I'm all on board with people changing their genders to be the other one, but I'm still on the fence of the belief 32 genders exist or whatever the number is. But I mean, I'd be willing to call them it if that's what they want.

Sure why not. Many languages already do

Won't work.

Some overly righteous and pompous snowflake will still get offended

@Ogion

actually, many other languages are SO gendered, the endings of many words are extremely dependent on genders.


however, I'll pose this question:

are "he" and "she" referring to gender, or sex? At the time they were created, the two were nearly synonymous with minor differences.

in the modern era of "gender identity," the definition of gender has essentially become synonymous with personality.

the only difference is individuals can't change tie personality on a whim by calling it something else, and also if someone sees you as more or less arrogant than you see yourself, you don't get massively offended and call that person transphobe.

-- I am separating this issue from transexualism, which is a very different matter in regards to pronouns --

because gender "apparently" has zero relation to sex now, all i propose is that they are now pronouns that correspond to one's sex.

He is referring to the male sex (those who carry the SRY gene) and She is referring to the female sex (those who do not carry the SRY gene)


in other news, the word gender has lot all importance. what gender you identify as is equally important as what personality you identify as. the subjective view of your personality by others is also matched by the subjective view of your personality.


see how nothing changed when you disconnect gender from sex? reality is reality, and these dumb little definitions are getting us nowhere

Wouldn't it be of more use to simplify all verbs, so that they didn't have to change for different tenses..eg past present & future, or change like French ( & english ) verbs depending on association with, me, you, him her, them etc.
Is your suggestion intended to apply to semi literate speakers of "pidgin" English like those wascally webellious blighters from the North American colonies ?

What are the variations of "that" ? shat ? is that the past tense of shit ? Is shit a variation of it ? Or a hybrid of she & it ? Like the masculine hybrids hitim & shitim ?

MM. English is already a pidgin, or rather a Germanic- Franco creole. It has a vastly simplified grammar compared to either.

And the language you are looking for in mandarin. No genders to the pronouns and no conjugations. Estonian also has nongendered third person pronouns, and by some bizarre turn, it's the same non gendered pronoun in both malfuages

Languges

I speak spanish and spanish is an extremely gendered language. Every noun in Spanish is considered to have either masculine or feminine gender for grammatical purposes.

Most INdo-European languages are very gendered English is one of the few that is not, I think. I would have to check on Iranian and the Indian dialects, but in Europe I think there is 3 or 4 that dont use genders?

All the Romantics certainly do, I think all the Germanics do, except English? Slavics do (at least Russian does)

Languages evolve over time to reflect the society that is using it. If so, it does not require anyone to make artificial and forced changes to it - which won't work anyway unless all users comply. Given that most people learn their native tongue extremely early in life (and then only accept relatively minor changes to it, such as new vocabulary) change is invariably slow.

To try and make a sweeping change reminds me of Orwellian newspeak - a fictional language created for social control. I wouldn't want to support that.

Yeah man .Thats a cool idea dude ,

To my fellow Hu-its , the future of it-kind is under threat by its continual use of fossil fuels . (Or is fossils offensive and we should say age impaired)

Language naturally evolves

Girls used to refer to very young children so the term " You throw like a girl did not mean female it meant like a smnall child. Males children used to be dressed in pink and females or fe-its as you prefer in blue. So the point is get your head out of your unshaven hippy ass and take things in context and as how they are meant and intended.

Killer " Somebody Told Me " classic song.

In my early years on the phpDip/webDip Forum I called users 'it' until I knew their gender. As I put it in May 2010, "I use 'it' to refer to indetermanite on-line genders."

then what do i call cousin it? what about the knights who say ni?!?

Austin Powers test: does it have bits and pieces? Wedding tackle? Twig and berries? Meat and potatoes?

Is it sounds Fahjah?

I don't know why you'd use it when we already have a perfectly good gender neutral pronoun for people; singular they is in pretty common use, more convienent than the he/she alternative.

Like imagine you are out with a friend but don't want your parents to suspect you've been kissing said friend, you say something like 'oh yeah, i met up with them and we had coffee and saw that film everyone's been raging about'

Referring to them as him/her is really obvious and draws attention to the thing you're trying to hide...

Bingo

How about calling people what they want to be called and not getting your undies in a knot bing upset that other people aren't you?

Calling people want they want to be called? Sweet!

From this point forward I wish to be called “Better than Ogion in every conceivable way”

Done.

No one should get their undies in a bunch over that, right?

"Some overly righteous and pompous snowflake will still get offended"

It's self-aware!

"actually, many other languages are SO gendered, the endings of many words are extremely dependent on genders."

And others have no grammatical gender, which is what he was saying. And others have three, or four, or six.

Grammatical gender is really just about classes of nouns. It happens that a lot of languages, especially Indo-European ones, have two and male and female are in different ones, which makes that an easy way to distinguish them (and is in fact the source of our using the word "gender" outside of the linguistic context in the first place). You don't have to look that far even in the Indo European languages to see that grammatical gender isn't a direct correspondence to what we think of as gender. Young girl (Madchen) is neuter in German. Most (all?) Romance languages have the genders "backwards". The existence of neuter itself throws a wrench in things. Latin has two ways of classifying nouns, one of which has simply been named declension for clarity. I could go on. Outside of Indo European, you find several languages whose genders are "animate" and "inanimate", and others with many more that don't have any real semantic meaning.

As for the issue at hand, I don't think there's much point in trying to force linguistic change. Just look at the joke that is L'Academie Francaise. You could try to make it happen, and it may be nobly motivated, but it won't work. There are a couple Germanic languages that have kept a neuter gender while losing the masculine/feminine distinction, which suggests to me that it could happen naturally (though I'm not sure if they've kept gendered pronouns and occasional words while losing grammatical gender in the way we have). I think it's pretty easy to just call someone by their preferred pronouns and leave it at that, even if it doesn't sound particularly natural to you. If that's a real issue for you, it's probably because you're uncomfortable with the idea more than the language.

My problem is with the language. I am okay with language changing over time; I think it's why English works so well around the world. But there are uses of English that disturb me so much that the meaning of the text is lost momentarily while my attention is focused on it. The now classical 'your' and 'you're', the horrendous 'could of' and anytime someone says they are 'loving' their meal. Losing he and she would just add to my grumpy old man stance.

Well, I appreciate a good grumpy old man stance, that's for sure.

I've always wondered about the history of genders in Romance languages. In Spanish, a group of people of mixed sex/gender is referred to with masculine pronouns and adjectives. Is it fair for me to defend Spanish by saying that there are really just neuter and feminine genders in the language, with no masculine gender at all? Or is that a bastardization of the language's history?