Gender ambiguity: Do's and don't's

Some tips on what to do when you can't tell what gender a person is. If you take one thing away from this, don't call them "it". Also, don't beat them to death.

Gender-neutral pronoun FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/GNPFAQ

The music is the second movement of Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 13, as performed by Brendan Kinsella. http://www.musopen.com/music.php?type=piece&id=154

http://myspace.com/zjemptv
http://emptv.com/

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• gender
• identity
• ambiguity
• sex
• male
• female
• man
• woman
• thing
• person
• masculine
• feminine
• femininity
• effeminate
• womanliness
• reddit
• brain
• subconscious
• recognition
• he
• she
• it
• tranny
• shemale
• he-she
• transgender
• intergender
• bigender
• nongendered
• glbt
• lgbt
• transsexual
• neutral
• artificial
• pronouns
• english
• language
• singular
• they
• angie
• zapata
• pat
• greg
• egan

[lenaqtpie]

You're just an androgynous guy and very beautiful.

[Fishtastic0303]

I've heard of using ze, zer, zim, zimself as gender neutral pronouns. It would be nice if there were more official terms that would replace gender specific pronouns in our everyday language, but that is probably a long way away. I think that when I have kids I will raise them in a gender neutral environment, change starts in teaching the younger generation.

[hearttopmodel05]

I agree, I really don't care what people call me. Some people call me a handsome boy, some people call me a beautiful girl. Either way, I'm flattered!

[dagda825]

I personally prefer s/he to refer to neutrality and I go ahead and pronounce it as "she" since the feminine is the one who gives birth to all of us, and how cool is that?

[MouseAndShiraz]

@MouseAndShiraz Just as a couple of examples of inherent ambiguity in the English language, drawn from various internet sources:

'We saw her duck.'

'Prostitutes appeal to Pope.'

'The chicken is ready to eat.'

There is likely a functionally infinite number of ambiguous statements you can make in the English language. 'Pat said they went to the store' would be a drop in the bucket. So I say that, given 'they' has established precedence and usage history, we stick with it.

[MouseAndShiraz]

'They' has been used as a gender neutral singular pronoun since the 16th century. No reason to stop now.

Yes it also is used as a gender neutral plural pronoun, but it would hardly be the only word in the english language with multiple functions, nor would it be the only case of inherent grammatical ambiguity in the language. English is rife with problems of interpretation; that is half the fun.

That said, the lack of a gender neutral singular pronoun in English is rather telling.

[livedandletdie]

There are 4-5 points in the face of a person which tells directly of what gender the person is.

somewhere in the middle of the chin the cheekbone and the forehead just above the eyebrows.

It's not that hard.

[Chayraz2]

@xboxindahouse<---- Why is it's attempts at deprecation so obnoxiously contrived?

[grafplaten]

"ve" is a terrible solution; it sounds too much like "we"...

if you want to avoid gender distinctions, then i suggest giving up english and most other indo-european languages...how about speaking hungarian, finnish or turkish instead?

[absentmindedprof]

Nice glasses!

[Bigcricket467]

You are clearly a male that dress's as a female, thus, you are a female!