Shklee can fuck off.

My first thought was about Pretty Good Privacy (for encrypting emails) and I wondered what that had to do with sexual identity

http://www.openpgp.org/

To me, PGP is an email service.

Honestly, must everything be an acronym these days? Why can't I just be gay? Do I have to be LGBTQI to my friends, and an MSM to everybody else?

I feel like I work for a federal department. Nobody speaks in words anymore, they just use acronyms. I had a friend who told me he drives a POV (Personally Owned Vehicle). You know, he's made it even harder to say that he drives a car. This is too much. Will somebody please save the English language from the fucking abbreviators?

I'm fine with just calling it pronoun preference. I'll stick with that.

I don't see what the problem is with just being polite. If someone gets your pronouns wrong, calmly and patiently let them know what you prefer. It's rude to jump down someone's throat--especially potential allies--for making assumptions that work for 90% of the population, and you aren't going to change anyone's mind by being abrasive. I understand that it can get frustrating, but that doesn't excuse flying off the handle about misgendering when the person doesn't mean it maliciously.

In the same vein, if someone wants you to use terms you find ridiculous, it's rude not to follow their wishes. Even if you don't believe that non-binary identities are real, you can suck it up and show the other person basic respect like you do every day with so many other things.

see also: Pretty Good Privacy

Wait so this isn't about "pretty good privacy" security protocols for Internet use?

@3: "We're all out of cornflakes. F.U." Took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Ungar!

The challenge with PGP is that there is no standardization. People have come up with many different terms to try to describe who they feel they are and appearance is not a reliable guide. So you can't assume a pronoun without guidance the way you might with other politically correct titles. In practice I go with proper names or they for everyone because it is generally less fraught.

1) It's a matter of context. The average LGBTQer that I spend time with IS familiar (with the concept if not the terminology- see 2) with this, and doesn't think much of either avoiding pronouns for a new acquaintance until one is used by someone who knows that person better, or discreetly asking said better informed friend. That said, those pronouns tend to stick to more familiar (he, she, they) territory, and I can see where 'ou' could raise some eyebrows. But how hard is it to not be a dick and respect someone's wishes?

2) I am super familiar with the idea of asking people about their pronouns, but I'm not familiar with the 'PGP' acronym. Too many acronyms are a pain in the ass. Don't need an acronym to develop respectful practice.

People have the right to ask to be referred to as he, she, zir, or Emperor Norton. They shouldn't be harassed and should be respected.

I have the right to not associate with people who insist on this as I have problems keeping simple names straight most days, much less "that is Gary for whom you have to use ou".

And people have the right to think that my approach is not appropriate.

I can understand a transgender person getting upset if their friends or family continue to respond to them by their biological pronoun even after they have made their preference clear. And, it is surely frustrating for someone who is presenting as one gender to be referred by a pronoun of the other gender. However, I don't think the solution is to ask every person I engage in polite conversation which pronoun they prefer.

Another here who immediately thought PGP = Pretty Good Privacy, and was befuddled to see nothing about cryptography, encryption or internet privacy. As I skimmed the headline I wondered who, other than NSA snoops and your beloved federal government would regard PGP as obnoxious in practice. People regardless of sexual orientations and identities care about privacy. Is the PGP acronym without explanation supposed to be "secret code"? According to Chicago Manual of Style and other style manuals, acronyms upon first use should always be spelled out. Ask any of your editors.

Using existing pronouns to describe a person? That seems fine. Trying to come up with new ones to describe a person that is part of a small subset of a very small minority? That seems kind of dumb. Pronouns exist as words we use frequently to shorthand for categories of things we encounter frequently. Most folks won't knowingly interact with this very small subset of people for it to be worthwhile to add more words to the English language. I'll refer to anyone as whatever pronoun they desire, but you've got to use a pronoun that already exists and would make sense in context. Otherwise, you're just trolling people for unnecessary and counterproductive drama.

@4 yes yes yes. This is about respect.

In print I suppose it gets a little sticker—editorial decisions can always be interpreted as political, even if simply communicating with the readers in the primary goal.

And we aren't lower-casing anyone's name anywhere other than book covers. If E.E. Cummings didn't get away with it, none of us are either.

MacCrocodile would prefer if people would never use pronouns at all to refer to MacCrocodile. To use such shorthand for MacCrocodile is demeaning and rude.

@myself, "stickier"

You don't get to use PGP for this. PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy" and is the name of the standard user-level encryption program and protocol.

And yes, it is wise in theory to PGP your emails, but obnoxious in practice because it destroys your ability to search and ties you to a client with a plugin.

I remember being at a conference run by folks really big on PGP. It was an absolute comedic farce watching them trying to keep the crap straight themselves.

There are better ways to battle gendered attitudes.

I guess it's curtains for gender bending epithets like "gurl friend" and "Miss Thing."
It would be as well for forms which ask for prefixes to names and have a drop down list of the standards (Mr, Miss, Mrs) to add other choices. It takes a lot of time to change a language but maybe we need a gender neutral prefix for general use in cases where no preference is known or specified. It would do away with "Dear Sir or Madam."

Look, if you are catering a large function, you should include a vegetarian/vegan option, but you are not responsible if the gluten-free, raw-food, vegan locavore with nut allergies goes hungry.

We should appreciate that people come in all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, orientations, points on the gender spectrum, socio-economic backgrounds, altitudes, and time-zones. We should be willing and able to accept people for who and what they are. Nevertheless, one of the things about being a minority--by definition--is that you are relatively rare. Deal with it.

I am gender non-normative, but present as pretty male: bald, bearded and deep voiced. I identify as male because I like my physiology, and our culture currently only has two* categories. Fine. Now if you assume that I like sports, tremble at the mention of menstruation, and can't control the release of gasses from my body, I will have to correct you that I am not that kind of male.

*The Indonesian Buginese have five, but I have no idea how they handle pronouns...anyone speak Basa Ugi?

Nope. I refuse to say 'their' in place of he/she. Grammatically incorrect.
I'm the first to respect/celebrate my friends identities, but the middle ground has always been tricky to understand. If someone wants to exist outside of a gender binary, why procure a label for something that is seeking to strip a defined identity?

Also, as Spanish is my first language, I have a hard time escaping gender in general. So, maybe I'm just at a disadvantage?

"He" and "she" have worked perfectly well for me for more than 60 years. I don't expect I'll be changing that.

This image circulates around the /lgbt/ board of 4chon. As does this one. Apparently queer people get tired of it pretty quickly. (Incidentally, I recommend /lgbt/ as a place for discussion of legbutt issues, but if you go there, you better be ready for a bunch of trans circlejerk discussions and the occasional "I'm a straight guy but I want to suck cock does this make me a faggot" thread.)
From my point of view, it's perfectly have A SET of gender-neutral pronouns for the intersex/genderqueer out there, but there are about five hundred different special snowflake variants and it is thoroughly out of control.

@16, MacCrocodile would say that, MacCrocodile egotist.

White people problems.

It's shit like this that gives the right wing fodder to ridicule the left.

@22 - Using "their" for a person of unspecified gender long predates the artificial notion that it's grammatically incorrect. It was among the nonsense imposed on the language by people who were obsessed with Latin and figured English should be just like Latin. I reject their notions, and I split my infinitives, too.

I refuse to say 'their' in place of he/she. Grammatically incorrect.

How about "it?"

@22, Shakespeare used "they" to as a single-person pronoun more than once. It is so common a usage that calling it grammatically incorrect is a bit of a stretch. I say this as a professional technical editor who knows how to rewrite a sentence to avoid gendered pronouns but would prefer to just use they" sometimes.

It seems like the easiest solution to this: use "they" whenever you don't want to specify one of the two predominant genders. That works for general use when you are referring to any particular person in general, and it works for someone who is transgender. And it's been in use for 400 years, unlike all of the novel pronouns people have tried to introduce.

@21, great example.

I am gender non-normative, but present as pretty male: bald, bearded and deep voiced. I identify as male because I like my physiology, and our culture currently only has two* categories.

Would I be far off if I suspected that you're just a big dude who likes to get screwed while he wears panties?

If you want to be called something non-normative, that's fine- just don't be an asshole about it. Assumption is an integral part of communication with strangers, so the correction can be made without rancor or accusation.

Ophian @21: Word. BTW, if that three-way for IGBP ever goes down, wear the pink cowboy hat. Seriously ;)

@29 That's interesting. I wasn't aware of the history of its use. It still feels wrong, but, fuck it. I'm lazy and they I shall use!

Oops, I just clicked on #21's picture. He's a skinny dude who likes to get screwed while wearing panties, then.

Oh, for shit's sake! ou? really?

More than happy to call anyone what they prefer, but I'm not gonna ask every guy I meet if he prefers to be called "she". I live in Texas, I wouldn't make it long.

@31: I suspect if that was the case he would have just said that. I also suspect people like you are the reason Dr. Phil has a career.

Can't we just use nouns instead of pronouns?

I have enough trouble just remembering names. Maybe if I was forced to use them more often, they'd stick better.

@22 and @29: Supporting these posts as a genderqueer linguist. "They" as a singular pronoun is grammatically incorrect according to artificial rules meant to make writing clearer ("prescriptive grammar"), not according to how language is actually used ("descriptive grammar").

I think people should ask for whatever words they want, but they need to acknowledge that it's more difficult for people to adjust to function words that don't currently exist in the language.

And yes, it sucks that people make incorrect assumptions about trans people's identities. No one is obligated to educate others, but this shit won't change unless someone does educate people. Honestly, what I really want as a non-binary person is for people to be as neutral to "other" as they are to "male" or "female" instead of sneering that they know who I am better than I do. (Not everyone does that, but there's certainly plenty of that attitude in this comment thread.)

Whoops, I meant 27 and 29.

@23

That's because your social security checks will keep coming no matter how offensive, dysfunctional, and isolated you become. And because you count each of your guns as a "relationship with another person." Normal humans aspire to do just a little better than emulating a Yosemite Sam cartoon. Normal humans realize Yosemite Sam is a cartoon, not a role model.

Ironic because you only vote for wingnuts who do everything they can to make those retirement checks stop whenever Wall Street has a hiccup.

lolo, @32: Save a horse, ride a cowboy!

@34, I'll have you know that I take my panties off when in flagrante delicto, sir/madame!

In the battle between 23 and 42, I side with 23.

And 43, am I correct then, that you're a panty-wearin' cowdude, even if they eventually come off? Have you tried the crotchless ones so you can keep 'em on, or is that what the assless chaps are for?

I was not familiar with the term "PGP" and my sister is trans.

@4 The percentage of people who are trans* or genderqueer is probably less than 2% (2% is the highest estimate I could find) but probably at least 0.3%. But that estimate might be wrong, and in any case, many of them are not out to themselves and/or others, so let's go with 1%. Let's add an additional 0.2% for the gays and lesbians who claim genderqueer but might not show up in those studies. The large majority of those will not prefer zir/ou/hir or other pronominal neologisms. The large majority of them will be clearly presenting as the gender that matches their pronoun preference, obviating the need for a question (regardless of whether they pass).

So realistically, if you're interacting with the general population, you will encounter people who you would assume a gender but actually insist on zir or ou or whatever probably less than 0.1% of the time. For the rest, you will guess correctly the vast majority of the time or you will be unsure enough that you will already want to ask.

Obviously these standards should be relaxed or tightened depending on the context. If I'm out in rural North Carolina, I will not be asking anybody that kind of question. If I'm among an LGBT crowd, I would ask it at a lower level of uncertainty.

@27, @29 I'm going to preface this by saying I'm a linguist and not a prescriptivist. "They" used as a gender neutral pronoun is primarily restricted to indefinite referents. For example, most people would hear sentences like "Everybody left their books here" "Someone left their books here" or "A student left their books here" as unremarkable. It's even acceptable if the gender is known but the referent is still indeterminate, as in "No mother should have to testify against their child." It becomes much less accepted when the referent is definite as in "The student left their books here" but many people would still do it if the referent's gender is unknown.

There is no history, however, of English using "they" with a known referent. "Alex left their books here" would not be considered grammatical by almost any native English speakers. I'm willing to bet that the only group who would consider it grammatical are trans*/genderqueer people or people involved in LGBT activism.

You can argue that singular they should be extended for that last case, and it's a much better idea that zir or ou, but you cannot argue that it is a historical usage.

Also, @38 has it in a nutshell.

Also, also [and mostly tangentially] my favorite revenge on the gender-normative was about a year ago when I was a guest in Austin's Central Booking. While I was waiting for magistration, they brought in this red-necky guy for public intoxication. He was oscillating between woeful and belligerent...until they put the pink handcuffs on him [I don't know why APD has bubblegum pink handcuffs, but they do]. He FLIPPED his shit! The man broke down, weeping, pleading, begging them to please, oh please take the pink handcuffs off! He had to be strapped down and put in a separate room from which I could hear him howling until my stay there was done. Pink: straight man's kryptonite.

Occurs to me that you might not see this since it was below the fold.

@27, @29 I'm going to preface this by saying I'm a linguist and not a prescriptivist. "They" used as a gender neutral pronoun is primarily restricted to indefinite referents. For example, most people would hear sentences like "Everybody left their books here" "Someone left their books here" or "A student left their books here" as unremarkable. It's even acceptable if the gender is known but the referent is still indeterminate, as in "No mother should have to testify against their child." It becomes much less accepted when the referent is definite as in "The student left their books here" but many people would still do it if the referent's gender is unknown.

There is no history, however, of English using "they" with a known referent. "Alex left their books here" would not be considered grammatical by almost any native English speakers. I'm willing to bet that the only group who would consider it grammatical are trans*/genderqueer people or people involved in LGBT activism.

You can argue that singular they should be extended for that last case, and it's a much better idea that zir or ou, but you cannot argue that it is a historical usage.

I'm going to preface this by saying I'm a linguist

And a cunning linguist you are!

@44, of course you are correct, sir/madame. I spend my days ridin' the range, singin' lonesome cowpoke songs and primly refraining from spitting. Also, you are very astute to realize that gender mostly boils down to what kind of knickers one prefers.

[Not to detract from your otherwise flawless perspicacity, but I do have to point out that "assless chaps" is a tautology.]

@47 - No, I get that. I just have a compulsive need to respond when people insist that "they" is grammatically incorrect and insist on using "he or sh," which I guess wasn't exactly what was going on here in the first place. Although, honestly, I find "Alex left their books here," to be much less grating on my ears than inserting a neologism for a pronoun, which is supposedly supposed to make talking about people and things easier. We might as well just say "Please let Alex know Alex left Alex's books here."

While I respect an individual's right to self-identify, but I'm not going to upend the basics of the English language to accommodate each precious snowflake.

@50 I agree, extending singular-they to known referents who prefer not to be called "he" or "she" is a much better idea than using neologisms. And it does sound much better to the ears. I'd be willing to try to use it for someone who wanted it.

But I doubt very much that it will become an accepted feature of English grammar, however, since the number of people it applies to is so small. Or at least, I doubt it would become an accepted feature of English grammar on the basis of accommodating the genderqueer.

Ophian @49: Not to detract from your otherwise flawless sarcasm, but I think he/she will have to look up "perspicacity" and "tautology", which might ruin the effect. Hell, after the cunning linguist joke, he/she might have to look up "sarcasm". Not to mention "corny".

@44

I'd never hate on a man who likes to wear panties. Or chaps. Or whatever. Do you think you intimidate me with gender normative schoolboy insults? It takes courage to walk out in public dressed as the person you want to be, and that is something that will always be stronger than some cowardly bully on the internet. An anonymous bully at that.

lolo@52, I don't know. S/he just seems to really want to talk to me about my underwear....

Meh, whattaya gonna do?

I word I use for @49 is hottie.

Ophian @54: Well, my dear, I can hardly blame him/her for that.

@53, no hatin' with me. I approve of his panties. I'm only happy to have guessed right. And he's correct about the chaps. They are assless by design, although most of the cowdudes wear 'em with Wranglers, at least outdoors.

@57, so...uh, what are you wearing?

lolo @56, Alan @55, oh stop, you guys. I'm blushing.

Refraining from spittin'? What kinda cowdude are you? Just 'cause yer wearin' panties is no excuse to not spit. Besides, what are doin' with the tobacco juice? Not swallowin' it, I hope.

If somebody specifically asks me to call them something, I'll do it. Shit, if I got used to calling Prince "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" for half a decade I can get used to calling some average jane/joe/jou whatever floats their boat.

In practice this seems pretty limited to academia and the web. I've yet to encounter this in reality.

As someone who prefers neutral pronouns, but recognizes that it's hard to change a lifetime of lingual habit, I often tell new people to use whatever neutral pronoun works for *them*. It tends to go down easier and sticks better than insisting on one particular (yet arbitrary) neutral. Since they often find themselves at a loss to come up with any neutral pronoun (thank you English), I tend to suggest ey/em/eir because it seems easiest to grasp. It's just they/them/their with the "th" dropped off (and one would trade "are" for "is" in the sentence). Ey is going to the store. I like em. That's eir dungeon.

I also only bother to broach the use of neutrals with those I grow close to. Once I do, I try to keep in mind that it will likely still be hard for them to use neutrals. It only really gets to me when someone makes a fuss about saying how ey will be so sure to use the neutrals and then never does; I'd really just prefer ey say "I'll do my best" and we can leave it at that. I have caught myself applying a (perhaps unfair) higher standard to other genderqueer people however; it stings when I don't get neutrals from them.

In the end though, I must say that people who start off with asking my preferred pronoun, and those who pick up a neutral and use it consistently, warm a very special place in my heart.

@Ophian, ""assless chaps" is a tautology." made me guffaw. That one line made it worth slogging through the whole thread.

I apologize for calling Ophian a "cowdude." He's gender non-conformant, or whatever. I think Orphian is a cowsomething.

Dang! It is gender non-conformant, or whatever. Therefore, it is a cowsomething.

I think the issue comes down to this: Who is responsible for making sure the pronouns being used with a given person are correct? Is the person with the less common set of pronouns responsible for educating others? Or is every individual responsible for checking a person's gender identity before using any pronouns in an interaction with them? I think this very much depends on how important other people getting those pronouns correct is to a person.

I have an extremely sensitive allergy to gluten. I'm sensitive enough that if a package says, "GLUTEN FREE!" on it, I don't believe it and read the ingredients and allergy warnings myself. If a person offers me some food and says, "It's gluten free!" I don't believe them and quiz them on ingredients and preparation and usually don't eat it. If I didn't do these things, and expected other people to educate themselves on what gluten free means to people with celiac's disease, I would get sick A LOT and I'd also get mad at a lot of people and generally be unhappy.

So, if I use an alternate set of pronouns and it is extremely offensive and hurtful for me to be called by the incorrect pronouns, then I would probably consider it my responsibility to educate others that that's my preference. If I didn't, I'm at a much higher risk to be upset and offended on a regular basis. Plus, informing one person at a time does educate people on the existence of alternative pronouns in a way that's in one's personal control, rather than waiting for the majority of the population to catch up with my own strong (though legitimate) opinion.

alls I know is Another one of these threads Anonymous 10/22/13(Tue)00:39 No. 1546552

is one of the fuckers that is likely to get their throw at slipt