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This came up 6 months ago, see my comment below.

@IsaacKing What's your utility attitude towards using gendered pronouns not just as a concession to avoid drama, but as an opportunity to create harmony? Thinking of things in the latter way, flipping the utility polarity, was a big part of me deciding a while back not to adapt the same stance you've arrived at.

@Panfilo That seems like a rather biased interpretation of the situation. If you take everyone into account, all the arguments over pronouns are causing drama, not harmony.

@IsaacKing At what stage does any minority go from causing drama to being implicitly worthy of consideration?

I'm a fan of they/them, but I think it's important to use affirming pronouns for binary trans people. Most trans people I know have a near constant anxiety that people don't accept their gender and they appreciate when people make an effort to affirm that.

Even if (big if) literally everybody you interact with knows that you always use they/them for everyone, and you're not degendering binary trans people, things like this are felt on an emotional level before being processed on an intellectual level. Some binary trans people, if you "they'd" them in person, would feel the twist in their gut before they remembered that it's how you refer to everyone.

/StrayClimb/nytimes-changes-default-pronoun-ass

This is the related market for the NY Times deciding the same thing.

It's not okay for me, please don't degender me

@Ernie reminder, I asked you to stop doing it to me 6 months ago and yet you continue. I respect others pronouns when stated, and have played this level 2 game where you assume mine are "them/they" wrongly with you, but it doesn't seem to being respected.

@Ernie I don't know what you mean by a "meta-troll". I use gender neutral pronouns by default because it means I don't have to remember which gender everyone is. This is already hard enough in-person and only gets worse in the world of pseudonymous online usernames.

I don't even know what pronouns you prefer, it's not stated in your Manifold or Twitter bio. This confuses me as there's a seeming contradiction; you say you care very much that I use non-neutral pronouns, yet you don't make your preferred pronouns easily accessible to others, which seems to imply that you don't care very much about people knowing how to refer to you.

Regardless, other people aren't entitled to demand arbitrary changes in how I speak. Gendered pronouns in many cases bother people, so I switched to using neutral ones as a compromise between making people more comfortable and keeping my life easy. Gender-neutral pronouns are, exactly as they say, "neutral"; they apply to everyone. It seems you're instead treating "they/them" as a third-gender that does not apply to you, and if that usage of them as a third gender becomes normalized, then I'm happy to switch away from they/them and use zie/zir or whatever other gender-neutral pronoun people standardize on. But the claim that I'm simply not allowed to treat you as a generic human and must draw attention to your gender every time I speak about you does not seem remotely reasonable to me.

@IsaacKing the old system you look at their face and 98% of the time you can tell

You're trying to impose a new rule that despite having a male name, having told you before I'm male, and in other contexts where we interact having a clearly male face icon with 5 o'clock shadow, you're somehow not allowed to or can't figure it out.

I disagree with that. if someone looks male I assume male unless informed otherwise. This is the status quo followed by nytimes and our entire society. See my related market, for example, which relies on the assumption that NYTimes does NOT do what you do now. There's no way they have asked Kim Jong Un, for example, what pronouns he prefers. They simply assume. Or a random person they interview in North Korea; they simply assume. Or an article about a refugee from NK 20 years ago who presents as a man and was written up as a man. They do NOT say "{presumed} he" when you look in the archive. They said 'he" then and they say "he" now and don't caveat it.

So, you are the one implementing a new personal system. In general I like this approach and creativity. But the problem is I think asking me to post pronouns when it's obvious anyway just plays into the "gender is arbitrary" idea where they want to question everything all the time. Without them, you'd be fine, but in today's environment, your plan strongly overlaps with a group who I think are not right.

Anyway, they and you can do what you want, and so can I, and I'm cool with that, this is America. But I'm saying, I'm a guy so call me he. I'm not going to start telling people this by default. I expect people not to steal from me either, and I'm not going to mention it to everyone I meet, that's assumed, and that's good for society, regardless of whatever theories some late-night potsmoking social science undergrads come up with

@Ernie Ah, I see. Couple things:

I didn't remember having seen your face, or you telling me that you were male. I wasn't intentionally ignoring that fact, I was just using my default. (Assuming people's gender based on their online username is extremely unreliable. e.g. how everyone assumed that Eliza was a woman.)

I completely agree that what I'm doing is atypical, and it tends to make both the political left and the political right mad at me. But that's exactly what makes it a good compromise! It's harder for the right to dismiss me as woke or the left to dismiss me as a transphobe when my behavior clearly doesn't align with the other side either. (Not that they won't do it anyway, but it makes it easier for me to counterargue.)

On the object level, I hold the following beliefs:

• People should say true things, not false things.

• Categories like "male" and "female" are meaningful and useful categories, and the existence of some outliers does not change that.

• The number of outliers has been steadily increasing over the past 20 years, and the categories are gradually becoming fuzzier and less useful. This trend will continue as technology improves and we gain a greater ability to change the various physical correlates of gender.

• There are many stereotypes that our society has about people of each gender, and those stereotypes are increasingly often incorrect and/or unwanted.

• Many people experience significant psychological discomfort being referred to as their current sex, and do not have the financial means or desire to transition to a different one.

Eschewing gendered pronouns is a simple solution to all issues. It does not perfectly solve the last one, since some people, like yourself, will still experience gender dysphoria from neutral pronouns. That's not my intention, but I consider it an acceptable side effect. If someone tells me that it makes them uncomfortable if I ever use the word "mountain" while in their presence, I respect their preferences and I'm sad that they're uncomfortable, but I fundamentally consider that to be "their problem". i.e. I'm generally against social ownership of the micro.

As I mentioned, I am willing to use gendered pronouns from time to time as a favor to people I know, and I'll try to remember to do that with you, but I may forget or change my mind in the future.

And from a language-design standpoint, why did we even have gendered pronouns in the first place? It's completely unnecessary to mention the gender of a person any time you're talking about them. I'm in favor of making language better and not being stuck to the poor choices of the past. Douglas Hofstadter agrees.

I think this turns on what you are communicating with "they/them".

There are people who openly and exclusively use neutral pronouns for people who don't pass as the gender they are trying to pass as, and going around telling people they don't pass seems clearly rude and not okay.

You seem nice and I expect you are not being rude, but the market is on whether it is "always okay", and there are plenty of not okay people out there. So buying some NO.

@MartinRandall Yeah, that's one of the more interesting cases. If I refer to everyone as they/them, it seems hard to complain about that. But if I refer to cis people with gendered pronouns, while referring to trans people as they/them, then I'm clearly treating them as different, and I could understand being upset about that.

@IsaacKing Right. Other examples that I've run into in darker corners of the internet:
- someone uses they/them pronouns exclusively for ugly women.
- someone uses they/them pronouns exclusively for gay men.

I see your disclaimer comment below about "obviously contrived situations", but hopefully you believe me that such people exist in the world and you won't ask me to provide examples.

In the description should "upset that I'm not using" be "upset that I'm using"?

@MartinRandall Yes, thank you. Fixed.

Do you think it is always ok (e.g. in emergency situations) to use a refined version of language with people who are learning English, in ways that could cause confusion and ambiguity?

Would this market resolve to NO if you find that the answer to the title is "no", even if the reason is not because someone got upset at you for using the correct pronoun for them?

@GustavoMafra There are obviously contrived situations where it would not be ok. e.g. someone points a gun at someone else and says "I'll shoot them unless you refer to me with a gendered pronoun". I don't think anything is gained by discussing such out-of-scope hypotheticals.

Have you refused to do this before? Have you argued with someone about it? Have you gotten pushback on it by people in your social circle? If not, what's your credence that each of those will happen by the time the market resolves?

@EliasSchmied Also, how long have you believed this?

@EliasSchmied I've gotten a bit of pushback, and so far have avoided big arguments over it by switching to gendered pronouns for the person in question. I'd put it at about a 20% chance that such an argument occurs by the end of next year.

I can't recall any time when I concretely had a different opinion.

@EliasSchmied To elaborate, I only started using gender-neutral pronouns for most people a year or two ago. Before that time I didn't have any particular reason to avoid them, I was just used to using gendered pronouns since that's how I learned English and that's what most people around me did. I hadn't put much thought into the topic.

what are the arguments against this?

@BTE From the progressive side, that people's pronoun choices should always be respected, full stop. Some subcultures treat neutral/nonbinary as though it's a third gender, and view referring to someone who identifies as male with neutral pronouns as misgendering.

From the conservative side, that neutral pronouns are a contortion of language being forced upon them by progressives, and gendered pronouns have worked for us just fine for hundreds of years. Neutral pronouns are also linguistically annoying, as they're treated as plural just like a group of people, and they remove some easy ways to tell which pronouns refer to which nouns in a sentence.