Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Sometime when we aren't talking about "They" I would love to hear
more about how I can support people on the autism spectrum.  Another
whole topic, some day?
  

    <scribbled by lrph Sat 22 Feb 20 08:50>
  

    
Sharing that on the Book of Faces. Thank you!
  

    

Posted elseWELL
<https://raisingmyrainbow.com/2020/02/20/gender-is-over/>

Children are growing up with the idea of gender-nonconformity being
*almost* widely acceptable, and definitely on the rise. This makes
my heart happy. 

Emma and I have had lots of conversations about the fact that if we
had even known about all of this when they were younger, we would
have changed their pronouns years earlier. We just didn't really
know. 

Just at the time when we were learning, so was my sibskid
(Step-sister's eldest child), who was 13 and being called to the
bimah to read from the Torah for the first time. I remember how
impressed Emma was that Ellie was having the same gender identity
awareness as they were, but at a much younger age. 

scribbled and corrected for my own language mishap. This is still
challenging, despite all my best efforts.
  

    
Also, noted <aslan>. And excellent idea. I’ll work on it. 
  

    
I am here for that conversation. Also for one on intersectionality.
And on the changing landscape of awareness. 

A key reason I left a school gig and lost much-needed income was the
after-school managers’ attitude towards autistic children and
adults. It came to a point where I felt existential dread
approaching the place, and where my voice and work were more
effective outside those walls. 

That “If only...” conversation is a familiar one. 

What in the WELL is the Book of Faces?
  

    
FaceBook
  

    
Ahhhh. 
  

    
My synagogue has a little bucket of pronoun pins by the table where
we have literature and spare yarmulkes. I'd like to see this idea
spread.

Don't think we have any that combine multiple gender choices but I
suppose a person could wear multiple pins.

There's an essay going around the Internet at the moment (mistakenly
attributed to Ron Howard, but actually by Laurie Gallagher Witt)
about being a liberal, that includes this very moving paragraph
(although  I think I would like it better without the last
sentence): 

14. I believe in so-called political correctness. Not because
everyone is a delicate snowflake, but because as Maya Angelou put
it, when we know better, we do better. When someone tells you that a
term or phrase is more accurate/less hurtful than the one you’re
using, you now know better. So why not do better? How does it hurt
you to NOT hurt another person? Your refusal to adjust your
vocabulary in the name of not being an asshole kind of makes YOU the
snowflake.


https://gallagherwitt.tumblr.com/post/169422719191/an-open-letter-to-friends-a
nd-family-who-arewere
  

    
Last night I led a workshop with sixteen people in Berkeley at the
Pacific School of Religion. Everybody is generally pursuing either a
degree in social work or divinity and it was a diverse group. At the
very beginning we each introduced ourselves, and the first participant
said their name and their pronouns, which were they, them, their. Almost
everyone else followed suit, with maybe a third of the room using 'they',
and the others using 'he' or 'she', whether they specified or not.

I have trouble remembering that many names all at once, and I quickly had
to give up learning their associated pronouns. There were people who I
would have defaulted to 'she' who used 'they', but also other seeming
'she's who used 'she'; and the same for a couple seeming 'he's. The
best tactic would be to always use first names, but that's hard without
nametags. Mostly I just felt awkward and maybe overvigilant about my
speech habits.

For instance, I tell stories about people. I have images in which
characters named Heather and Noah do things, but I found myself stumbling
over the pronouns for these two fictional people. I tried using 'they'
but then I had to word it so it was clear I wasn't talking about both
of them, except of course for the times when I was. It was exhausting,
and eventually I just used their names in every reference.

Pronoun pins would have been nice.
  

    
<esau> describes the problems I have teaching university classes.  If
I have more than a dozen students it can take me two weeks just to
memorize everyone's name.
  

    
In class you can use table name placards. It's what elementary
teachers have been doing for years. Since the class is used by
multiple people, you can give each student a piece of folded
yardstick to design their own name placard, with their pronouns on
it.

For events with a variety of people who don't already know one
another, I think name/pronoun tags should always be used. 

If people are offering their pronouns, as Emma has said here, they
probably would be fine with you asking when you forget.
Forgetfulness happens. Practice helps. 
  

    
Language changes over time. If the singluar "they" is coming back,
what's the big deal? Is it any more confusing that "su madre" ? 

Even gendered pronouns can throw me. A colleague, a native Chinese
speaker once said "I met with Barbara and he said ....". Spiral eyed
I had to ask, "who else was at the meeting besides you and Barbara?
. Took a while before I glommed on to the notion that Chinese
apparently doesn't make a distinction between "he" and "she" in that
context, and then my colleague's English was still a work in
progress.

Now if they had said "I met with Barbara and they said ..." I guess
that would slide right on by these days. Go figure. 
  

    
Yeah, I've had this discussion with many students from mainland
China.   We often look at something like this wiki:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns>

In journalism I was taught to write one/they, but learning to use it
in speech 30 years later is a bit more difficult than I expected.
  

    
So glad to see y'all come back to discuss this. After you get used
to using they/them/their in the singular, you may run into the issue
I currently have which is using they for people who use he/his or
she/her pronouns. Some days I think it would all be easier if we'd
all be they/them. (But I'm in the minority with that thinking, and
it's only sometimes).
  

    
A single pronoun that applies to everyone isn’t a bad idea. It seems
similar to using “a” for all words, including those with vowels as
first letters. “They/them” has more to do with gender identity. I
sometimes use “it,” although it applies more to objects. Something
very, very distantly relevant yet somehow not irrelevant I want to
mention is everyone using the same time. The implications of this
would be funny because usually when someone asks me for the time of
day and I reply with 12 am, they may go o.O and tell me to get my
beauty sleep. Now if I were on the other side of the big ball called
Earth and the time is the labeled the same and the sun hasn’t set, I
could poke fun at them for thinking that it’s midnight. Since night
and day are impersonal, no one gets offended. I feel like a moron
bringing this up.
  

    
I hope you can lose that feeling. Most of us are working our way
through this just now.
  

    
An interesting idea, about night and day and the sun and moon, but
nothing to do with THIS topic. 
  

    
Language changes according to its own rules and at its own pace.

The singular they sometimes throws me because I've had many decades
associating "they" with a plural, so if somebody says "I just saw
"Z" and they say ...." I'm thinking ....huh? who are those
others....oh! Its a singular they, ok.  

Now if we could use "They" as a singluar all the time, and "theys"
or "they-all" ; similar to you singular and you-all plural,
sometimes, in certain neighborhoods, "youse". 

But language being what it is, it ain't likely to happen that way.
Rats! 

 
  

    
Once you get used to following along with the context, they singular
or plural is easy to parse. 
  

    
Emma directed this adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, called Pride
is Her Prejudice. It's a modern, queer adaptation.
The production all takes place on Zoom, the actors are all in
different cities and time zones. I hope you enjoy.


https://youtu.be/AWPMlciXAo8
  

    
I've been using the singular they for years when a subject's gender
was unknown or irrelevant (i.e. when writing software
documentation). I've only ever gotten pushback from pedants. Lately
I've come to prefer the singular they when people address me, but I
never insist on it unless specifically asked about my preferred
pronouns.
  

    
Pendant that I am I would be happier with the singular They I’d we
treated it grammatically as singular (“They is” and so on). But of
course that is too hard to say. I do wish we just never started
languages as gendered to begin with. I mean who first even thought
we needed to and why THAT particular dichotomy rather than age or
rank or profession or what have you.