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That had me spitting coffee.
As for the topic - just another attention seeking celeb. Prob just a ploy to sell more cds to the gen z idiots who buy into all this ****.
Misgendering? Sam Smith is now they or them, not he or him?!
- Thread starter Malt_Vinegar
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That had me spitting coffee.
As for the topic - just another attention seeking celeb. Prob just a ploy to sell more cds to the gen z idiots who buy into all this ****.
As mentioned, consider those who have deliberately blinded themselves or insisted that a healthy limb(s) were amputated, because they "didn't feel right" about having sight or a full compliment of limbs.
Mental illness doesn't always present itself like the mad hatter at Alice's tea party. There's all sorts of mental illness. From anxiety and depression to hearing voices to uncontrollable impulses to OCD to tourettes to... you name it.
How can you so surely state that a longing to be the opposite
Man of Honour
The fact that those people actually were gay. They weren't straight people saying they were gay when they weren't.
No, it isn't. It's the pretence that the two are the same. It's not about people saying that they are feminine or masculine, it's about people saying they are male or female.
Take me, for example. In my youth, I sometimes wore extremely feminine clothing. I had very long hair. I sometimes wore feminine perfume. I sometimes wore make-up. In those days, all those things were extremely feminine. Doing those things did not in any way, shape or form, make me female. I was male. I remained male. I did not become female any more than I became a warrior and a wizard when I played Elder Scrolls games. Even less, as I was roleplaying a warrior and a wizard.
Anyone who's talking about gender falls into two camps - those who pretend that gender is sex and those who acknowledge that gender is a huge collection of spectrums, doesn't apply to any individual and is almost entirely fake anyway. People talking about how they're "non-binary" because they're neither male nor female or both or slide between the two are either intersex or wrong. In both cases, it has absolutely nothing to do with gender.
Soldato
Personally it's nothing to do with being "scared", I don't want to be drawn into anyone's fantasy land. I don't know Sam Smith but I can tell you that 99.9% of people here would refer to "him" if he was standing near by, or if "he" forgot his manbag while rushing for the bus.
He's a he and will just have to get over being himself.
All this pandering to people's delusions is just silly. People have been managing their children's broken and incomplete picture of the world since the beginning of language, yet in the last few decades grown adults are being told in no uncertain terms that a delusional man in a dress is a woman and to disagree is a crime.
Live and let live and all, I don't want to tell anyone how to live their life. I just refuse to let anyone tell me what pronoun I have to use when I don't even know them. I'd refuse to let a male change in the same shower room as my daughter as well, while we're at it. Who is progressive enough to say that's fine? Hands up please
Man of Honour
I say it's fine. "progressive" is a subjective word, though. The current "progressive" movement is a combo of authoritarianism, irrational prejudice and a level of deceit that Minitru would be proud of. I regard it as regressive, not progressive.
I am in favour of desegregation. Few of the "progressives" would be, since their entire ideology revolves around a belief in biological group identity and the resulting segregation and discrimination.
Soldato
I just don't understand why people care so much. I really have no strong feelings about it as it doesn't alter my life in the slightest.
It's interesting you feel forced to have an opinion on it, it may be wrong of me but i find it difficult to have any strong feelings on it whatsoever.
A bit like curtains. We need them at home at the moment, but when asked which i prefer i really can't muster a strong view.
Associate
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It all depends on where you think this is all going. If this was purely a celebrity having Prima Donna tantrums and that's it, then fine. However a lot of people believe that it's a creeping insidious attack on free speech in the real world that will lead to people having restrictions on speech that leads to possible criminal investigation or loss or jobs, exactly as we have seen in the trans debate.
Right now it is a real threat that you can be dismissed from a workplace if you don't subscribe to a notion, and verbalise it, that a trans person cannot biologically be their desired sex.
Soldato
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NVM
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Soldato
The Sam Smith probably works, when its someone this famous talented they can go full Prince squiggly letter thingy and it would fly anyhow.
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The Sam Smith probably works, when its someone this famous talented they can go full Prince squiggly letter thingy and it would fly anyhow.
That was a savvy move by Prince to solve his contractual dispute with Warner Brothers. Not a belief that he was a pretty cool purple symbol.
Couldn't agree more with this comment, as a father to a daughter I would not be happy with a male in a female changing room... apologies if that makes me old fashioned.
No issues with Sam wanting to be addressed as "They/Them", but I'm not about to change my ways nor would I expect many others will, and question absolutely everyone I meet how they'd like to be addressed.
So if someone addresses Sam as "He/Him" in error "they" got upset about then it's on "them" (geez this is a headache), but "they" have to understand this is how society operates and we are labelled as either Male or Female, I'm sure most will do their best, but errors can be made (and rather likely, given what he is asking).
Soldato
oi, that's not nice!
THEY dammit.
You know, I read that back like 100 times and I still messed up!!
Suppose it proves my point.
Soldato
Drop 'he' and 'she' and just continue to use 'they' (something some other languages do as a default anyway).
Make all toilets massive/open/cctv in the main area and full of cubicles (i hate the pig troughs anyway, drunken splashback from strangers - not nice).
Maybe not a complete and full solution but it's a start would stop people feeling the need to announce stuff and others feeling the need to respond.
Maybe I could have a quieter life then without all this noise
Make all toilets massive/open/cctv in the main area and full of cubicles (i hate the pig troughs anyway, drunken splashback from strangers - not nice).
Maybe not a complete and full solution but it's a start would stop people feeling the need to announce stuff and others feeling the need to respond.
Maybe I could have a quieter life then without all this noise
Soldato
Radio 1 were running this story during newsbeat every hour on Saturday, regardless of your view it was quite funny because it immediately preceded a story about a massive asteroid doing a close fly-by.
Put it into context a bit anyway.
My personal view is I don't care, but as mentioned here, "they/them" is typically used for plurals and so I can only see it being confusing when used in the media. If I was them I'd just ask that I'm always called by my name (which, other than assumptions, are non-binary), and if that's too binary for them then they can change that quite easily.
As an example to my first sentence, how confusing is the second!
Put it into context a bit anyway.
My personal view is I don't care, but as mentioned here, "they/them" is typically used for plurals and so I can only see it being confusing when used in the media. If I was them I'd just ask that I'm always called by my name (which, other than assumptions, are non-binary), and if that's too binary for them then they can change that quite easily.
As an example to my first sentence, how confusing is the second!
Sings like a cat being chocked by piano strings.
Man of Honour
To an extent, maybe, but confusion is nothing new with English. Just look at how we spell words!
The same letters and groups of letters are pronounced differently in different words with absolutely no consistency, even with the same local accent. In some cases, the whole word is spelt the same but pronounced differently and the meaning depends on the pronunciation. In other cases, the whole word is spelt the same and pronounced the same but has completely different meanings depending on context. Would you shed a tear at a tear in a favourite item of clothing? Have a row about which row of seats in a boat you were to row in? Could you understand those sentences despite the confusing custom of spelling different words the same way? Spelling need not have any connection to pronunciation, either. English is full of confusion, some of it worse than using the same word for singular and plural. People manage well enough. Expanding a usage that has been accepted in English for at least 600 years and probably much longer shouldn't add an intolerable amount of confusion to the amount we already have.Or consider the word "you". It was explicitly plural and only plural. Yet now it's singular or plural depending on context and people manage that well enough. The explicitly singular third person pronoun has fallen out of use entirely and some dialects of English use "you" as explicitly singular and have made a new compound word to be explicitly plural ("y'all").
I think that ungendered language is a good idea and expanding the already long-established use of "you" as singular is a far more practical approach than trying to insert a new pronoun into English.
Soldato
Thats just to confuse the foreigner's.
I have no problem with evolving language, but it has to be fairly obvious when it is applicable. One look at Mr Smith and it would be 'he' as a first response, only to be told it is 'they'. Does not really compute and I am too old to give a damn really anyway.
I agree 100% with everything you have written there, a very well worded summary of the situation.
It's all very tiresome.
Man of Honour
Thats just to confuse the foreigner's.
Nah, it's because of the foreigners. Bloody foreigners taking our words!
Going off on a tangent, there is a slight interest in making a form of modern English that's more, well, English. Modern English is a weird mash of languages stewed in a pot of English and seasoned with apparently random scatterings of who knows what. Some people have some interest in creating what modern English might have been without so much influence from other languages. Anglish, a modern version of Anglisc.
https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/What_is_Anglish?
An example, from the beginning of their page on the USA:
Irrelevant, but possibly interesting.
I was thinking in a broader context, not specifically about this person. A whole lot of English is only "fairly obvious" to people who are very familiar with it. Using "they" as both singular and plural isn't really any less "fairly obvious" than many things about English, such as using "you" as both singular and plural. English mostly dropped gendered language centuries ago. Why not drop the remaining bit? I argue that it does more harm than good, so binning it would be a good thing.