone
Controlling for variables can only increase certainty that there is a correlation, but it still does nothing to establish causality. I totally agree that any proposed explanation is speculative, but unfortunately that's part of how science is (supposed to be) done. Establishing the causality can never be done with perfect certainty, so what we have to do is propose hypotheses and design tests to falsify them. The simplest possible hypothesis which has passed all attempts at falsification to the present date gets the almighty designation of theory unless and until it is falsified. Of course, in practice most scientists only bother with a very superficial level of falsification, so it's not exactly working out the way Popper envisioned it. He won the battle against Kuhn but he's losing the war.

Missing, don't try to tell a statistician about the correlation fallacy. Of course a correlation is suggestive, but until you establish one, you don't even get off the ground. For instance, in your own example, how do polyglots fit into this model? What if someone speaks both a weak- and a strong-FTR language with native fluency? Does this effect correlate with the number of weak- and strong-FTR languages you speak? If it did, then that would be truly suggestive of a real correlation. Using your categorization, you don't even know that A really correlates with B at all.

He determines most of the "weak-FTR" languages by referring to previous research where there is a consensus that a future tense doesn't exist. In languages which do contain a future tense, he delineates them by comparing the percent of the time when the future is being referenced that a future tense verb is used. Only the North Germanic languages made the cut to be considered weak-FTR by that measure, so the vast majority of them simply lack a future tense. 22 of the 29 languages marked strong-FTR used it 70% of the time or more. Of course, I agree that the study would be better suited with a spectrum, and it's possible that the results would change, but there's little about his designation that could be considered arbitrary.

Actually, it is very arbitrary. What's so special about that 70% figure that delineates between weak- and strong-FTR? Also, why is future tense the subject of this study, when there may be other verb inflectional features that may be just as influential in affecting how people save, like verb aspect, modality, or evidentiality. Again, you don't even know that A correlates with B at all.

Yes, as I mentioned there are a million areas where things like this occur and it is futile to fight them in most cases. I simply think that in this particular case we might be trying to put the peg through when we don't need to.

You can't avoid putting the peg through something. If you avoid language about the sex of your roommate, we may wonder why you're so reluctant to reveal it. This may imply something that is just as much a distortion of reality as referring to your roommate's sex via pronoun. (For instance, is there hanky-panky you're reluctant to imply?) Instead of trying to limit the conversation to a few choice words, why not put in more information to try to refine and revise those initial distortions into something closer to reality?

Then again, SJWs do often avoid real conversations in favor of sound bites.

An interesting theory, but have you considered that the correlation between the gender system and reduced ambiguity does not imply causality?  I suspect you're right about that, actually, but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect the way people think. In fact, based on what you just said this may be a unique opportunity to truly test objectivism vs relativism in psychology of language. In situations where the original conditions that resulted in a particular construct of language are the same as the current conditions, such as with color in England and Namibia, it's hard to say whether differences in color perception would be due to which colors are important for living in the area or which naming categories are available, because the former caused the latter and so there is insignificant difference between the set and distribution of colors pertaining to either metric. And, of course, it's perfectly possible for both to be true and reinforcing. In the case of gender, though, the force that created the category is distinct from the apparent meaning of the category. It would be interesting to find a set of nouns in German and French which mean the same thing but have different gender in each, and see if there is a noticeable difference in the way a speaker describes each thing which isn't there for words sharing gender. If enough differences existed to carry out the experiment, it would be even better to use very close languages like Spanish and Portuguese.

This might be hard. A specific example that comes to mind is that Pferd (German: horse) is neutral gender (das) while in French you have to refer to a male horse (le cheval) or a female horse (la jument). However, the differences in expression may come down to the fact that in French you have to choose a gender to talk about a single horse, the same way that in English you have to choose a gender to talk about a single cattle.

I guess the point is that it's a much easier step than stamping out sexism altogether, which isn't saying much considering the latter task is impossible. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution isn't going anywhere.

I don't think it would be that confusing. If you've read your Shakespeare, you know that the hard parts are the archaic figures of speech and words which have changed meaning. The thees, thous, and thithers are pretty simple to get past. Still, your point does make me realize that the change would be far harder to make than I was considering, not because people would have a hard time reading, but because they wouldn't - the vast majority of all the works they would ever read would make copious use of the words, so the movement would have to significantly outlive the current generation before it would ever be embedded.

Yep, just as millions of years aren't going anywhere, millions of works of fiction and non aren't either. Most of the books we have available to us were written in the last hundred years or so. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if most readable text wasn't written in the last ten, the way internet data is exploding. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that all that text is calcifying the grammar.

[Ace101]

University of Kansas Student Senate Bans Gender Pronouns Because They’re Microaggressions

https://twitter.com/hashtag/NationalOffendACollegeStudentDay?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw

"If you need a "safe space", you shouldn't be at a college/university, you should be in daycare"

Considering that gender dysphoric people make up far less than 1% of the population this is rather absurd.

Not to mention even gender dysphorics do identify as either a "he" or a "she", they just claim that their brain structure doesn't match the body - I'm pretty sure referring to them as an "it" or a "they" would be more offensive if they wish to be called one or the other.

[pr126]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYYmjeoZGRY

[widdershins]

All of these arguments only look at one side of the issue, how the person being addressed feels about it.  Nobody ever seems to look at the other side, how the person using the pronoun may be made uncomfortable by its use.  While I am certainly a champion for LGBT rights that doesn't mean that their feelings are the only ones we should consider.

Case in point, I read a few months ago about parents suing to stop gender reassignment surgery (unsuccessfully) for their daughter (born as their son).  The father kept calling her his "son" until the judge ordered him to use the proper pronoun.  The judge was considering only the feelings of the defendant, who was a woman as far as she was concerned and demanded that she be referred to as such.  But he never considered the father's perspective.  He took a baby boy home from the hospital.  He was old and this really is rather new territory for this country.  He was not comfortable referring to her as his "daughter".  She had always been his son and, as far as he was concerned, she always would be.  Now certainly he was closed minded and selfish.  He was, after all, suing to prevent his daughter from having the surgery, which is what she truly believed would make her happy.  But why must we be concerned with her comfort zone and hers alone?  They will clearly never see eye to eye on this matter.  The father clearly doesn't want to see this happen (I believe he lost, by the way).  And, yes, referring to her with the female pronoun did make her feel more comfortable, which I, personally, am more than happy to do.  But it doesn't make me uncomfortable to do so, so there's no conflict.  In this case either the father was uncomfortable or the daughter was.  Yes, the father's beliefs were bigoted and outdated, but they were still his beliefs.  Why are we concerned only with the feelings of one and not the other?  Is it not enough to say, "You are wrong.  Everyone has the right to be happy."?  Must we then go further and demand that they make themselves uncomfortable, that they offend themselves in order to prevent offending the other?  It's not like what he was saying was derogatory or anything.  He wasn't using negative words to describe her and he wasn't hurting her on purpose.  But he wasn't comfortable describing his boy as his daughter, from his perspective.

I understand that not everybody "feels" like they fit into one of these two categories, but really, that's life.  People label us all the time in ways we are not comfortable with.  Personally, if it bothers you then tell the person using what you feel is the wrong pronoun which one you prefer, but don't expect them to make themselves feel uncomfortable to make you feel comfortable.  It's selfish and childish, in my opinion, and if they refuse to do it then you can easily tell who is more concerned with their own feelings than yours, thus, who to avoid in the future.

[Baruch]

We can go Solomon on this, find someone's baby, and offer to cut the baby in two!

Attend to a divorce, particularly your own.  Ask anyone if anyone cares about the husband/father feelings?  They don't.  Not saying that things are easy for women ... but in a court ... your example, the judge considers the citizens to be bugs under his feet.

[trdsf]

I don't have a problem with a new pronoun - I've seen 'sie' appropriated from the German as a non-gendered personal pronoun.  A new pronoun that stands for unknown or indeterminate gender seems a perfectly reasonable extension of the language to me.  What form it might take, I don't know.  I've seen 'sie' and 'ce' used, but they decline awkwardly.  The objective for both is frequently rendered 'hir', which is fine on paper but sounds too much like 'her' for clear speech.