If I saw that, no offense to anyone intended, but I would think it was from a StarTrek or Dr Who script!
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I was so disappointed when I started to learn Esperanto that it still had gender…
What an opportunity to do away with it all.
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Hex makes me think of witchcraft, and hix the Beverly Hill Billies
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It’s a shame, it really shouldn’t be so hard. Call people what they ask to be called. My wife was telling me the other day about a school she’d heard where a kid at a school identified as male with a new name, and the school insisted on hyphenating and calling him [female birthname]-[male name] which is baffling
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At which point I’d change the child’s school
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and offensive
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It is baffling.
But being slightly mischievous, what if what they want to be called offends someone else?
also that
that is about as rude as when in one company my boss told a new staff member that his foreign name was awful and she would call him John instead!
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Or when a former girlfriend’s father had his surname changed at the border by an immigration official who didn’t like it!
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Didn’t that happen a lot at Ellis island? Didn’t like them or couldn’t spell them so they just made up a new one?
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I think it did, but this was here, I think it happened a lot to Indian immigrants.
At least we’ve moved on a bit as a society
I hope so anyway
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It seems with society that it is normally 2 steps forward 1 step back all the time
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Regarding “they”: i’ve always had trouble with the fact it is plural as well. As far as i know the only other time one person is referred to in plural is when referring to royalty.
Personally i feel “I” should not be capitalized (unless at the beginning of a sentence), and there should be a logical and intuitive, all inclusive, neutral pronoun fit for a person (thus without the rudeness of “it”) and that it becomes the norm to address everyone by that gender-neutral pronoun out of politeness and respect, until and unless the individual offers a different pronoun. (After which it is still never considered rude to use the all-inclusive neutral pronoun.)
For such a thing to happen though, i imagine, we would first need such a pronoun which may need a much followed (by all kinds of people) individual to use a word that thus becomes famous and popular amongst all age groups. Certainly not any easy thing to accomplish! Pity (for so many reasons) that equality wasn’t at this stage back in days of monarchy and thus a good king/queen could just decide on such a word and declare it to be used as such. If the chosen word wasn’t approved by the masses, surely over time slang would “fix” it. Lol.
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Interesting - for what reason do you not like a capitalised I?
I generally do not understand why gender is needed as a piece of information by almost any institution - bank or otherwise. It’s just not relevant to the service they are providing.
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It just seems so lofty… like the way god always used to be capitalized… You don’t capitalize “me” or any other pronoun for that matter. Why am “I” so much more important?
Good point on why it is necessary information in the first place. I am guessing that it is just because there isn’t an all-inclusive neutral pronoun and, being “old school” the company wants to know whether to address you as him or her. Though, in the case of banking, it could very well be part of identity verification…
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I would still capitalise god if referring to a specific god - but I suppose the default capitalising comes from when saying god would almost always be referring to the Christian God, and therefore a specific god.
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True.
I mean if you look at the Oxford dictionary site they’ll tell you singular they dates back to the 16th century. I’ve never really had it wired in my brain as a plural.
But either way, language is never as static as being taught rules would have you believe, it will always just change from they way people actually use it.
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