No-- most people understand how pronouns work now (and the rest are rapidly coming up to speed). It's only people who are deliberately insistent on misunderstanding that are mislead.
No, absent other context everyone will understand female to mean having typical female characteristics, almost by definition. Calling someone who is unlike a female in most ways "she" is deceptive even if you consider it "correct", in the same way as making a tomato dish and calling it a fruit salad.
There's no "keeping up" with an unnatural category. It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place.
> It's like the "international except Taiwan" example I gave earlier - the language is forced and artificial and always will be, because it doesn't reflect the underlying reality that these people would be in the other group if you put the boundary in the natural place.
If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place".
> If this were true, then we wouldn't have all the examples of languages and cultures that don't put it in that "natural place".
What languages and cultures would those be? (The example usually given is "two spirit", but (as has been more widely reported recently) that was largely a fabrication)
Lots of languages have complete gender neutrality in pronouns. They often include arbitrarily or self-assigned signifiers or honorifics, which isn't too far from the direction we seem to be evolving towards. E.g. Kurdish, the Turkic languages, Tagalog (although Spanish influences have caused some appearance of -a and -o suffixes), Armenian, Estonian, etc.
Some languages assign gender to everything grammatically.
English is a rare case of a language without very little grammatical gender except personal pronouns. The only other language that I know of with this characteristic is Persian. Singular "they" dates back to middle English.
Sure, it's possible to not make a distinction at all. But no natural language has a male/female distinction that makes the kind of exceptions that trans people want for themselves.
Plenty of languages have very arbitrary and complex rules for pronouns or other signifiers. You wanting these to be, in English, very closely tied to specific characteristics of expressed gender similar to traditional usage doesn't make it have to be so.
Plenty of humans live in a language where you can't figure out what's in people's pants or whether they're likely to wear a skirt without someone explicitly telling you. Maybe it's time to shrug, and realize that language of English is morphing enough that you're going to experience this same difficulty. Your only choice is whether you passive-aggressively refer to people in ways that they don't like or not.
What's with showing up every day or two to poke at this with a two sentence reply, when you're active elsewhere on hacker news much more often? Just trollin'?
> You wanting these to be, in English, very closely tied to specific characteristics of expressed gender similar to traditional usage doesn't make it have to be so.
Right back at you - it's your side that's trying to impose changes to the meaning of these pronouns by fiat. You can start using then differently if you want, but it's incredibly entitled to demand others conform to your novel definitions.
> Plenty of humans live in a language where you can't figure out what's in people's pants or whether they're likely to wear a skirt without someone explicitly telling you.
I don't object to neutral statements. I object to deliberately misleading ones.
> What's with showing up every day or two to poke at this with a two sentence reply, when you're active elsewhere on hacker news much more often? Just trollin'?
Quite the opposite; this is such a fraught topic that I'm being very careful about what I write, because I know I won't be given the benefit of the doubt over any slight misspeaking.
> Right back at you - it's your side that's trying to impose changes to the meaning of these pronouns by fiat. You can start using then differently if you want, but it's incredibly entitled to demand others conform to your novel definitions.
It's not really "my side". Lots of people are asking me to call them differently, and I'm complying. I think people who don't listen to polite requests about how to address others are rude. I think language is moving, and that people who insist to keep older conventions at all costs are A) generally on the wrong side of history, and B) rude.
Someone may have learned growing up that calling a black person a "Negro" was a polite form of address, and that "moron" is an accurate, impartial label. But it stopped being so. Trying to pedantically cling to something that now many people consider insensitive or rude is not great.
And, language moves on. We can assume a bit less from certain pronouns about what's in someone's pants or what they might wear. Of course, we could already assume a lot less about those things than a hundred years before.
Just like the people mislead by 'decimate'.