(no subject)

[nonethefewer]

Via cereta:

Dogs and Smurfs; Why women writers and stories about women are taken less seriously, by Max Barry

The entire post is the awesome.  I've even caught myself referring to unknown-sex animals as "he"/"him".  It's incredibly frustrating.

Originally posted on Dreamwidth.  Number of comments so far:

Comments

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

That is wonderful! Thank you. Also fucking argh.

[phaedra-lari.livejournal.com]

It would be so much easier to make progress on the dog thing if our language had better pronouns :(

[rosefox]

Our language has perfectly fine pronouns. People just get hung up on thinking that "they" doesn't have centuries of use behind it as a gender-neutral singular.

[the-xtina.livejournal.com]

*flappy hands of agreement*

[phaedra-lari.livejournal.com]

Singular "they" is definitely the best option out there, I think. Are there any good treatises out there on dealing with the rest of the grammar implications of singular they? In some sentences it works just fine, but in a lot of sentences I can't get over the gut-level feeling of that sounding wrong, though. I find my innate sense of language wrongness very hard to retrain.

Like: "Look at that dog - what is he doing?" To use they, would you say "What are they doing?" (which definitely implies there is more than one dog) or "What is they doing?" (which sounds awful to my ear). I guess I'd likely go with calling the dog it in a sentence like that if gender-neutrality were the top goal. Or rearrange the whole sentence to avoid pronouns.

My mom told me that when I was a little girl I always unconsciously called God a "she" when I asked her all the tough religion questions.I was raised Catholic and no one around me called God she, so my mom was never sure why I did that. She never once corrected me or questioned it, though.