h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just something I have been pondering on lately...

I suppose Sasha/Alex is an interesting case, as it is considered to be a male name in some places and a female name in others. I guess that means in practice that if you generally think of it as a gendered name, then you will apply that gender to the person.

If someone's username is not associated with gender, though, do you think there is a "feminine" or "masculine" or "neutral" style of posting messages?

I tend to focus on the comments and respond to that ... so that would be neuter. With time I might associate comments to usernames but that's really all. I have sometimes wondered whether with time one can tell whether a commentator is female or male i.e. is there a difference between male & females in the style and content of their comments in a Men are from Mars & Women are from Venus type of way. But we have to factor in different nationalities, cultures, age, experiences etc.

Overall it doesn't bother me ... at the end of the day it's the content of the comments that count ... so aim for neuter.

I'd generally assume neutral until I know either way.

If they're on here F2137311?thread=4592023 can provide a bit of a clue.


Geggs

I like to think I take a Marain approach to gender in internet discussions.

Marain, the language of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, serves a society in which your partner in a conversation may be a base-level human, an altered pan-human of near-arbitrary connection to their original physiology, any one of dozens or more alien species with any one of dozens of patterns of reproduction, or an artificial intelligence of a level below, about the same, or way, way beyond your own. Gender in that language does not, therefore, have any connection to what, if any, gonads you may be packing, on the fairly straightforward basis that most of the time it's of academic interest, if any, to your interlocutor. Rather, gender indicates developmental level - a single pronoun is good for anything/anyone capable of "scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language ".

Of course, when getting in conversations on the internet, it's a depressingly frequent occurrence to come across people apparently unable to scrape together the rudiments of language. Lacking actual Marain vocabulary, I tend to refer to those things with the pronoun "it". They don't seem to like it, though.

Good points, thanks

I guess the other thing is that it doesn't often arise that you would need to refer to someone using third person pronouns, so gender is pretty much irrelevant indeed.



I have a vague recollection of posting on that thread, although I might have just contemplated it - if I did post, I unsubscribed afterwards

I remember (on a different forum) being a member and mod for over 2 years when somebody suddenly realised that I was not the gender that they thought i was. They started a thread about it and around 90% of the people had the same impression. which I thought was a bit weird.

There aren't a lot of gender choices besides male and female. Whenever possible, I try not to involve gender pronouns. If absolutely unavoidable, I'll say "he or she." If I'm communicating with a computer, and the third person becomes unavoidable, I'll say "it." I can't think of situations in which that might be necessary, except when I need to complain that a particular computer has gotten my online order wrong. Even then, I may just repeat the phrase "the computer" rather than using a pronoun. It may be awkward, but it's clear as to what I mean.

That is interesting, Sho (although rather rude of them to start a thread about you) - so people's mental images of your persona were gendered but it was a long time before that gender became involved in a discussion.

"There aren't a lot of gender choices besides male and female."

But there are a few...

Good to know that many people generally do not assign a gender to people when reading posts, anyway. On another BBC forum back in the old days a few times my username was read (pretty much correctly) as a diminutive of Alexander, but I have learned fairly recently that in the US Sasha is predominantly a female name, so that probably explains the occasional difference in reading here.

Fascinating

I have a young nephew named Sasha, but he was born in Russia and then adopted by my brother.

to give the false-gender thing with me some context, it was a sci-fi board and we spent a lot of time talking about the military and weapons. Also I was a mod who didn't take any prisoners (none of us did). Almost without fail people thought I was male

I find the singular "they" to be quite useful for this sort of situation.

I dont know if people can guess my gender but if they read my stories they will certainly be in no doubt about my preferences.

I was thought to be a man for my first few years on this site until Dunx referred to me as his mother and I posted about my experiences as Lady Bracknell

we probably thought you looked a little bit like Lee Marvin too

I guess, the same way I assign an age to someone. However sometimes you're rather off the mark on both.

Y'all might find this classic entry of some interest. A770960

Gender-free pronouns are hardly commonly known and accepted, but it is a good idea.

My initial response to that entry was "wtf?", because I couldn't believe anyone thought gender in pronouns was a big enough problem to be worth devoting any time to solving.

Then I had a bit of a think, and could kind of see the point. How we speak affects how we think about things, and it would, I concede, be kind of neat if we could just see people as people, first and foremost, and have their gender be a fairly minor part of their identity.

But then I had a bit more of a think, and ended up more or less back where I started. Gender in pronouns is the classic first-world problem. Seriously - if your society, and your life, is already so comfortable and equal that you have the luxury of sitting around and complaining about what pronouns people use, and that is EVER the best use you think you can make of your time to make the world a better place - you've already won. 99.9% of the population of the world have it much, much worse than this, and if you don't want to do anything to improve their situation, that's your right, obviously. But don't, please, try to push on me or anyone else the idea that pronouns matter.

Equal pay matters. Equal access to justice matters. Access to healthcare, including contraception and pregnancy termination, matters. Safety from harassment, intimidation and violence matters. If you even begin to start to tell me pronouns matter, I have to assume that every single one of those other things is already 100% sorted in your country, and I for one would love to live there, but I don't think I could afford the ticket to get there, what with the interplanetary travel tax and everything.

On the other hand, one could argue that "seeing people as people, first and foremost", could in turn help with those other problems you mention.
If people are seen as people (and not men/women), then how could there be a wage gap?

Maybe, just maybe, we can work on the little things first, and then the big things will be easier to change?

I believe we should all be proud of our gender, and not hide in this closet of neutral pronouns.

But why do I feel like a weirdo for even suggesting it here?

's one of those things though, innit?
if you send CVs with the genders (and race) hidden the selection of candidates is much more equal. So in that respect being able to hide behind a neutral pronoun must help equality at least in that respect.

For most of us once we have met people in RL our actual gender is clear.