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On September 09 2026 06:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think that's nonsense. I have conversed with a lot of people (including very 'woke' people working at the English linguistics department in the university in trondheim) whose reaction to learning that 'they/them' was supposed to be used as a pronoun to refer to individuals was bafflement. I don't mind doing it because I'm not the president of languages and I'll go with whatever society goes with because like, that's how languages work, but it still fundamentally doesn't make sense to me.
Singular they/them to describe a person of an unknown or irrelevant gender is older than modern English, it fell out of use because style manuals in the 18th century discouraged it but it can be found in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
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Norway28889 Posts
On September 09 2026 07:00 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2026 06:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think that's nonsense. I have conversed with a lot of people (including very 'woke' people working at the English linguistics department in the university in trondheim) whose reaction to learning that 'they/them' was supposed to be used as a pronoun to refer to individuals was bafflement. I don't mind doing it because I'm not the president of languages and I'll go with whatever society goes with because like, that's how languages work, but it still fundamentally doesn't make sense to me.
But when I talk about not wanting society to be genderless because this to me is a change that is more trouble than its worth - languages is actually part of it, and this might be hard to understand because your native tongue is English, which isn't a gendered language. Norwegian however, has gendered nouns. While - to be fair - these are subject to change both based on dialect and sociolect (more radical left people have tended to use 'a' ending, indicating female gender of the noun, while more conservative people have tended to use more 'en' ending, indicating male gender of the noun), I think insisting that car should now, in Norwegian, be considered 'it' rather than he or she (this is one of the words where you're allowed to choose) is more trouble than its worth. This also applies to spanish, arabic, french, german - and many other languages. I mean - changing languages to make them more inclusive, like my aforementioned example of saying firefighter instead of fireman - totally, it makes sense, but a lot of it just isn't discriminatory, it just is.
Like, just because people disagree with you or your solutions doesn't mean they are hostile. Here's my logical chain: I accept that there are places in the world where we do not know gender, but assume gender. Right here is a noteworthy place, you can 'safely assume' the people you are interacting with are male. I accept that this behaviour unnecessarily alienates non-males. I accept that myself pushing towards using gender-neutral pronouns (Specifically they/them) when I don't know someone's gender is a small action I can take to counteract the above point. I accept that if I'm willing to use they/them as someone's pronouns before I know better, I should be able to use they/them if requested. I'm curious where we diverge. All of the above fundamentally makes sense, where does it not fundamentally make sense to you?
I'm guessing around part 2. I think if I am in a place where you can safely assume that you are interacting with a male, then using 'he' is entirely reasonable until you are informed otherwise. I entirely agree with using the requested pronouns, but I see no convincing reason why I would refer to a new, unfamiliar poster as 'they' or 'them' if the poster hasn't made any effort to indicate their (this one was ok) preferred pronouns. This would be confusing to me, because I would assume someone was talking about more than one person. Honestly, if I were to enter some internet community where 97% of the users identified as men, I'd honestly feel a bit weird being characterized as 'they' - not that it would bother me - but I'd be like, 'huh'. As for GH, GH to my knowledge for the first decade+ of his stay at this website identified as a black man. The genderqueer/fluid element is relatively new. I think it's entirely expectable and understandable that people aren't cued in - and that mistakes will be made.
Like, I get - and agree - that the majority has a responsibilitey to learn about how minorities feel about different issues and to take some steps to at least not alienate them. But I also think that if you are a small minority whose minority status is not immediately visible to other people, people not treating you as part of that minority before they know you are part of that minority, isn't really a problem. If I see a person wearing sunglasses I'm still going to operate under the assumption that this person has functional eyesight - whereas if there's a white cane present, I won't. If I communicate visually with the blind sunglasses person and I go like yo can you respond after he doesn't, I'll feel silly after being informed of his or her visual impairment, but I'd feel it was unreasonable to be described as hostile.
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Norway28889 Posts
On September 09 2026 07:03 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2026 06:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think that's nonsense. I have conversed with a lot of people (including very 'woke' people working at the English linguistics department in the university in trondheim) whose reaction to learning that 'they/them' was supposed to be used as a pronoun to refer to individuals was bafflement. I don't mind doing it because I'm not the president of languages and I'll go with whatever society goes with because like, that's how languages work, but it still fundamentally doesn't make sense to me. Singular they/them to describe a person of an unknown or irrelevant gender is older than modern English, it fell out of use because style manuals in the 18th century discouraged it but it can be found in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Yes, which doesn't mean it comes naturally to people who speak modern English.
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I'm a little surprised people working at an English linguistics department would be baffled by it.
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Norway28889 Posts
That is fair- but they're still predominantly native scandinavians.
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On September 09 2026 06:40 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2026 05:19 Artesimo wrote:On September 09 2026 05:11 dyhb wrote:On September 09 2026 04:22 Artesimo wrote:On September 09 2026 03:42 dyhb wrote:
You're skipping past the most important part. Is the person saying, "A man is an adult human male" committing an error by making it a simple substitution? I presume you disagree with the statement, since some people use man and woman to express a nuanced gender identity partially or entirely divorced from biological sex. But you haven't told me if you disagree and why.
Not at all actually. This started with On September 08 2026 20:35 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
One could simply say that a man is an "adult human male", but then "male" ends up carrying all of the same interesting/controversial weight that "man" did. We could say that a man / someone who is male usually-but-not-always has XY chromosomes, usually-but-not-always has testes, usually-but-not-always produces sperm, usually-but-not-always can grow facial hair, and usually-but-not-always has a ton of other features. Which was followed up by you with On September 09 2026 01:16 dyhb wrote:
You don't think the controversy is saying that a man is an adult human male? I didn't know what male had all the baggage that man did. If you wanted to question if substituting man with "adult human male", you could have done so, but you didn't. Instead you straight jumped to "how is male controversial" in response to DarkPlasmaBall clearly laying out a logical construct where you either substitute the terms or one becomes a subset of the other and thus inherits all the complexity and controversy as I described in my response. You either failed to understand that, or asked the wrong question. Personally I don't really care of its definition past "sex and gender are 2 different things" and "what does the person I am talking to understand/mean when they hear/say the word". Having dabbled in some linguistics, and coming from a languages where its linguistics is descriptive rather than proscriptive, I am more open to contextual use of it and changing of it. As long as the intend is not stupid gatekeeping don't care how one uses the term. There is non stupid gate keeping, which I am also fine with. Overall I think I am fine with the definition DarkPlasmaBall laid out as long as we are talking about "man/male" being understood in the context of sex and not gender. My dream would be to live in a world where all we need is the "usually-but-not-always" definition by DarkPlasmaBall because we have completely done away with gender roles and thus its merely a question of sex where it matters, but we will never get there. So a more wishy washy definition with lots of "usually-but-not-always" is ok too. "male" ends up carrying all of the same interesting/controversial weight that "man" did. I am actually putting the question back to DPB and asking him why he doesn't challenge the substitution in the first place. That sounds like the appropriate thing to question. Once you go from the nuances of man/woman to the less-nuanced male/female, you lose the class of people that are biologically male, but have the gender identity of woman and might have taken hormones or undergone surgery to make their gender expression closer. Is it really true to say that chromosomal anomalies or sexual development conditions are equal ambiguities to that plus gender incongruence and genderfluid identities? I think that's core to the debate, and includes linguistics but isn't confined to linguistics. You can do that, but that doesn't change the fact that you couldn't follow this very basic logic which was my point. And ofc I can't speak for DarkPlasmaBall, but when you accept the premise that defining man is complicated, and have no issue accepting that male is therefore complicated as well, then there is nothing to challenge there. Or he was just making an example for why man is so complicated to define, and how blanket terms that we might jump to are not suffice, which is how I read his post. It helps to try to follow what the other person is saying and attempt to understand them instead of looking for gotchas whenever you aren't partaking disingenuously. Either you wanna discuss, so you want to understand the other persons point of view and should act accordingly, or you want to debate, so you want to be correct and therefore have to use the correct logic. Logically, if man is not a subset of male, then one's complications cannot be said to deductively apply to another. If men are adult human males, then maybe that definition excludes the majority of complications within a population, and the remaining cannot be said to be complicated. I don't understand if DPB understands either the subset issue or exclusionary issue. The definition is meant to exclude.
No, you cant put your lack of understanding on what has been said on DarkPlasmaBall like that. He clearly set up the premise of male being proposed as an explanation for what a man is, and why it would not work as that would conclude that male is complicated as well. You accepted said premise when instead of challenging this you expressed not to understand the conclusion. And in general, when you use B as an explanation for what A is, it would be common sense to assume that B encompasses all of A. Otherwise you would say B is A but without... And if common sense fails, the phrasing DarkPlasmaBall used makes this also obvious imo. So now your choices are a logical error on your part, lack of common sense, lack of reading comprehension, being disingenuous and deliberately going for the outrage angle, or a combination of all of these options.
You can't do much here with logic or your understanding of set theory as long as you accept to play in DarkPlasmaBalls wheelhouse. It is on you to understand the implications of what he has said, and then challenge the basis of what he said. Instead, you challenged only the implication of "what if B has all the properties of A", without refuting that "all of A is wholly contained in B". You are only now somewhat challenging the right thing, which is good, though unfortunately you are still doing so in an attempt to frame DarkPlasmaBall having made the mistake rather than you. My reading of what has been said would imply that male is a much broader category than "man", so once again your attempt at finding a flaw doesn't work as long as you do not challenge that. I think the overall premise DarkPlasmaBalls has constructed is quite sound and consistent logically speaking, and also fairly straightforward and simple, so your attempts at finding an error in his internal logic like you are doing here are probably futile. All you can say is that you obviously disagree and why, and use that to challenge his basis.
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On September 09 2026 07:36 Liquid`Drone wrote:
That is fair- but they're still predominantly native scandinavians.
You don't think they were being sinister do you?
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Norway28889 Posts
Not sure I'm missing a left handed joke or not but no.
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On September 09 2026 07:00 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2026 06:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think that's nonsense. I have conversed with a lot of people (including very 'woke' people working at the English linguistics department in the university in trondheim) whose reaction to learning that 'they/them' was supposed to be used as a pronoun to refer to individuals was bafflement. I don't mind doing it because I'm not the president of languages and I'll go with whatever society goes with because like, that's how languages work, but it still fundamentally doesn't make sense to me.
But when I talk about not wanting society to be genderless because this to me is a change that is more trouble than its worth - languages is actually part of it, and this might be hard to understand because your native tongue is English, which isn't a gendered language. Norwegian however, has gendered nouns. While - to be fair - these are subject to change both based on dialect and sociolect (more radical left people have tended to use 'a' ending, indicating female gender of the noun, while more conservative people have tended to use more 'en' ending, indicating male gender of the noun), I think insisting that car should now, in Norwegian, be considered 'it' rather than he or she (this is one of the words where you're allowed to choose) is more trouble than its worth. This also applies to spanish, arabic, french, german - and many other languages. I mean - changing languages to make them more inclusive, like my aforementioned example of saying firefighter instead of fireman - totally, it makes sense, but a lot of it just isn't discriminatory, it just is.
Like, just because people disagree with you or your solutions doesn't mean they are hostile. Here's my logical chain: I accept that there are places in the world where we do not know gender, but assume gender. Right here is a noteworthy place, you can 'safely assume' the people you are interacting with are male.
I accept that this behaviour unnecessarily alienates non-males. I accept that myself pushing towards using gender-neutral pronouns (Specifically they/them) when I don't know someone's gender is a small action I can take to counteract the above point. I accept that if I'm willing to use they/them as someone's pronouns before I know better, I should be able to use they/them if requested. I'm curious where we diverge. All of the above fundamentally makes sense, where does it not fundamentally make sense to you?
Are you sure on the bolded? Or have any research to back it up? My understanding is that there are a bunch of non-males that like the “ genderless” of certain places, like TL, of the internet. Many even do things like choose male avatars or male sounding names to gender swap because they prefer the experience.
Now, lots of the reasons why they prefer it are problematic, but some of it is just enjoying the lack of tension that can exist between genders (not all that tension is bad, but it can be nice to step away). Sometimes it can be simple curiosity.
I get that your intentions are to be as accepting as possible. I’m just not sure that presumption on this point is accurate.
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On September 09 2026 07:49 Artesimo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2026 06:40 dyhb wrote:On September 09 2026 05:19 Artesimo wrote:On September 09 2026 05:11 dyhb wrote:On September 09 2026 04:22 Artesimo wrote:On September 09 2026 03:42 dyhb wrote:
You're skipping past the most important part. Is the person saying, "A man is an adult human male" committing an error by making it a simple substitution? I presume you disagree with the statement, since some people use man and woman to express a nuanced gender identity partially or entirely divorced from biological sex. But you haven't told me if you disagree and why.
Not at all actually. This started with On September 08 2026 20:35 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
One could simply say that a man is an "adult human male", but then "male" ends up carrying all of the same interesting/controversial weight that "man" did. We could say that a man / someone who is male usually-but-not-always has XY chromosomes, usually-but-not-always has testes, usually-but-not-always produces sperm, usually-but-not-always can grow facial hair, and usually-but-not-always has a ton of other features. Which was followed up by you with On September 09 2026 01:16 dyhb wrote:
You don't think the controversy is saying that a man is an adult human male? I didn't know what male had all the baggage that man did. If you wanted to question if substituting man with "adult human male", you could have done so, but you didn't. Instead you straight jumped to "how is male controversial" in response to DarkPlasmaBall clearly laying out a logical construct where you either substitute the terms or one becomes a subset of the other and thus inherits all the complexity and controversy as I described in my response. You either failed to understand that, or asked the wrong question. Personally I don't really care of its definition past "sex and gender are 2 different things" and "what does the person I am talking to understand/mean when they hear/say the word". Having dabbled in some linguistics, and coming from a languages where its linguistics is descriptive rather than proscriptive, I am more open to contextual use of it and changing of it. As long as the intend is not stupid gatekeeping don't care how one uses the term. There is non stupid gate keeping, which I am also fine with. Overall I think I am fine with the definition DarkPlasmaBall laid out as long as we are talking about "man/male" being understood in the context of sex and not gender. My dream would be to live in a world where all we need is the "usually-but-not-always" definition by DarkPlasmaBall because we have completely done away with gender roles and thus its merely a question of sex where it matters, but we will never get there. So a more wishy washy definition with lots of "usually-but-not-always" is ok too. "male" ends up carrying all of the same interesting/controversial weight that "man" did. I am actually putting the question back to DPB and asking him why he doesn't challenge the substitution in the first place. That sounds like the appropriate thing to question. Once you go from the nuances of man/woman to the less-nuanced male/female, you lose the class of people that are biologically male, but have the gender identity of woman and might have taken hormones or undergone surgery to make their gender expression closer. Is it really true to say that chromosomal anomalies or sexual development conditions are equal ambiguities to that plus gender incongruence and genderfluid identities? I think that's core to the debate, and includes linguistics but isn't confined to linguistics. You can do that, but that doesn't change the fact that you couldn't follow this very basic logic which was my point. And ofc I can't speak for DarkPlasmaBall, but when you accept the premise that defining man is complicated, and have no issue accepting that male is therefore complicated as well, then there is nothing to challenge there. Or he was just making an example for why man is so complicated to define, and how blanket terms that we might jump to are not suffice, which is how I read his post. It helps to try to follow what the other person is saying and attempt to understand them instead of looking for gotchas whenever you aren't partaking disingenuously. Either you wanna discuss, so you want to understand the other persons point of view and should act accordingly, or you want to debate, so you want to be correct and therefore have to use the correct logic. Logically, if man is not a subset of male, then one's complications cannot be said to deductively apply to another. If men are adult human males, then maybe that definition excludes the majority of complications within a population, and the remaining cannot be said to be complicated. I don't understand if DPB understands either the subset issue or exclusionary issue. The definition is meant to exclude. No, you cant put your lack of understanding on what has been said on DarkPlasmaBall like that. He clearly set up the premise of male being proposed as an explanation for what a man is, and why it would not work as that would conclude that male is complicated as well. You accepted said premise when instead of challenging this you expressed not to understand the conclusion. And in general, when you use B as an explanation for what A is, it would be common sense to assume that B encompasses all of A. Otherwise you would say B is A but without... And if common sense fails, the phrasing DarkPlasmaBall used makes this also obvious imo. So now your choices are a logical error on your part, lack of common sense, lack of reading comprehension, being disingenuous and deliberately going for the outrage angle, or a combination of all of these options. Then may I inform you both that the "Woman: Adult Human Female" and "Man: Adult Human Male" is not immediately assumed by the reader to be an explanation as much as it is an exclusionary definition. One that might certainly exclude complications, and you might even say it's designed to eliminate complications (and maybe not all).
DarkPlasmaBall and you have this reframe that is a goofy gotcha. Aren't those dolts asking what is a man just passing on the complications from man to male? The answer should be partly yes and mostly no. The categories are being redefined in such a way as to make that nonsensical.
You can't do much here with logic or your understanding of set theory as long as you accept to play in DarkPlasmaBalls wheelhouse. It is on you to understand the implications of what he has said, and then challenge the basis of what he said. Instead, you challenged only the implication of "what if B has all the properties of A", without refuting that "all of A is wholly contained in B". You are only now somewhat challenging the right thing, which is good, though unfortunately you are still doing so in an attempt to frame DarkPlasmaBall having made the mistake rather than you. I am interrogating the viewpoint until it's resolved or at least elucidated. You are getting a little closer here with the rest, but still missing harmony and consistency with your previous post:
when you accept the premise that defining man is complicated, and have no issue accepting that male is therefore complicated as well you want to understand the other persons point of view and should act accordingly, or you want to debate, so you want to be correct and therefore have to use the correct logic. One of the major milestones of learning within this debate is the proposition of eliminating the A man is whoever says he is a man by excluding certain categories of self-identified men along lines of biology. The exclusion is the point. If you want to say their logic dictates that the complications of man are now inherited by male, you miss the exclusion.
I gather that you and DPB are doing the, "Yes, yes, we know all that, and are having fun with at troll question" but I'm not quite sure until you write that you know precisely. No gotchas or mistakes or anything from me here.
My reading of what has been said would imply that male is a much broader category than "man", so once again your attempt at finding a flaw doesn't work as long as you do not challenge that. I think the overall premise DarkPlasmaBalls has constructed is quite sound and consistent logically speaking, and also fairly straightforward and simple, so your attempts at finding an error in his internal logic like you are doing here are probably futile. All you can say is that you obviously disagree and why, and use that to challenge his basis. You're as clear as mud. If, for sake of argument, man includes some females that identify as men, then man is a broader category with more ambiguity. If man includes gender incongruity, genderfluidity in addition to non-psychological biology like XXY & CAH, then man is the broader category. I don't see the logic or consistency in adding gender identity and gender expression to a categorization and calling that the less broad category.
Since you've brought it up twice now, this is not meant to do some gotcha or gloating mistakes, but to interrogate positions until I know what you actually mean. We might actually agree on every part of this, but it isn't at all clear to me yet.
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At no point was I attempting to make any "goofy gotchas" or "troll questions" o.O
It doesn't seem like we'll be able to figure this out together.
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On September 09 2026 07:21 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2026 07:00 Fleetfeet wrote:On September 09 2026 06:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think that's nonsense. I have conversed with a lot of people (including very 'woke' people working at the English linguistics department in the university in trondheim) whose reaction to learning that 'they/them' was supposed to be used as a pronoun to refer to individuals was bafflement. I don't mind doing it because I'm not the president of languages and I'll go with whatever society goes with because like, that's how languages work, but it still fundamentally doesn't make sense to me.
But when I talk about not wanting society to be genderless because this to me is a change that is more trouble than its worth - languages is actually part of it, and this might be hard to understand because your native tongue is English, which isn't a gendered language. Norwegian however, has gendered nouns. While - to be fair - these are subject to change both based on dialect and sociolect (more radical left people have tended to use 'a' ending, indicating female gender of the noun, while more conservative people have tended to use more 'en' ending, indicating male gender of the noun), I think insisting that car should now, in Norwegian, be considered 'it' rather than he or she (this is one of the words where you're allowed to choose) is more trouble than its worth. This also applies to spanish, arabic, french, german - and many other languages. I mean - changing languages to make them more inclusive, like my aforementioned example of saying firefighter instead of fireman - totally, it makes sense, but a lot of it just isn't discriminatory, it just is.
Like, just because people disagree with you or your solutions doesn't mean they are hostile. Here's my logical chain: I accept that there are places in the world where we do not know gender, but assume gender. Right here is a noteworthy place, you can 'safely assume' the people you are interacting with are male. I accept that this behaviour unnecessarily alienates non-males. I accept that myself pushing towards using gender-neutral pronouns (Specifically they/them) when I don't know someone's gender is a small action I can take to counteract the above point. I accept that if I'm willing to use they/them as someone's pronouns before I know better, I should be able to use they/them if requested. I'm curious where we diverge. All of the above fundamentally makes sense, where does it not fundamentally make sense to you? I'm guessing around part 2. I think if I am in a place where you can safely assume that you are interacting with a male, then using 'he' is entirely reasonable until you are informed otherwise. I entirely agree with using the requested pronouns, but I see no convincing reason why I would refer to a new, unfamiliar poster as 'they' or 'them' if the poster hasn't made any effort to indicate their (this one was ok) preferred pronouns. This would be confusing to me, because I would assume someone was talking about more than one person. Honestly, if I were to enter some internet community where 97% of the users identified as men, I'd honestly feel a bit weird being characterized as 'they' - not that it would bother me - but I'd be like, 'huh'. As for GH, GH to my knowledge for the first decade+ of his stay at this website identified as a black man. The genderqueer/fluid element is relatively new. I think it's entirely expectable and understandable that people aren't cued in - and that mistakes will be made. Like, I get - and agree - that the majority has a responsibilitey to learn about how minorities feel about different issues and to take some steps to at least not alienate them. But I also think that if you are a small minority whose minority status is not immediately visible to other people, people not treating you as part of that minority before they know you are part of that minority, isn't really a problem. If I see a person wearing sunglasses I'm still going to operate under the assumption that this person has functional eyesight - whereas if there's a white cane present, I won't. If I communicate visually with the blind sunglasses person and I go like yo can you respond after he doesn't, I'll feel silly after being informed of his or her visual impairment, but I'd feel it was unreasonable to be described as hostile.
Fair enough, and I suppose it's a difference of non-males in my circles for the last 20 years having voiced that concern here and there, which is a message you (I suppose) haven't heard as often. Small things like "Bro you fucked up my lane" or "This dude is a sick supp player" in a game of dota are examples of things I'm talking about. Fine if you're a dudebro, but a reminder that you are 'other' otherwise.
And I haven't personally experienced that 'othering' either. In that way it's also something I 'don't understand', I've just come to trust those that relay the experience.
Re - hostility - I'm on the outside with you on this one, so I can't say it is / isn't hostile because I'm not among the potential sufferers.
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EPT
