6 reasons the gender critical right and the woke left are both WRONG about pronouns

"I failed a student for saying there are only two genders." "What are you, a woke fanatic?" "No, a German teacher."

I lived for 14 years in Turkey, where the language has no gendered pronouns or grammatical gender at all. You can have a long conversation with someone without giving any clue about the gender of the person your discussing, and it won't count contrived at all. You can make a person's gender clear if you want or need to, but the language doesn't force your hand. Coming back to the US was kind of like walking into a minefield...

I'm a trans man, I've asked my colleagues for years not to ask people their pronouns in introductions, they never listen. They would rather "respect" a hypothetical trans person they never met, rather than the "weird" trans man they know. I've always been put in a bad spot when people ask me, when I was trying to stay closeted or not. I think most people nowadays just have a weird mental idea of what trans people are, that they refuse to interact with the reality in front of them, whatever that may be, they just love or hate on their mental construct. Thanks for the video.

In Finnish we don't have gendered third person singular pronouns, just one formal (hän) and one informal (se) neutral pronoun for everyone. The informal one translates to "it" so yeah, we go around calling each other "it" and nobody bats an eye. In Finnish we usually automatically assume that whoever is mentioned first is also being mentioned first in the following sentence. So if I say "Mark didn't like what Pete said, so he hit him" I would automatically assume that Mark is the one doing the hitting. In cases where they are not mentioned in the same order, we would specify it by using the name again in the next sentence, like for example "Pete said something Mark didn't like, so Mark hit him". As for the "Alice in the mirror" part, we would likely say "Alice saw [one's self] in the mirror and liked [what one saw]". The fact that romance languages insist on gendering such simple, everyday statements feels so weird from a Finnish viewpoint!

Calvin and Hobbes definition of pronoun: A noun that has lost its amateur status

Most people I know who use gender neutral pronouns actually don’t share them a lot far as I know. They by large just state it in their social media bio and if the person in Dunkin Donuts or some old professor misgendered them they just won’t say anything. I imagine because it would be exhausting in everyday life and run the risk of encountering some mean people. And I’m in college art school (it won’t get any woker than that).

I was fully prepared to bristle at the "both sides are wrong, here's how normal people think about it" framing, but I was happily surprised by how broad, well-studied and informative this was. Thanks!

So I'm Vietnamese American, and I'm so happy to have come across a video that so well articulates my experience and struggle with the whole debate around gender. I too am on the side of compassion and empathy (especially given that so many of my friends are trans or nonbinary), but I also have friends and family who really struggle with alternate pronouns. In my experience, Vietnamese culture is very collectivistic, while I think American culture tends more individualistic, which is something I've explained to friends before when talking about my upbringing, but I never thought about how that carries over into linguistics and pronouns specifically. Vietnamese pronouns, like in many other Asian cultures, specify the speaker's relationship to the subject, so it gets a bit more complicated than just he/she/they... Anyhow, this has got me thinking hahaha

My step dad has asked me before if Spanish speakers think of objects as inherently masculine and feminine, and I've used a few different examples to explain it. My favorite is that "a beard" is feminine and "a dress" is masculine. A really good example that shows it's a purely grammatical category and has nothing to do with the objects themselves is that the same object might be feminine if you call it "a chair" but masculine if you call it "a seat." It's about the words, not the things themselves.

It's technically not a gendered word but I always find the term "Drama Queen" interesting because it can be used to refer to men and women.

"requiring people to share their pronouns means that you either force people to out themselves or choose to be in the closet" YES. Honestly I struggle to wrap my head around why so many people think that there is anything remotely appropriate about wanting to "normalize the practice of everyone sharing their pronouns." The youtube search that led me to this video was sparked after I had an uncomfortable experience where I was suddenly asked for my pronouns by a new customer at work. It was literally the first thing they asked me upon our meeting. For context, I'm a cis woman with very short hair and my work clothes are androgynous simply for functional reasons. I'd never been asked that question before in my life. Moreover, I'd also never really thought much about my gender in terms of me being at my job. I stuttered and just told them to use whatever they felt comfortable with and moved onto the actual content of the business interaction, but in my head I was just thinking "why on earth is my gender identity relevant to you in this situation???" As you said, it felt similar to "where are you really from" questions regarding ethnicity and race. Like you, I'm not going to tell a stranger "my pronouns are she/her" because that would be implying that I give a crap whether people view me as a woman in every context, which I don't. Anyway my point here is this: to add to your point of not forcing people to out/closet themselves, I think another big problem with the normalization of "asking for other people's pronouns" is that it actually undermines the whole goal of gender equality, which is that gender honestly SHOULDN'T be relevant in most contexts. Other than my husband (for hopefully obvious reasons) and maybe some of the people closest to me in my life, I couldn't care less if other people recognize my gender identity, as long as they aren't being mean or judgmental on the grounds of gender. My gender is the most boring and innocuous aspect of my personhood and I'm not going to contribute to this weird assumption that a lot of left-wing echo chamber inhabits have that "being cis means having a deep connection to the gender you were assigned at birth." Sorry, but it's just not true and I'm not going to pretend that my womanhood is deeply important to me in all social/professional contexts if that isn't the case.

As someone at least way more interested in linguistics than social subjects, this makes so much sense why our arguments go right past each other as wrong & irrelevant.

I got so accustomed to using gender neutral pronouns when I was younger because I didn’t want my brother to make fun when I was talking with girls. It just comes naturally now.

"what are your pronouns?" "Use whatever you think will confuse the person you're talking to the least. The less time you spend discussing my pronouns, the more time you can spend calling me fat."

You mentioned the Portuguese pronoun “a gente.” This phrase/pronoun is so wonderfully versatile! It can mean you, me, or we; and everyone gets it from context. It is fully gender-free, and it avoids the English mess of using a plural pronoun (they) to mean single third person gender unknown.

Thank you for bringing up the point that "requiring people to share their pronouns means that you either force people to out themselves... or choose to be in the closet". I've been struggling a lot with my gender identity for the last year. I've never really had to worry about coming out to other people about it if I wasn't comfortable doing so, until a questionnaire came up at work and asked me what my gender identity is. I could either lie and say my perceived gender, put my current identity on there, or write "prefer not to advise". All of those options were very uncomfortable and I couldn't quite pinpoint why until you said that.

In terms of grammatical gender in other languages, I love how "girl is neuter" is always the example for how German is illogical - it's actually one of the very few examples that follow a clear rule: the German word Mädchen is a diminutive of basically the same word as English "maid" for a young woman (so a very very young woman) and diminutives are always neuter in German. My favourite example of gender nonsense in German is actually cutlery - knife is neuter, spoon is male and fork is female :-)

One thing I’ve thought about with pronouns that you skimmed right next to with new pronouns is that, if everyone has their own, then it would simply be easier to solely refer to people with their name. If you’re telling a story, or example, and there are six people in the story with their own pronouns, the only options would be to give a list of each person’s pronouns mid-story and hope that the listener remembers while risking the chance that they won’t follow the story at all, or just use the people’s names and exclude pronouns.

First, love the sweater! Second, great video. Thank you for the information and the clear and sensitive way you discussed this subject. Number 6 is an interesting one. As an 'out' member of the lgbtq+ community, coming out becomes a way of life. It seems like a singular event, but in reality, we are always coming out because (in my observation) folks assume a hetero-normative stance in conversations, 'What does your wife do for a living?' It can be challenging. Every time it happens, it feels like a splash of cold water in the face, and every time, I have to make a quick decision on how to answer. What are the odds this person will shoot me if I say 'My husband...' etc. It is a complicated subject, and I really appreciate your willingness to chime in with some good science. :-)

Random note: I really like how Japanese has a bunch of ways to say "I" to convey your gender, personality etc. It makes so much sense to not categorize someone who isn't there to someone listening, although I'm pretty sure Japanese still does that too, but you get the chance to introduce yourself as who you think you are.