Glad to hear it. The 4-6 year-olds I spend my time around are very heteronormative. Cassandane is actually a bit concerned about misogyny in two of the boys we know. We try to push back a bit and maybe we should go further.
I like the observation that the way was only paved for the emergence of gender non-binary, fluidity, etc., on a greater than micro scale, by the mainstreaming of trans people (contra contrarians who propose that they irrevocably/harmfully conflate gender stereotypes with gender).
I am a bit ahead of Heebie; my childhood was filled with "gay" as the worst insult ever, from way too young (like, running around in K-3 during recess). Heck, one of the more savage games that we'd play (again, in primary K-3) was "smear the queer," which was basically an anti-tag with lots of tripping. That was during free recess rather than PE, but somehow we all ran around crazy, "knowing" that queer was a terrible thing to be.
I was a reflexive homophobe until my 20s, when I ran into Lackey and her peers who had the fantasy main characters I liked who just lived in an understanding, accepting world, modeling it for me. Once my empathy was activated, it was easy to shed the weak but pervasive anti-gay conditioning and move into enthusiastic support. Meeting my wife probably would have been impossible if I'd gone unchanged; she played in an LGBT band in Dallas around Y2k and had lots of friends from that scene. If I hadn't started my journey a decade earlier, I'm sure unthinking prejudice would have fouled things early in our relationship.
3.1 is how things were growing up for me also.
3: My childhood was roughly like yours, but I or my environment grew out of it earlier. Vermont offered civil unions for gay couples when I was in high school and I think I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper in support of it. I'm not sure if I or my parents still have a copy of that anywhere, but in theory it's my first published piece of writing, whatever that means these days.
Not that I have ever been to Vermont, but I was almost 30 by the time Vermont allowed civil unions.
Lots to say about this (that is difficult to express), but: we had a previous thread on a closely related theme, right? Heebie, I think it might have been one of your posts, but I don't remember the details except that Frowner showed up to contest a lot of the "I don't even see/feel/experience gender" comments. Can anyone find it? (Which reminds me that I am still not 100% sure of Frowner's preferred pronouns, so I just use "they.")
in theory it's my first published piece of writing, whatever that means these days.
My first published piece of writing was a letter to the editor saying high school kids ought to be able to drink.
One thought: I have seen relatively few cartoons of the gender spectrum. Even a mostly-joking representation of what people consider to be the Pronoun Lines of Demarcation would provide more information than I have. My instinct when I don't fully "get" things is to historicize, but I'm not sure that's a useful impulse either.
I don't have any coherent thoughts other than it being good that kids feel freer to do what makes them happy. My kids have a couple of non-binary friends who were assigned male at birth and present, other than pronouns, in a fairly conventionally male kind of way, which is a group of people I haven't seen much discourse about -- most discussion seems to be about binary trans women, or AFAB people somewhere on the trans masculine spectrum.
One of my very minor peeves is people who say "any pronouns" or some combination - "he/they", "she/they". It deprives us of some of the consistency pronouns provide, per Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla. But I just default to "they" when it's an option, it's usually the most disambiguating in a group and it's good mental practice.
7: I do remember it, but I also remember that I became a little embarrassed of my post after Frowner pointed out some shallowness in my thinking. I think I basically said, "I never FELT a gender! How come people feel so strongly?!"
So someone can dig it up with that as a caveat. When I wrote this one, I tried to be a little more cognizant of things.
Also Hawaii likes to drop these updates into conversations in hilariously hamfisted ways, where I'm a country yokel for not knowing that some old friend is now going by James and she must witheringly humor the olds. Don't eyeroll me and say "You know JAMES! They've been to our house!", young lady, without prior mention of update!
I spent ages 12-18 in community theater. It's hard to imagine anyone I knew then would have had a binary gender identity (well, except maybe me for solely for fundamentalist Christian reasons). Instead we just identified as "a theater person", which in a way was non-binary gender identity available to a teenager at the time.
10 is very very common in nerdy circles. A similar phenomenon happens with for AFAB non-binary people in the same circles, where the presentation is very typically binary (always very long hair for example) but "low-matinence." The latter is a little less common only because there's often fewer AFAB people in such circles, I think the rates are similar. A related phenomenon is people whose pronoun is their name (or more likely their chosen nickname), which seems to defeat the entire purpose of pronouns.
We had a school musical every year, but we didn't have theater people. For example, Max in the Sound of Music was played by the best football player in the school.
A related phenomenon is people whose pronoun is their name (or more likely their chosen nickname)
I had no idea this was an option.
Oh man. This is so, so awfully cringey: our friend's kid starred in their 5th grade play this year. It was held over zoom. Every kid was in their own house. They had pre-loaded backgrounds, and props to "hop" from screen-to-screen. The audio was pretty bad, but the kids were delightful.
The audience members were all instructed to keep our cameras off. Of course, zoom prioritizes anyone with their camera on. So for the entire first half, there was some mom lounging awkwardly on the screen, with her camera on, living room in full view, sometimes displacing actual actors, depending on how Zoom chose to display things. It made me feel so uncomfortable.
In hindsight, it probably should have been a webinar format.
On topic because musicals. And tweens.
I think I would have liked "they", but I'm not sure my reasons would have been great. It was tough being a nerdy awkward girl (Hermione without the glow up) and at the time everything would have been simpler if I had been a boy.
Dumb question: why "he/him/his" instead of assuming the interlocutor knows how language works?
WHEN YOU ASSUME YOU MAKE AN ASS OF YOU AND x
My guess is that it's to normalize novel pronouns? If your pronouns are "zir, zer, zers" you need to give all three forms because people won't be able to guess, and then it makes sense to give conventional pronouns in a format that corresponds.
18: Urple is exactly the sort of name/nickname/handle/pronoun this happens with. The example sentence would be "urple's pronouns are urple."
That sample sentence starts to sound very smurfy.
Heebie,
This is happening in Texas, isn't it? Oh wow, it warms my heart. I grew up like Mooseking, so this sort of change is .... *enormous*. Just enormous. So great to learn of this. And also that Hawaiian Punch is old-ing you. *grin* Welcome to the club! The dentures aren't so great, but the shuffleboard totally makes up for it!
25: That's my best guess, too -- the norm evolved from novel pronouns.
Dumb question: why "he/him/his" instead of assuming the interlocutor knows how language works?
I think the added length, compared to just the nominative form which will be monosyllabic, helps draw the eye to it and make it obvious what you're conveying, even if the extra forms are technically redundant.
Or to put it another way, "she" in isolation would look abrupt/unmoored and sometimes confuse, so you could say "pronoun: she", or with equal clarity and length, just say "she/her/hers".
Even "pronouns: she/her/hers", while even more redundant, emphasizes with its length that it's something relevant for the reader to retain.
I sometimes abbreviate to "h/h" or "h-series", but that's just my novelty, not common practice.
I think 25 is also right and may be the real origin of the practice, but I think 30 is part of why it took hold for traditional pronouns too.
Back in my day, you couldn't have pro nouns at all if you wanted to compete in the Olympics.
I think it should be "urple's pronouns are urple/urple/urple. "
But that would be incorrect, it's "urple/urple's/urple's." No one says either version though.
That is, the example sentence I gave is the version I've heard. I've never heard name-pronouns given as a list.
You're once, twice, three times an urple...
47:. Everyone still knows this song, right? It just occurred to me that I can't remember the last time I heard it playing outside my head.
She couldn't be four times a lady because she wanted to get sleep so she could be alert at work the next day.
I grew up in (what I later discovered to be) a weirdly non-heteronormative bubble, Montana notwithstanding. One of my dad's law school (?) friends came out & got divorced and the three parents (dad, mom, dad's partner) shared a house off and on. We played with their kids all the time. My parents had multiple other gay and lesbian friends, including one of my uncles. I knew a lot of out GLB/genderfluid kids in high school and we went to drag shows pretty often.
I don't remember when I encountered "they" pronoun use but it was much later- college or after. And I remember my (frequently awkward/now cringe-inducing) learning curve for transgender-related language. But I had a very different childhood/adolescent world than most people my age.
I don't really have a point, I just think this is interesting, mainly because I learned about it being an outlier at a pretty late age. College at least, but I think afterwards because of the ridiculously liberal bastion that is Reed.
Bubbles can be nice to live in.
When my sister was in college she had a really awkward conversation with our stepmother when it became obvious that the stepmom had been assuming my sister was gay for YEARS and she had to come out as straight.
Ideally, this involved bringing home boyfriend named Chris or Sam.
Okay, I searched up gender diagrams and found a couple:
- this image
- this interactive map
I don't know how representative this is of the schema and the options that young people see for themselves. I didn't really see any detailed mappings of gender along a line from female to male endpoints, and nothing (unless it's further into the interactive diagram) that specifically mapped pronouns onto the different options. So I have no idea what I would have done as a kid given these options. I remember middle school as this hyperfeminine time when people found me unbearably girly (I was also very miserable), and both sides of that period were more, as a friend put it, "my gender identity is 'leave me the fuck alone'"*. And that was certainly "right," i.e. stable, in the way that the hyperfeminine phase was not, but maybe these transient shifts are unavoidable for some people.
Tl;dr: there are many more available ways to get it right, but people will still need to make adjustments.
* Pronouns presumably would be "don't fucking talk about me at all."
'I am still not 100% sure... so I just use "they."'
This being OK seems like a loophole that'll get closed soon. Too good to be true. [Not calling you out, I do this too, for now.]
Re: OP, did y'all catch JK Rowling basically saying that she might/would have been trans if she'd been born 15 years ago? Explained some things.
It is definitely useful to have a neutral catch-all pronoun set, and I don't know if that will persist. In this case my memory is that "they" was the expressed preference at one point, but I don't know if it still is or if I'm misremembering.
It's hilariously unclear from my awkward comments how much time I have spent thinking about and discussing all this stuff in the past year. I'm not actually trying to infer gender from first principles.
Using people's actual names as pronouns seems terribly cruel to those of us who use pronouns because we struggle to remember people's names.
Apparently, saying "Your pronouns are 'hey, you'/'dude'/'excuse me'" is considered too aggressive.
Urplus, urpluris, urplure, urplus ultra, ex urpluribus unum.
Having family friends (kids and adults both) who go by they/them has made it way easier to come out as trans to my own fourth-grader. The story I told her was basically, "you live in a sane world where kids are allowed to choose their gender expression, that wasn't my world, if I'd had the option I might have gone for she/her much earlier." Which I think is true although the counterfactual is hard to run. My recollection is that I didn't think much at all about gender until puberty, and after that spent a lot of time wishing I'd been born a girl; but I never dreamed I might be able to do anything about it, no matter how much I enjoyed Rocky Horror. I've said this already, but my self-sorting-out was much delayed by never imagining there could be a coherent category of people who a) were assigned male, b) felt themselves to be women, c) liked women. As I understand it, the current TERF line still involves a lot of denial that this is a possible category.
My bio used to say "My pronouns are I/me/mine" as a joke on my narcissistic tendencies, but I took it down when I realized the joke was indistinguishable from being an asshole.
10: In a weird coincidence, Reddit just served up this recent research article: Transgender and gender diverse people up to six times more likely to be autistic.
51 We olds would be thinking of George Harrison, who may have been an asshole, but that wasn't really his brand.
I don't think Harrison was a broad brush asshole. There are numerous stories of his kindness and generosity to strangers. His main character flaw seems to have been his inability to keep it in his pants, which led to him behaving badly towards a number of women, including both his wives.
I am finally getting around to watching Freaks and Geeks and was interested to see how gender identity and homosexuality were treated. (Not sure what I expected, made 20 years ago to reflect 40 years ago and within the constraints of network TV.) So far (two episodes left to watch so maybe something comes up) there has been nothing that explicit other than everything embodied in the language, insults, social groups and overall gender roles. On the whole, the depiction is (not unexpectedly I guess) closer to my high school experience (~10 years earlier than shown in the show). And similar to 3-5 what a shitshow that was. Painful to even think about. Assholes, the lot of us.
I'd be sad if F&G doesn't hold up anymore. I love the Come Sail Away dance scene so much.
I was too old for that. I never say it.
Well gender identity issues are about to get way more prominent. You really need to watch the next episode before we can have this discussion.
Is that how Drake got started being a famous Canadian?
Overall I think it holds up pretty well (for me anyways). Enough so that it has a 66-year old guy often cringing with painful remembrances. It has just come out on Hulu, apparently it was held up for a while (after previously being on Netflix I believe) because of song rights. I think Apatow (quite rightly I would say) said it would not work without the original music.
I am of course leery of the "nostalgia" factor, but I think it does generally quite well on *not* playing that card; at least not in a typical way. There are a few elements that seem "off" to me but they are more in the way of how they chose to portray specific characters; Lindsay somewhat, and the parents are a bit too over-the-top for me. I did find the party episode particularly good.
I do think the characters of Bill Haverchuck and Harris Trinsky are particularly well drawn and acted. (Probably a combo of my sensibilities, and the Hs experience of the guys who created the show.)
There apparently a documentary that was done about it a few years back. Looking forward to watching that. My kids have urged me to watch F&G for some time, but I kind of backed into it after watching Linda Cardellini in the TV series Dead to Me (we found that to be an entertaining watch with both stars' performances compelling--although it did not make me want to go back and watch Married With Children).
61: Ah ok. Will probably finish it up tonight. (Did have the thought that that might be the case.)
I'm so old that I watched F&G so long ago I have forgotten most of it.
The only thing that bugs me about F&G is that they clearly sourced 90s vintage-looking clothes instead of actual vintage clothes.
Really, that era has never gone out of style.
I've been working through Wandavision and the 80s style makes me think "looks a little dated but I'd wear that aside from the overalls."
You can hardly walk down the street without seeing someone wearing a red tiara/helmet/visor thing.
61: Yeah. Just watched the next one and yes I see.
On topic because music: Is there now a drug called "Watermelon sugar" or is he just signing about sex?
No drugs, it's about performing oral sex. The video makes this quite clear.
Apparently, there's a guy nabs named Aaron Dessner and Taylor Swift isn't singing with the guy who played Pippin in LOTR.
Paula Abdul is selling arthritis medication, in case anyone is wondering why I'm starting to think about my own mortality more often.
Also, the whole year of lots of people dying didn't help.
But mostly, it's Paula Abdul's fault.
Who wants to have Mutombo endorse their insurance company?
Anyway, I should probably not watch network tv.
My Dad is, in a lot of ways, a very traditionally masculine guy. Gorbals upbringing, then the Army. But, when I was a kid, he sometimes spoke to me about gay friends of his, so while the local environment was very definitely homophobic, as per 3.1, he was always ver clear that that wasn't OK, and I knew that he had had gay friends for most of his life. Then when I got into my mid teens and started growing my hair and experimenting with makeup* he was also supportive about that, too. As it happens, I'm an entirely conventional cis-hetero man, but if I hadn't been, I'm absolutely certain that my parents would have been supportive and I knew that at the time, not just in retrospect.
That said, as per the OP, I think things have changed hugely. I was at a joint kids' birthday party, just before lockdown last year, for siblings, one of whom is a tween girl. In among all the very elaborately dressed glammed up 12 year olds, there was one girl presenting as a boy, who was pretty clearly the "boyfriend" of more than one of the girls, and I don't think any of the parents** or any of the kids even blinked an eye.
* this was a glam rock thing, rather than anything "queer" identifying, but I still looked pretty "femme".
** a lot of quite socially conservative catholic Nigerian and Polish families.
