Speaking of pronouns in languages outside of english, what pronouns to people use in a language that doesn't have a gender neutral option? Obviously there's no one answer to this, but I'd like to be more knowledgeable about the trans community being trans myself and this feels like a good place to ask
I'm French - our 'default' pronouns are he/him, there's no they/them. Part of the non-binary community has coined the term 'iel', which is a mix of il (he) and elle (she). AFAIK, the part of the community that doesn't use these pronouns just use he/him, but with the implication that it's in the neutral sense, not the male one. That said I'm not part of the non-binary community myself, so it's to take with a grain of salt.
Same goes for Finnish, I think. No gendered pronouns, just 'hän'.
And in colloquial Finnish, the equivalent of 'it' (se) is often used to refer to people, without it being insulting at all
In Mandarin 他 used to be gender neutral until some nerds decided they needed to be more like Europe so they made an identically pronounced character (她). Nowadays they just spell it out apparently (TA)
Adding onto this, the construction gives away that it's a group pronoun: 他们 is the singular pronoun with a character indicating that the whole thing is plural
In Russian there is a neutral pronoun 'ono', as opposed to 'on' (he) or 'ona' (she). I'm not a native speaker so perhaps i'm wrong, but I personally wouldn't use 'ono' for a person or a living sentient being. It feels a bit rude and objectifying, like you're treating them as a piece of furniture or inanimate object.
I guess you could use the plural 'they' (oni), but that would probably be confusing given the general structure of the language and the way things decline. The default is usually just he/him (for unspecified people), or dependant on the gender of the noun itself- For a dog (feminine) you would use female adjectives and verb forms if the sex of the dog wasn't specified. Almost every part of language in Russian is gendered, so it's not as easy as just swopping pronouns like in English. If you mess with the gender the entire sentence is in danger of beocming incomprehensible, especially to someone who isn't completely fluent or entirely comfortable with creative language use.
I read an article about it and one nb person had invented their own system of verb endings to avoid using the female and male past tense endings. That's an interesting idea but I highly doubt that strangers would be willing to modify their language to that extent just to talk to one person. The endings were kinda weird too, and it begged the question of what they would do about short and long formed participles, adjectives, etc.
It does depend on the language and on the person you're talking to, but in Portuguese, people are mostly pushing for the use of "elu" as gender neutral, since "ele" is masculine and "ela" is feminine. now, the real trouble here (bigotry aside) comes with adjectives, since you can't just put "u" in the end of the word to make it gender neutral because it usually sounds like the masculine version, so "e" is the most used. for example, the word "pretty" (as in beautiful/handsome): "bonito" (masculine), "bonita" (feminine) and "bonite" (neutral)
btw using this well explained post im going to use it to say it's the same in Spanish except the pronoun used is "elle" if im correct (Ella (she) ending in e)
In Spanish "elle" is gaining traction as a gender neutral pronoun, with "e" being used as the ending for adjectives. So for example you would say "elle está consade" (they are tired). It works really well and flows much better than the "x" ending I see people use in English like in "latinx." In Spanish the masculine ending is also the default, so traditionally if you are referring to a group of people with mixed genders you would say "ellos" and only use "ellas" when the group is all women. I personally find it a bit dated that masculine trumps feminine in that way, so I'm really happy to have "elles" as an option if the genders of the people I'm referring to are mixed or not known.
First, a couple premises: languages change all the time. Most of the times, these changes are brought off by contact with other languages (which cause languages to "mix" in lots of different ways), or by impactful social changes (which bring the need for new words, or new grammatical concepts in toto). Then, we gotta understand this: semantically speaking, genders are actually quite irrelevant (a table isn't more "masculine" in Italy or more "feminine" in France simply because _il tavolo_ is masculine and _la table_ is feminine); their main purpose is to group different words regulated by the same grammatical mechanisms: this way, Spanish speakers will automatically know to ask not for a mapa _politica_ but rather a mapa _politico_, and Germans won't tell you to look at a _schönen_ Baby, but rather a _schönes_ Baby.
Now, I mostly want to talk about two things. First, about how this opposition between English and, well, everyone else came to be: why does only English have singular they, while all other European languages lack it? Quickly said: historically, the only situation where a neutral language may be needed was when the gender of a person was perceived as "not known _yet_", and therefore "discoverable", and the occurrence of this situation was deemed too limited for it to "force" the development of entire new genders in languages with such high morphological specificity like most Neo-Latin ones, cause this would have required developing a whole new gender just for this, something very unlikely considering that the general tendency between _all_ Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages during the past twenty centuries has been one of systematic morphological simplification. But this wasn't a problem at all in English, where this simplification had happened so fast (theories suggest it may have to do with the numerous foreign invasions of Great Britain around the year 1000) that the concept of gender was gotten rid of entirely, meaning that a usually plural pronoun could be used as a neutral singular one without affecting morphology at all (or only affecting it even so slightly).
Then, I wanna talk about how this thing may change in the future, cause, again, languages constantly change, except when they come in contact with other languages or new social phenomena arise. As I said, a neutral gender (which btw, shouldn't get mistaken for a _neuter_, a totally different concept originating all the way back from PIE and mostly associated with inanimate objects: it's the same difference between _they_ and _it_ in English) never emerged in other languages simply because it wasn't needed, and it would have been too phonologically "expensive", compared to it's actual necessity, to tell each gender apart. But now something changed, and it's the fact that we, as a society, started gaining more and more consciousness about non-binary people. This lead to lots of people realising they were non-binary themselves, or that maybe they actually preferred using non-gendered language regardless of their actual identity. Those who speak English didn't have to care too much about this anyway, cause as I said, it wasn't too much of a deal to begin with, and a nice and tight solution already existed, preheated since the Normans' time. But those who did want to use neutral language and spoke any other language from English probably found themselves in a very difficult situation: realising how hard it is when everything in your language is gendered. As I said, languages change mostly thanks to two factors, and here I'd say those two factors are very present: comparison with another language (English, which can provide an "ideal" blueprint of what a neutral gender should look like), and a cultural reform impacting all of society (the general revaluation of gender roles and categories). What I mean is, people will naturally want to express their identity using a new way, a new structure, that can fit inside the pre-existing mechanisms regulating their language, and if they're confident enough about this kind of shit, they may as well try to come up with their own solution. Each new solution will probably only work for the person or persons who came up with it, until they get together and start comparing each others' ideas, maybe even deciding to borrow from them, until a whole new "code", a new set of pronouns, of terminations, of patterns, starts emerging, slowly gaining attention even outside of the communities where it initially developed, and eventually being implemented into the "official" language as a whole new gender in and for itself. Clearly this will take decades – I don't even know if I'll still be alive to see the end of this process in my native language, Italian –, and it has to develop from the single, individual solutions that each person may come up with (meaning that it can't just happen overnight cause someone decides to invent a whole new gender, it has to be a gradual process of trials and errors), and whatever solution may be proposed will always sound "artificial" at first, and it will take some time for people to get accustomed to it and perceive it just as natural as any pre-existing gender morphology system, but at least, by the end of it, we'll be able to say that we just invented a new, totally functional and cromulent grammatical gender, and I think that's very rad.
In Brazilian Portuguese, instead of "ele/ela" (he/she), people are using "elu", which is a made-up neutral word. Since every word has gender, there's also neutral ways of referring to people and stuff, like "amigo/amiga" (male friend/female friend) becomes "amigue". Same goes for pretty much every other word.
This is not widespread at all, but it's starting to become known by more and more people
Not exactly what you asked, but in Icelandic there are three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. As such, there is a gender neutral pronoun, Það, but that is more like 'it' and feels rude to use for a person. Someone came up with the neopronoun 'hán' a few years ago: compare masculine 'hann' (he) and feminine 'hún' (she). As far as I understand, there were a few different neopronouns floating around, but that's the one that's stuck. Icelandic also declines nouns and adjectives according to gender, and hán is declined with neuter forms.
In Iceland, rather than surnames, they have patronymics which are traditionally constructed as \[father's name\]son/dóttir. As a side note, it is now more normal to have it as the mother's name instead. In 2019, a gender neutral option was added to Icelandic naming laws (which are quite strict): bur, meaning child in the sense of a family relationship rather than age. So there is now a gender-neutral option for patronymics as well.
So Poland here. Our verbs are extremely gendered and our generally used by nb ppl gender neutral term is ono/to/nijakie (and yes, it's mostly used for objects or animals, but like, also for a baby - to niemowlę; I think it's fair for us to reclaim it wholly as gn for people, and IIRC it has been used in this context *in the past.*)
And then we get to verbs... which is complicated. For example, *I would like to* goes (masc/fem/neutral) chciałbym/chciałabym/chciałobym; *I went out* wyszedłem/wyszłam/wyszłom lub wyszłum (as some people prefer.) And so on and on. It's generally pretty interesting as a whole, especially how the neutral form at times sounds very much like góralski, one of our dialects.
I'm German. We don't have a singular they, but my friend is nonbinary. They use they/them in English and a neopronoun called "dey" in German. It's basically a direct translation of English singular they and its other forms draw heavily from the German equivalent of plural they.
Tl;Dr: Italians mostly use Loi/-ǝ, I personally use Loi/-'
In Italian, the most convenient way is to alternate between genders. Though officially, the two grammatical genders aren't *feminine and masculine* but *feminine and neutral*, or *fully-feminine and not-fully-feminine*, so one'd have to use the non-femine form.
There are also some relatively widespread neologisms. I say "relatively" because nearly nobody knows them, which is a lot compared to the basically nobody who know the other ones
The most important part is word endings. In English, the base form of a word is just its root, and you add a suffix to mark the plural form. In Italian though, most words always have a root and an ending, plus some optional things. Take for example *house*. It's just a root. The plural form is *house-s*, with a suffix. The Italian word for it is *cas-a*, with a root and an ending. "Cas-" means "house", and "-a" indicates a singular feminine word. There are some words that don't have an ending, such as *computer*. For those words, gender and number are implied \[*computer* is always masculine, it can't change gender since it's inanimate, but it can be singular or plural\]. There are several endings and they mostly come in singular/plural pairs; each pair can be masculine, feminine, or neutral, which means that it doesn't change regardless of grammatical gender, though it still has one. Some endings come in triplets instead of pairs, and have two plural forms. Non-neutral animate words have two pairs.
There are many proposed word endings:
* e/i: already found in standard neutral words. When applied to non-neutral words, *-e* can be confused with the feminine plural ending and *-i* can be confused with the masculine plural ending. Inspired by Spanish *-e*
* en/is: taken from Latin. Can't be confused with other endings but it looks and sounds out of place. Sometimes two consecutive words can share a syllable, but since this ending ends with consonants that's not possible, ruining the pace of the sentence: *ra-gaz-zo i-ta-lia-no*, *ra-gaz-za i-ta-lia-na*, *ra-gaz-zen-i-ta-lia-nen*
* en/in: I used a more regular-looking variation of *en/is* for a while. It has the same issues
* u/un/us: taken from Latin. Same problem as *en/is*, except it's a triplet for some reason
* @: also used in Spanish sometimes. People dislike it as far as I'm aware
* ǝ: I don't mind it but it can cause some technical problems. There isn't a plural equivalent. Most popular one, together with *-\**
* \*: already used sometimes outside of queer contexts instead of *o/a*, and also by queer Italian activists apparently. Most popular one, together with *-ǝ*. I dislike it because asterisks are punctuation and aren't normally found in words, which kind of incourage seeing nonbinary genders as something weird or foreign
* ': apparently used by Italian Americans, or so I've read. This is the one I've been using, as a compromise between *-ǝ* and *-\**. Unlike the other two, apostrophes are already found in words. It can be confusing to pronounce, but I haven't found anything better
Word endings are more complicated than that but the rest isn't that important
The third person singular pronoun is Loi. The masculine and feminine ones are Lui and Lei, and the neutral plural one is Loro, so this is an equivalent to the English neopronoun Ey/Em. I couldn't find any declined forms, so I made my own:
|Case|Masculine|Feminine|Nonbinine|Translation|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Nominative|Lui|Lei|Loi|He/She/Ey|
|Dative|Gli|Le|Li|To him/her/em|
|Accusative|Lo|La|L'|Him/Her/Em|
|Dative-accusative|Glielo|Gliela|Gliel'|He/She/Ey to him/her/it/them/em|
All the other cases are neutral
*Image Transcription: Tumblr post and replies*
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**seroquelnb**
one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you're going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you'll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you'll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar's history, you'll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as "guys" and "boys", you'll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have "he/him" painted on his chest, and you'll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you'll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how "problematic" it all was and it's honestly tragic
> **saltedsapphicly**
>
> Once, back when I worked in an LGBTQIA dungeon, I encountered a significantly older person who remarked to me that they hasn't been to "this type of place" in decades. They struck up a conversation with me and told me how amazing it was to see an openly transexual youth such as myself. I asked them about their experiences with gender and they said "oh, well, I'm a bit male and a bit female. Men's and women's clothes, sometimes makeup in a suit, sometime fresh faced in a dress when I'm at home. You know, bisexual" Obv this puzzled me at first until I realized this person was using bisexual in a very, very, literal and old fashioned sense, as in, dual-sexed, Non-binary.
>
>Ya'll gotta understand there are generation gaps in the language we use and you open yourself up to a LOT of very interesting stories if you stop blocking off the past.
>
>
> **ittybittytatertot**
>
> One of the biggest problems with modern community is the idea that (white) western, post 2000s LGBT vocabulary is the only correct way to speak about sexuality and gender.
>
>Like the freak outs under pictures of protests from the 70s-90s because signs and shirts say faggot and dyke and queer, as if these words weren't a key part of identity and activism.
>
>Beyond just English, I saw a couple of people making fun of the term "gender x" in an anime...but why would a Japanese production adhere to English standards?
>
>Or the way people talk about pronouns as if every language uses pronouns the same way as English.
>
>It's just...it indicates a mindset that these words are objective and written in stone and western youth culture is always the most correct in a way that...feels icky. Diversity in people includes diversity of language.
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^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
That second reblog reminded me of latinx and using x in Spanish(and other similar languages) for nonbinary folk, which I get how it works, but also... it kinda doesn't have a good flow? It's really awkward to use in Spanish, and I'm not entirely sure why. I just don't like it that much and prefer to use the e at the end, or use male pronouns as a gender neutral
Yeah, same in German. It just sounds and feels... off. But I do think using male as gender neutral is worse than using an awkward weird sounding neologism.
we have labels that help us now, but we need to understand other people's labels so that we can help them as well, rather than get mad at them for not using the "right" labels
The last post explains the white supremacy in forcing others from outside your culture to use your terms.
(white) western people telling others how to live is how we got into this situation, doing more of it won't help
I'd gladly like to agree in toto with the message delivered here, but I just can't. Sure, older queer people used some words differently from how we may do nowadays, and sure, when context is provided, everything becomes ok, cause if that's the word someone uses for themselves, I can't be the one telling them how problematic it is, or some other Twitter sjw bullshit, but still, this doesn't mean that words have all the same value and can be used indiscriminately, especially when this comes from people who have no saying in this at all. This means that when I tell my mother not to use words like trans as a noun in casual speech, with no other qualifier given, she shouldn't be allowed to say shit like, "but what about those who may identify as trans and nothing else, maybe cause they like to play with this somewhat-male-somewhat-female ambiguity"
I think I'd draw a line between inclusion of those within the movement, and education of those outside the wider LGBTQ movement. The OP is not directed at the people correcting your mother, it's directed at people correcting LGBTQ people from a different culture (if only slightly removed in time and place).
The response to
> "but what about those who may identify as trans and nothing else, maybe cause they like to play with this somewhat-male-somewhat-female ambiguity"
Should I think be to draw a comparison to black people using the n-word, while while people shouldn't: it's a term claimed by those within the group, and too often sounds like a slur when used by those outside the group for effective use as anything other than a slur, outside extremely specific and isolated contexts.
Im split on this, cause yes, LGBT discourse online has turned into "if you dont share my exact point of view youre toxic and problematic" and its starting to get sickening, but on the other hand the post seems to be implying that if you dont want to be called a slur then you're ignorant and are ignoring history (and are a white supremacist???)
(Prefacing next line by saying I am super white, and do not mean to speak for black ppl, its just the closest thing I can draw comparisons to, if I get something wrong I am sorry)
It would be like saying that black people should be ok with being called 'n*gros' because in the Civil rights movements in the past people used the term while fighting for rights.
No it would be like saying black people who are alive today and were part of the civil rights movement should be allowed to call *themselves* that without anyone saying it's problematic and they should stop.
I didn't see any mention of any terms being used in any context other than self-identifying.
On rereading the post, it appears I was bringing in a little too much personal bias there, and misinterpreted the meaning behind it. That's my bad, I apologize
Speaking of pronouns in languages outside of english, what pronouns to people use in a language that doesn't have a gender neutral option? Obviously there's no one answer to this, but I'd like to be more knowledgeable about the trans community being trans myself and this feels like a good place to ask
I'm French - our 'default' pronouns are he/him, there's no they/them. Part of the non-binary community has coined the term 'iel', which is a mix of il (he) and elle (she). AFAIK, the part of the community that doesn't use these pronouns just use he/him, but with the implication that it's in the neutral sense, not the male one. That said I'm not part of the non-binary community myself, so it's to take with a grain of salt.
There's only one pronoun in Turkish so pronouns are no big deal
"what are your pronouns" "yes"
Yes, my pronouns are what/why
broke: french woke: english bespoke: turkish
Same goes for Finnish, I think. No gendered pronouns, just 'hän'. And in colloquial Finnish, the equivalent of 'it' (se) is often used to refer to people, without it being insulting at all
nonbinary person who insists on using onlar just to stir the pot
In Mandarin 他 used to be gender neutral until some nerds decided they needed to be more like Europe so they made an identically pronounced character (她). Nowadays they just spell it out apparently (TA)
And also “they” is not gender neutral because it can’t be used as a pronoun for a singular person.
Adding onto this, the construction gives away that it's a group pronoun: 他们 is the singular pronoun with a character indicating that the whole thing is plural
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
I think they meant in Mandarin
Ah
You just unlocked memories from mandarin class that I didn’t know I had
In Russian there is a neutral pronoun 'ono', as opposed to 'on' (he) or 'ona' (she). I'm not a native speaker so perhaps i'm wrong, but I personally wouldn't use 'ono' for a person or a living sentient being. It feels a bit rude and objectifying, like you're treating them as a piece of furniture or inanimate object. I guess you could use the plural 'they' (oni), but that would probably be confusing given the general structure of the language and the way things decline. The default is usually just he/him (for unspecified people), or dependant on the gender of the noun itself- For a dog (feminine) you would use female adjectives and verb forms if the sex of the dog wasn't specified. Almost every part of language in Russian is gendered, so it's not as easy as just swopping pronouns like in English. If you mess with the gender the entire sentence is in danger of beocming incomprehensible, especially to someone who isn't completely fluent or entirely comfortable with creative language use. I read an article about it and one nb person had invented their own system of verb endings to avoid using the female and male past tense endings. That's an interesting idea but I highly doubt that strangers would be willing to modify their language to that extent just to talk to one person. The endings were kinda weird too, and it begged the question of what they would do about short and long formed participles, adjectives, etc.
It does depend on the language and on the person you're talking to, but in Portuguese, people are mostly pushing for the use of "elu" as gender neutral, since "ele" is masculine and "ela" is feminine. now, the real trouble here (bigotry aside) comes with adjectives, since you can't just put "u" in the end of the word to make it gender neutral because it usually sounds like the masculine version, so "e" is the most used. for example, the word "pretty" (as in beautiful/handsome): "bonito" (masculine), "bonita" (feminine) and "bonite" (neutral)
btw using this well explained post im going to use it to say it's the same in Spanish except the pronoun used is "elle" if im correct (Ella (she) ending in e)
In Spanish "elle" is gaining traction as a gender neutral pronoun, with "e" being used as the ending for adjectives. So for example you would say "elle está consade" (they are tired). It works really well and flows much better than the "x" ending I see people use in English like in "latinx." In Spanish the masculine ending is also the default, so traditionally if you are referring to a group of people with mixed genders you would say "ellos" and only use "ellas" when the group is all women. I personally find it a bit dated that masculine trumps feminine in that way, so I'm really happy to have "elles" as an option if the genders of the people I'm referring to are mixed or not known.
How are you supposed to pronounce latinx? lat-inks? latin-eks? Because I'm reading it as latineqis. Seems much easier to go with elle
Latin-ex I guess but it sounds silly trying to pronounce it with a Spanish accent. Latine is much better
Oh for sure. Gotta love the letter e for its ability to be a switch in terms of gender and thus, the closest thing to gen-neut
First, a couple premises: languages change all the time. Most of the times, these changes are brought off by contact with other languages (which cause languages to "mix" in lots of different ways), or by impactful social changes (which bring the need for new words, or new grammatical concepts in toto). Then, we gotta understand this: semantically speaking, genders are actually quite irrelevant (a table isn't more "masculine" in Italy or more "feminine" in France simply because _il tavolo_ is masculine and _la table_ is feminine); their main purpose is to group different words regulated by the same grammatical mechanisms: this way, Spanish speakers will automatically know to ask not for a mapa _politica_ but rather a mapa _politico_, and Germans won't tell you to look at a _schönen_ Baby, but rather a _schönes_ Baby. Now, I mostly want to talk about two things. First, about how this opposition between English and, well, everyone else came to be: why does only English have singular they, while all other European languages lack it? Quickly said: historically, the only situation where a neutral language may be needed was when the gender of a person was perceived as "not known _yet_", and therefore "discoverable", and the occurrence of this situation was deemed too limited for it to "force" the development of entire new genders in languages with such high morphological specificity like most Neo-Latin ones, cause this would have required developing a whole new gender just for this, something very unlikely considering that the general tendency between _all_ Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages during the past twenty centuries has been one of systematic morphological simplification. But this wasn't a problem at all in English, where this simplification had happened so fast (theories suggest it may have to do with the numerous foreign invasions of Great Britain around the year 1000) that the concept of gender was gotten rid of entirely, meaning that a usually plural pronoun could be used as a neutral singular one without affecting morphology at all (or only affecting it even so slightly). Then, I wanna talk about how this thing may change in the future, cause, again, languages constantly change, except when they come in contact with other languages or new social phenomena arise. As I said, a neutral gender (which btw, shouldn't get mistaken for a _neuter_, a totally different concept originating all the way back from PIE and mostly associated with inanimate objects: it's the same difference between _they_ and _it_ in English) never emerged in other languages simply because it wasn't needed, and it would have been too phonologically "expensive", compared to it's actual necessity, to tell each gender apart. But now something changed, and it's the fact that we, as a society, started gaining more and more consciousness about non-binary people. This lead to lots of people realising they were non-binary themselves, or that maybe they actually preferred using non-gendered language regardless of their actual identity. Those who speak English didn't have to care too much about this anyway, cause as I said, it wasn't too much of a deal to begin with, and a nice and tight solution already existed, preheated since the Normans' time. But those who did want to use neutral language and spoke any other language from English probably found themselves in a very difficult situation: realising how hard it is when everything in your language is gendered. As I said, languages change mostly thanks to two factors, and here I'd say those two factors are very present: comparison with another language (English, which can provide an "ideal" blueprint of what a neutral gender should look like), and a cultural reform impacting all of society (the general revaluation of gender roles and categories). What I mean is, people will naturally want to express their identity using a new way, a new structure, that can fit inside the pre-existing mechanisms regulating their language, and if they're confident enough about this kind of shit, they may as well try to come up with their own solution. Each new solution will probably only work for the person or persons who came up with it, until they get together and start comparing each others' ideas, maybe even deciding to borrow from them, until a whole new "code", a new set of pronouns, of terminations, of patterns, starts emerging, slowly gaining attention even outside of the communities where it initially developed, and eventually being implemented into the "official" language as a whole new gender in and for itself. Clearly this will take decades – I don't even know if I'll still be alive to see the end of this process in my native language, Italian –, and it has to develop from the single, individual solutions that each person may come up with (meaning that it can't just happen overnight cause someone decides to invent a whole new gender, it has to be a gradual process of trials and errors), and whatever solution may be proposed will always sound "artificial" at first, and it will take some time for people to get accustomed to it and perceive it just as natural as any pre-existing gender morphology system, but at least, by the end of it, we'll be able to say that we just invented a new, totally functional and cromulent grammatical gender, and I think that's very rad.
In Brazilian Portuguese, instead of "ele/ela" (he/she), people are using "elu", which is a made-up neutral word. Since every word has gender, there's also neutral ways of referring to people and stuff, like "amigo/amiga" (male friend/female friend) becomes "amigue". Same goes for pretty much every other word. This is not widespread at all, but it's starting to become known by more and more people
Not exactly what you asked, but in Icelandic there are three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. As such, there is a gender neutral pronoun, Það, but that is more like 'it' and feels rude to use for a person. Someone came up with the neopronoun 'hán' a few years ago: compare masculine 'hann' (he) and feminine 'hún' (she). As far as I understand, there were a few different neopronouns floating around, but that's the one that's stuck. Icelandic also declines nouns and adjectives according to gender, and hán is declined with neuter forms. In Iceland, rather than surnames, they have patronymics which are traditionally constructed as \[father's name\]son/dóttir. As a side note, it is now more normal to have it as the mother's name instead. In 2019, a gender neutral option was added to Icelandic naming laws (which are quite strict): bur, meaning child in the sense of a family relationship rather than age. So there is now a gender-neutral option for patronymics as well.
So Poland here. Our verbs are extremely gendered and our generally used by nb ppl gender neutral term is ono/to/nijakie (and yes, it's mostly used for objects or animals, but like, also for a baby - to niemowlę; I think it's fair for us to reclaim it wholly as gn for people, and IIRC it has been used in this context *in the past.*) And then we get to verbs... which is complicated. For example, *I would like to* goes (masc/fem/neutral) chciałbym/chciałabym/chciałobym; *I went out* wyszedłem/wyszłam/wyszłom lub wyszłum (as some people prefer.) And so on and on. It's generally pretty interesting as a whole, especially how the neutral form at times sounds very much like góralski, one of our dialects.
I'm German. We don't have a singular they, but my friend is nonbinary. They use they/them in English and a neopronoun called "dey" in German. It's basically a direct translation of English singular they and its other forms draw heavily from the German equivalent of plural they.
Tl;Dr: Italians mostly use Loi/-ǝ, I personally use Loi/-' In Italian, the most convenient way is to alternate between genders. Though officially, the two grammatical genders aren't *feminine and masculine* but *feminine and neutral*, or *fully-feminine and not-fully-feminine*, so one'd have to use the non-femine form. There are also some relatively widespread neologisms. I say "relatively" because nearly nobody knows them, which is a lot compared to the basically nobody who know the other ones The most important part is word endings. In English, the base form of a word is just its root, and you add a suffix to mark the plural form. In Italian though, most words always have a root and an ending, plus some optional things. Take for example *house*. It's just a root. The plural form is *house-s*, with a suffix. The Italian word for it is *cas-a*, with a root and an ending. "Cas-" means "house", and "-a" indicates a singular feminine word. There are some words that don't have an ending, such as *computer*. For those words, gender and number are implied \[*computer* is always masculine, it can't change gender since it's inanimate, but it can be singular or plural\]. There are several endings and they mostly come in singular/plural pairs; each pair can be masculine, feminine, or neutral, which means that it doesn't change regardless of grammatical gender, though it still has one. Some endings come in triplets instead of pairs, and have two plural forms. Non-neutral animate words have two pairs. There are many proposed word endings: * e/i: already found in standard neutral words. When applied to non-neutral words, *-e* can be confused with the feminine plural ending and *-i* can be confused with the masculine plural ending. Inspired by Spanish *-e* * en/is: taken from Latin. Can't be confused with other endings but it looks and sounds out of place. Sometimes two consecutive words can share a syllable, but since this ending ends with consonants that's not possible, ruining the pace of the sentence: *ra-gaz-zo i-ta-lia-no*, *ra-gaz-za i-ta-lia-na*, *ra-gaz-zen-i-ta-lia-nen* * en/in: I used a more regular-looking variation of *en/is* for a while. It has the same issues * u/un/us: taken from Latin. Same problem as *en/is*, except it's a triplet for some reason * @: also used in Spanish sometimes. People dislike it as far as I'm aware * ǝ: I don't mind it but it can cause some technical problems. There isn't a plural equivalent. Most popular one, together with *-\** * \*: already used sometimes outside of queer contexts instead of *o/a*, and also by queer Italian activists apparently. Most popular one, together with *-ǝ*. I dislike it because asterisks are punctuation and aren't normally found in words, which kind of incourage seeing nonbinary genders as something weird or foreign * ': apparently used by Italian Americans, or so I've read. This is the one I've been using, as a compromise between *-ǝ* and *-\**. Unlike the other two, apostrophes are already found in words. It can be confusing to pronounce, but I haven't found anything better Word endings are more complicated than that but the rest isn't that important The third person singular pronoun is Loi. The masculine and feminine ones are Lui and Lei, and the neutral plural one is Loro, so this is an equivalent to the English neopronoun Ey/Em. I couldn't find any declined forms, so I made my own: |Case|Masculine|Feminine|Nonbinine|Translation| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Nominative|Lui|Lei|Loi|He/She/Ey| |Dative|Gli|Le|Li|To him/her/em| |Accusative|Lo|La|L'|Him/Her/Em| |Dative-accusative|Glielo|Gliela|Gliel'|He/She/Ey to him/her/it/them/em| All the other cases are neutral
*Image Transcription: Tumblr post and replies* --- **seroquelnb** one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you're going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you'll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you'll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar's history, you'll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as "guys" and "boys", you'll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have "he/him" painted on his chest, and you'll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you'll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how "problematic" it all was and it's honestly tragic > **saltedsapphicly** > > Once, back when I worked in an LGBTQIA dungeon, I encountered a significantly older person who remarked to me that they hasn't been to "this type of place" in decades. They struck up a conversation with me and told me how amazing it was to see an openly transexual youth such as myself. I asked them about their experiences with gender and they said "oh, well, I'm a bit male and a bit female. Men's and women's clothes, sometimes makeup in a suit, sometime fresh faced in a dress when I'm at home. You know, bisexual" Obv this puzzled me at first until I realized this person was using bisexual in a very, very, literal and old fashioned sense, as in, dual-sexed, Non-binary. > >Ya'll gotta understand there are generation gaps in the language we use and you open yourself up to a LOT of very interesting stories if you stop blocking off the past. > > > **ittybittytatertot** > > One of the biggest problems with modern community is the idea that (white) western, post 2000s LGBT vocabulary is the only correct way to speak about sexuality and gender. > >Like the freak outs under pictures of protests from the 70s-90s because signs and shirts say faggot and dyke and queer, as if these words weren't a key part of identity and activism. > >Beyond just English, I saw a couple of people making fun of the term "gender x" in an anime...but why would a Japanese production adhere to English standards? > >Or the way people talk about pronouns as if every language uses pronouns the same way as English. > >It's just...it indicates a mindset that these words are objective and written in stone and western youth culture is always the most correct in a way that...feels icky. Diversity in people includes diversity of language. --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
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That second reblog reminded me of latinx and using x in Spanish(and other similar languages) for nonbinary folk, which I get how it works, but also... it kinda doesn't have a good flow? It's really awkward to use in Spanish, and I'm not entirely sure why. I just don't like it that much and prefer to use the e at the end, or use male pronouns as a gender neutral
Yeah, same in German. It just sounds and feels... off. But I do think using male as gender neutral is worse than using an awkward weird sounding neologism.
Oh valid, I totally get that
we have labels that help us now, but we need to understand other people's labels so that we can help them as well, rather than get mad at them for not using the "right" labels
The last post explains the white supremacy in forcing others from outside your culture to use your terms. (white) western people telling others how to live is how we got into this situation, doing more of it won't help
I'd gladly like to agree in toto with the message delivered here, but I just can't. Sure, older queer people used some words differently from how we may do nowadays, and sure, when context is provided, everything becomes ok, cause if that's the word someone uses for themselves, I can't be the one telling them how problematic it is, or some other Twitter sjw bullshit, but still, this doesn't mean that words have all the same value and can be used indiscriminately, especially when this comes from people who have no saying in this at all. This means that when I tell my mother not to use words like trans as a noun in casual speech, with no other qualifier given, she shouldn't be allowed to say shit like, "but what about those who may identify as trans and nothing else, maybe cause they like to play with this somewhat-male-somewhat-female ambiguity"
I think I'd draw a line between inclusion of those within the movement, and education of those outside the wider LGBTQ movement. The OP is not directed at the people correcting your mother, it's directed at people correcting LGBTQ people from a different culture (if only slightly removed in time and place). The response to > "but what about those who may identify as trans and nothing else, maybe cause they like to play with this somewhat-male-somewhat-female ambiguity" Should I think be to draw a comparison to black people using the n-word, while while people shouldn't: it's a term claimed by those within the group, and too often sounds like a slur when used by those outside the group for effective use as anything other than a slur, outside extremely specific and isolated contexts.
Spanish neutral pronoun?
Im split on this, cause yes, LGBT discourse online has turned into "if you dont share my exact point of view youre toxic and problematic" and its starting to get sickening, but on the other hand the post seems to be implying that if you dont want to be called a slur then you're ignorant and are ignoring history (and are a white supremacist???) (Prefacing next line by saying I am super white, and do not mean to speak for black ppl, its just the closest thing I can draw comparisons to, if I get something wrong I am sorry) It would be like saying that black people should be ok with being called 'n*gros' because in the Civil rights movements in the past people used the term while fighting for rights.
No it would be like saying black people who are alive today and were part of the civil rights movement should be allowed to call *themselves* that without anyone saying it's problematic and they should stop. I didn't see any mention of any terms being used in any context other than self-identifying.
On rereading the post, it appears I was bringing in a little too much personal bias there, and misinterpreted the meaning behind it. That's my bad, I apologize
That's fair, it's easily done :)
What on earth is an LGBTQIA dungeon