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Comment by urthen | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely "They". They they they they they. English already has a perfectly good gender-neutral pronoun. I explicitly list my pronouns as "He/his or they/their" because I think the neopronouns are ultimately a way to gatekeep inclusivity, which is ironic.

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> I explicitly list my pronouns as "He/his or they/their" […]

This reminds me of an interview I had with a recruiter from Slack HQ.

The first question the interviewer asked was which pronoun should I be called?

The question threw me off for a moment but after reflecting about it for a while I thought it was a good strategy to make themselves look inclusive. If you are in California and want to work at Slack, know that at least their interviewers will respect whatever pronoun you want to be called.

This is what confuses me the most: the pronouns usually listed by people who insist on listing them are third person pronouns. How do you use a third person pronoun when talking to somebody to reference the very same person? Or are "he/him/his" etc actually second person pronouns? I.e. if somebody listed pronouns as "they/them/their" should I say "Hi, how are they doing? Can I offer them something to drink?". I hope this is not the case and these are really third person pronouns but then I fail to see how you can use them when addressing that person in a one-on-one interview (since it's "the interviewer" it was a one-on-one, right?).

PS. In Russian there are two second person pronouns and sometimes people will ask if it's appropriate to use a less-formal singular "you" instead of default plural "you" but this makes no sense in English. There is just one second person pronoun.

It makes no sense to me either. When you reply to a person, you never use a pronoun apart from 'you' when you refer to them.

It might make some sense in a multi-party discussion, I think. E.g. "When Soandso implied X he or she made a mistake by assuming Y". In an interview though? Unless it's from the Silence of the Lambs, I don't see where third person pronouns could ever happen.

Singular they always gets me confused about how many people we're talking about. As a non-native speaker, I wouldn't call this solution perfectly good.

On the other hand, I think it's an advantage that plurality is ambiguous. You can always make the plurality certain with additional words and when it is necessarily, and e.g. "you" is already a pronoun that has ambiguous plurality.

I assume that your native tongue is one where pronouns necessarily indicate plurality, and also that your English education almost always uses they to indicate the plural. But there are languages that have independent subject pronouns that do not mark for plurality; they indicate plurality when necessary with other words.

That doesn't fix everything.

My kid's best friend is now a they. After knowing a 'her' for three years, it's been hard to switch. I have a hard enough time some days stringing the right adjectives into sentences without also worrying about pronouns too. It's easier for me to do when typing, but I can't speak for everyone.

Since their first name is a single syllable, I've found myself avoiding pronouns entirely when talking about them. Because accidentally saying 'she' more than once in a while causes stress for everyone. It's a big deal, their father is not okay with this, and we are frequently the safest house for this group of kids to hang out at.

Our kid has always gone by a nickname. When she got older she decided she wanted a change. I was the first one in the house to use her new first name reliably. I'm not sure why I'm the one having trouble with pronouns.

A friend of mine transitioned. Using the new name came fairly quickly. Adapting all of my own history with this friend to bubble up a new pronoun reliably is still a work in progress.

You mean that you say "do they want some chocolate" when directly asking that single person if that single person wants chocolate?

I thought that "they" is too ne used instead of he or she (3rd person) - which I find useful to avoud he/she or (s)he

EDIT: I had an epiphany under the shower, sorry I misunderstood you and you probably meant that you now have to say "ask your friend Jane if they want chocolate"

What will happen with grammatically gendered languages, like Spanish?

Then you need to go look up how it's handled in Spanish.

BTW, English is gendered, just not as much as Spanish, French, and Italian are.

What are you talking about? English is verifiably not as gendered as Spanish, at the very least.

All nouns in Spanish require a gender article (el/la or los/las). In English, you do not have to figure out whether "día" should be prefixed with el or la -- and in the case of "día" despite it ending in "a" which usually implies feminine and la, it's actually masculine and is properly "el día."

That doesn't even bring into it examples like ellos/ellas ("they" or "them" in English) referring to a male group or a female group where the standard rule is to use ellos if referring to an unknown group or even a group of 100 women and one man, the only application of ellas should be when you can verify every single member of the group is female.

Look more closely at Latin gendering rules, not romance language gendering rules. In Latin, gender comes from the suffix.

It's typically carried over in suffixes from Latin: Words ending in "a" are feminine, words ending in "um" are masculine.

Or, look through common English names and see how often they follow Latin gender suffixes. Adam / Ada is an example. ("Am" is a male suffix.)

nit: the suffix -um in latin typically indicates a neuter grammatical gender. -us is usually masculine, and only in its accusative form it becomes -um. there are exceptions though, e.g. feminine 'manus' (hand). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension

I recall responding to the statement "English is just as gendered as...", but clearly that's not what you wrote. That's my fault.

They hamfist in their solution of using "x". eg. latina/latino -> latinx.

How does that work in the language itself? In English people say "latin-ecks". In Spanish do people say "latin-equis"?

It doesn’t. It’s a written-only solution. If you listen to a speech from someone who uses the latinx you will notice they don’t even try to speak it, and they just go with the “latino and latina”.

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