4:33am February 4, 2014

genderviking-i-honestly-would-like-to-believe

genderviking:

i honestly would like to believe that the reason why this pronoun thing is happening is because people just like the idea of having cool fun and unique pronouns, and just aren’t thinking about the implications this could have for those of us who have a hard time with learning…

This. I have honest trouble remembering, and suspect I’m just as bad with less familiar pronouns as names until/unless it has a chance to transfer to longer-term memory. And I am awful at remembering names until I have spent a lot of time around someone and heard it repeatedly, no matter how much I want to. It’s often embarrassing. In person, I also have hearing/auditory processing problems which don’t help with taking things in to remember them properly either. How much more general language problems also contribute is anybody’s guess.

That’s definitely *not* the same as just not caring or considering other people’s feelings important. Nor making excuses to try to get out of putting in effort. I don’t want to hurt people because I can’t remember or retrieve the right thing, but it has happened several times already with pronouns (where I will also tend to default to “they”).

I even have trouble getting cis people’s pronouns right, let alone unusual ones. Like I know, in theory, the following pronouns, whether for cis or trans people…

I learned these two the way everyone does:

She/her/her/hers/herself

He/him/his/his/himself/

They/them/their/theirs/themselves

And then I learned this one as a teenager from a MUD, of all places:

Sie/hir/hir/hirs/hirself

And then in my late teens learned this one from an intersex person (with undeveloped anatomy, rather than ambiguous anatomy, who identifies as both physically and socially neuter):

Xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself (I get a couple of those confused)

And then in the trans community shortly after that:

Ze/zem/zer/zers/zemself

And I really haven’t been capable of learning any further than that, even the various other fairly standard nonbinary pronouns out there. (And yes, some of them are both gender neutral and nonbinary pronouns, considering the fact that many ‘non binary’ pronouns are derived from attempts to make gender neutral pronouns. So I don’t buy that all such pronouns are exclusively non binary and should never be used in other contexts, which is a concept I’ve seen going around lately.)

But.

I’ve been known to mix she, he, they, I, and you, totally scramble them, in the same sentence. Pronoun confusion is actually a fairly standard autistic thing. (Usually it’s between I and you when 'experts’ talk about it, but lots of autistic people I know randomly throw in all of them the way I do.) And that’s not specifically trans people that cause those difficulties, it can be cis people as well.

Oh and I’m outside of gender myself. (I have pronoun preferences, but they feel kind of private to me so I don’t tell a lot of people for some reason, I just say nearly anything goes.)

And unlike some others, I really have run into a lot of people who didn’t distinguish between inability to say the right words, and unwillingness to say them – in this area and others. I’ve seen disabled people made into pariahs for accidentally getting words wrong, including pronouns – and nothing they said, nothing, changed the way people treated them for it. That’s why I was among the first people to vocally say “Hey, something’s wrong with a total insistence that anyone who doesn’t get words right is a horrible bigot.” I don’t know if there’s bigots turning that argument around and using it as an excuse (I would not be surprised), but so far the only people I’ve ever seen talking about this are other cognitively disabled people who’ve run into problems in this area.

I am completely confused by the 'let’s turn every single word into a pronoun’ thing, though. I had trouble telling if that was for real, or flame bait (often people post things like this as flame bait to “prove” that “things have gone too far”, and then everyone both SJ and anti-SJ has a field day complaining from opposite ideological sides, about something that isn’t even real). But whatever it is, I’m absolutely certain I wouldn’t be able to follow it even at the purely cognitive level.

Notes: