I hope I’m not insulting anyone while trying to educate myself
no, but other people are being insulting and it's overall a miserable experience to be constantly asked to justify your own existence. I honestly think this is my sixth or seventh time having virtually this same exact conversation in about 3 hours.
Mostly I’m just posting them because putting things in writing makes me actually think about what I’m thinking/get a critical understanding of why an “unorthodox” pronoun confuses me/what it means to identify as “doe”.
the key here is that you in a very fundamental way, you can't understand someone else's gender. no one can. we all just have to trust each other, even when the ask seems strange. I explained how someone ends up at uncommon neopronouns in reply to you a little up thread.
With regards to only one pronoun - that was more of an allusion to a society that put way less emphasis on gender.
we want to abolish the social construct, not the things that make us different from one another. why would we need to collapse down to one pronoun? in a world where we've abolished the cishetero patriarchy, there's no reason to police how people choose to express their gender identities. and there's even less reason, if that's possible, to police someone's gender identity.
But in such a society (i.e. one where people didn’t assume a gender based on your outward appearance, and gender wasn’t something you are obligated to perform) would pronouns be as important?
how could I possibly know? I'm me and that means I'm the composite of my years of experience in this society. if you took me today and transported me to that world, my gender identity would still be exactly as important to me. and why shouldn't it remain important to people in that world? again, the harm in gender comes from the social construct, not from how people identity or ask to be referred to.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me about it even though you might be sick of it! I appreciate the work you’re putting into the community.
this actually means a lot given my day. thank you.
This makes a lot of sense to me - I think I’ve had previously a more naive view of neopronouns like “choose the pronouns that conform most closely to the way you want society to view you”
yeah, you'll hear this described as the notion of gender as a performance. that idea is obviously very hard on NB people and trans people who can't pass because it demands recognition by an other to be yourself.
Looking at it from the lens of “I’d like to be called this even if you don’t understand what that means” makes doe make a lot more sense to me
it goes deeper than that. I can't even properly justify, even were a gun to be put to my head, why I'm a woman, why I prefer she/her pronouns over even they/them, or much else about it. for me, these are fundamentally experiential truths about myself.
Yes, but lots of other aspects of identity that are arguably just as important to some people as gender aren’t elevated to having their own pronouns,
yeah, it's the one where our languages push that categorization on us. but consider, are are our languages structured that way because of societal choices or because people naturally tend towards gendered expression? can that question even be answered?
making pronouns gendered makes gender an effectively obligate activity when not everyone wants that necessarily
absolutely, which is why people should always be free to choose what suits them.
no, but other people are being insulting and it's overall a miserable experience to be constantly asked to justify your own existence. I honestly think this is my sixth or seventh time having virtually this same exact conversation in about 3 hours.
the key here is that you in a very fundamental way, you can't understand someone else's gender. no one can. we all just have to trust each other, even when the ask seems strange. I explained how someone ends up at uncommon neopronouns in reply to you a little up thread.
we want to abolish the social construct, not the things that make us different from one another. why would we need to collapse down to one pronoun? in a world where we've abolished the cishetero patriarchy, there's no reason to police how people choose to express their gender identities. and there's even less reason, if that's possible, to police someone's gender identity.
how could I possibly know? I'm me and that means I'm the composite of my years of experience in this society. if you took me today and transported me to that world, my gender identity would still be exactly as important to me. and why shouldn't it remain important to people in that world? again, the harm in gender comes from the social construct, not from how people identity or ask to be referred to.
https://libcom.org/library/gender-nihilism-anti-manifesto
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this actually means a lot given my day. thank you.
yeah, you'll hear this described as the notion of gender as a performance. that idea is obviously very hard on NB people and trans people who can't pass because it demands recognition by an other to be yourself.
it goes deeper than that. I can't even properly justify, even were a gun to be put to my head, why I'm a woman, why I prefer she/her pronouns over even they/them, or much else about it. for me, these are fundamentally experiential truths about myself.
yeah, it's the one where our languages push that categorization on us. but consider, are are our languages structured that way because of societal choices or because people naturally tend towards gendered expression? can that question even be answered?
absolutely, which is why people should always be free to choose what suits them.
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you might be right, but it's one of those things we can't know until we get there.
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inshallah. cheers.
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