For the record I was posting in support of inclusive language, but pointing out that context and convention matter.

They seem to have even scrubbed my comment from their instance, lol.

  • Blaster M
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    1 day ago

    I was once told my choice of defaulting to referring to people as they/them is offensive to nonbinary people. I don’t necessarily know your pronouns at that particular instance of time when speaking, and being offensive is not my intention, but it seems to happen anyway.

    Which is why I call they/them the equal oppurtunity offender. It doesn’t discriminate in its neutralness.

    Wait until they hear what non-binary sounds like in Spanish, a language that genders every noun as either male or female.

    • @lurklurk
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      915 hours ago

      They/them is extremely practical and I’ve yet to meet a non-binary person in real life who complains about the umbrella usage of it. Some people just want to be offended or want to police behaviour. They should stay on twitter.

    • @hightrix
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      418 hours ago

      What the hell? I call everyone they these days as to not offend anyone, I’m trying to be inclusive with this.

    • @DrPop
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      171 day ago

      At least from one Non Binary, I default they/them and have no idea why I personally would find it offensive.

      • @LovableSidekick
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        1 day ago

        I usually get a lot of hate when I call it “binary thinking” to see only two extreme polar opposite sides to any issue. Some people don’t relate to that term outside of gender issues.

    • @[email protected]
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      224 hours ago

      Once it’s cheap enough, I will unironically just pay for Gemmini or something to monitor my comments and keep track of all the rules. I can’t possibly deal with all the nuances and expectations of every instance.

      If someone is still offended after that, idk what to say.

    • sunzu2
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      -61 day ago

      Spanish has neutral gender one so does English… “It” but somehow it ain’t enough

      • @[email protected]
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        151 day ago

        Nope, everything is either lo (masculine “the”) or la (feminine “the”), and there is no “the” which is gender neutral.

        Yeah, when saying things like “this” or “that” there is a neutral version used only and very explicitly for objects when you’re not using the actual noun for the object - i.e. in “give me that” but not in “give me that box” - but that’s about as close as the thing gets to having a neutral gender.

        Same with Portuguese, Italian, French and, as far as I know, all Romance languages out there.

        Funny bit is that whilst for most things the same thing tends to be have a noun which is masculine or feminine in all of those languages (at least the ones I know, so no idea about Romanian), some words might be masculine in one language and feminine in another or vice-versa.

        • @[email protected]
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          81 day ago

          That’s why some people push the Latinx crap. If you ever want to make a Hispanic person mad, call them Latinx.

          • sunzu2
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            71 day ago

            While he ain’t wrong about neuter being limited usage I also had spanish speakers tell me latinx is idiotic but if you mist then “latine” is the proper term.

            Latinx is some shot cooked up in American universities and has been brute forced into general use but nobody appears to have asked the Spanish speaking latino people lol

            • Lemminary
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              01 day ago

              But we’re OK with both, and we do use both occasionally. We even used the @ in the 90s-00s until it fell out of fashion as in Latin@.

              It’s usually only a problem when Americans discuss it amongst yourselves and start blaming each other about who did what, which then polarizes the conversation further for everyone else, especially other Latinos who wouldn’t have felt encroached otherwise. Because to us, in the vacuum of ignorance, it’s just another whimsy feature of the language.

          • Lemminary
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            11 day ago

            That’s not quite true anymore. A lot of progressives have been adopting it and it’s quite common to see in Spanish lingo, especially in gay and feminist circles, whether tongue-in-cheek or otherwise because it is a viable way of writing incusivity in some way.

            Here’s a picture of a published book by one of my acquaintances who’s both feminist and queer: