I know there’s probably no understanding it, but it’s keeping me up at night. When prompted with “what are your pronouns?” chuds will often reply with that they have no pronouns. But then if asked if they can be referred to as he/him, they’re fine with it. Plus being fine with using me/you/I etc. I’ve even heard them say they don’t consider he/him/she/her to be pronouns.

I mean I kinda know what it is but I’m not gonna ask a chud to confirm. I think it’s these things:

  • Confusion between very typical pronouns such as she/her with neopronouns like xi/xir.

  • They’ve literally never been asked for their pronouns before so their minds can’t process the question. They only know that pronouns are those things that trans people use, so they have an immediate kneejerk reaction to reject the concept entirely without consideration.

  • Confusion between the concept of pronouns and gender identity

  • Misunderstanding of the concept of a pronoun mean something more like “identified pronoun”

I seriously hate these people so much by the way. Obstinant, stubborn transphobia is a fucking plague and I’m very pessimistic about the idea you can simply argue them out of their mindsets. They’re completely stuck because they want to be stuck, and they don’t even want to know what they’re mad about. May Allah have mercy on their eternal souls because I have very little sympathy for them

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    14 days ago

    Oh sweet. I thought there were some obscure indigenous languages that didn’t use em, but wasn’t sure. Good to know!

    Edit:

    1. looking into it a little more (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns), looks like there is a reasonably strong argument that Japanese doesn’t use pronouns. Basically, pronouns in japanese are a subclass of nouns and arguably not a distinct part of speech. “School grammar” teaches that they are not distinct.

    For instance, watashi (normally translated as “I”) really means something more like “an individual”. Also second person pronouns are considered rude, but the words used as second person “pronouns” are also just nouns that have over time taken on pronoun-like usage, but don’t mean “you”. So the pronouns Japanese has are kind of… not pronouns… and are ommitted in casual speech anyway (pro-drop)

    1. also, per https://wals.info/chapter/99 - Wichita & Wari’ lack any pronouns and Canela-Krahô lack any pronouns in the Object (but allow them for Subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs).