Do you think people will prefer gender-inclusive language in literature?

None of which I speak. I specifically said, I speak four languages and only one of them does it. And I don't even speak French that well any more.

So what happens if the table identifies as male in French?

 

I've been reading these posts with some interest. I have this kneejerk reaction of "oh, come on!" when it comes to the gender-discussion, which then gradually ebbs away and makes room for discussion. I think the initial reaction comes from the usually needlessly offended tone of "don't assume my gender!"
Life becomes a whole lot easier if you realize you're dealing with humans and they make assumptions. I don't see why simply and preferably politely informing someone you are in fact the other gender is such a problem.
Then again, I don't see why a lot of things should be so difficult and quite frankly, I've long given up trying to make sense of people.

However, I noticed a glaring absence of discussion about the banning of books.
The act of banning suggests that the ones doing the banning have no faith in the people potentially reading the book to be banned. No book should be banned and I'm gonna go out on a limb here by saying this includes two of the greatest causes of unrest like the Bible and Mein Kampf.
Yes, it's painfully obvious that especially the latter is a deeply offensive (and badly written) book and I feel I should clearly state that I don't support any of the ideas in them (including the bible again), but if we want to read them, if only to learn how not to go about life, we should be able to.
Same goes for books with stereotypes or phrases that became offensive as time went on. It's part of your history, that how it went in the days of your grandfathers. Banning effectively destroys the capacity to learn.

As for writing gender-neutral in these current times. I can't speak for other writers. I don't do it, simply because I - and thus my characters - know what genders they are. I've tried, but it feels fake when I do it and I believe it becomes more offensive than when I write non-neutral. Even for the one MtF girl in it. She sorts out me and other characters where needed.

 

I would think that banning the Bible might require a longer limb than not doing so.

 

I don't mind gendered terms. I like "foreman", "mailman", and "policeman" even for women. They sound cooler than "-person." Man as in humanity, so why not? Likewise, for wish-fulfillment characters, they're all Mary Sue, even the boys. "Gary Stu" just doesn't have that same ring.

Of all the things to be pissed off in this world, "-man" is not one of them. It's just not worth it.

As someone who has studied language, male terms are meant to be male or neutral, depending on the context. German is extremely complex when it comes to the masculine/feminine pronouns, and english, a descendant of german, simplifies this by having male terms pick up the slack. Irish gaelic also does this.

 

I'm sorry, it's "hupersonity" now.

Wait. I thought I was doing a dumb joke, but I just invented a new science fiction word.
Thanks!

We run into this problem every now and then on some of the shows I work. We usually title a person with their name and their function, which means that if we have an actress on, we go for the gender-neutral version of "actor" and it just looks wrong. People at home will be going, "they know she's a girl, right?"
And usually someone will start about how stupid it is that to avoid using genders we just use the male version. There's no winning that fight.

 

Isn't this simply a question of what the character or person being spoke about identifies as?

I don't understand. We're still going to call our female characters women, and refer to them as she/her even if they are transgendered. Vice versa for men. You're probably going to figure out the gender identity of the character through context, not a pronoun.

 

I asked my dining table, and it didn't answer.

 

There are alternatives that don't involve "person": mail carrier, police officer, fire fighter, etc. What's interesting is how often gender is attached to one of these terms if the person is female. My daughter gets referred to as a female police officer on a regular basis but no one ever refers to my son as a male fire fighter.

 

I say, why bother with alternatives? People gettin' all up in arms over nothing. Though it is kinda weird someone might specify "female cop" if the person's gender is already known.

 

It's a progressive thing. Don't worry yourself about it.

 

Sadly, Kugelschrieber, in this day and age it's almost blasphemous to say that. If anyone has read my work here, he or she will be more than aware how accommodating I am when it comes to "otherness", but that only extends so far. At the risk of being incendiary here, I'm not sure this gender ideological society we live in is helpful. Intersectionality, identity relativism and identity politics are just about the most unfortunate trends I've seen in recent times. I've seen people called some pretty gruesome insults simply for stating that they believe biology has precedence over social trends. I'm still trying to work it all out for myself, but I'm more inclined to fall on the side of traditional biology. I once spoke to someone who believed that a man who on one day wakes up thinking he's a woman is a genuine bona fide woman. I argued for about an hour why this might just be a psychological abnormality, but I didn't seem to get anywhere... I'm all for making people feel safe, but even questioning certain narratives can result in some fairly angry responses.

Edit: I'll continue writing white males and white females because that's the world I grew up in and the one I relate to the most. (I'm not even thirty). I don't care about "whiteness" and "blackness". It's just skin pigmentation. It's literally meaningless. I've seen some fairly dodgy publications that exclude white men from even submitting. Not helpful and quite ironic to boot!

 

Anyone that tries to follow this will destroy their creativity. Little hyperbolic but look at what it's actually doing from a writer's perspective.

Ditching words like father, mother, sister, brother and all the endearments these words/catergories come with will kill your intimacy and tone because it buys into a lie that a parent is a parent - there is no special relationship you can achieve based on gender, of father or mother and certainly none that cross match. Parent child that's it. In this world there's no such thing as Daddy's girl, Daddy's little sweetheart, Daddy's boy. Or the any of special and or difficult relationships you can obtain from a mother. Either or will do and the label parent has a detached tone not quite verifying blood relation. I'm not saying you cannot ever use parent. I'm saying in lieu of where you'd use mother or father it will look ridiculous. i.e. - I kissed my parent goodnight.

And that's the chain reaction when word choice is coerced when they want you to look at your characters family and not see - mother, father, son but parents and child. The interactions, the motivations start to deaden and you've got three choices - you'll allow your story to be muted or you'll go out of your way to fix the stifling with either over compensation - bring back stereotypes or flat out reveal the identity, which at that point it would've been less trouble to be honest and call a mother a mother. It's not a dirty word.

 

I like distinctions so inclusive and traditional gender language works for me, I mean art expression and free speech.

 

The Navy and the Coast Guard have not given in, at least as far as I know.

Ships are still referred to in the feminine in formal English. It may be shocking to the lubber to read in a Navy document that the USS Ronald Reagan is easily identified by her unique superstructure. I believe boats are neuter in German, as, perplexingly, is the noun "Mädchen."

Since radio communication is directed to the vessel, not the crew, I suppose while underway I'm a she, too.

So, come here often, sailor?

 

Okay, so I write in a fast pased genre where authors come out with new material each month and the readers are the type to be inclined to like inclusion. Right now readers are asking for disabled main characters and they also like a varied cast (multiple races and sexual preferences). I've seen people asking for tourettets, missing limbs, deaf, mute, blind, Asperger's. Again, this is on top of a varied racial/sexual preference cast. I have yet to see much ask for gender identity fluidity but I write romance where gender fluidity is more of a kink than an widely used thing (real talk: women want alpha assholes and submissive women).

That said, I don't think it's a bad idea to have side characters that are gender fluid or transexual. At this point I think writing fully white washed, hetero, and cis characters is sort of... Non inclusive? Like it's not bad but there are people paying attention.

Gender neutral terms should be reserved for gender neutral character.

 

Even writing in third person, I believe integration of the characters and their psyche is important in how one goes about terming or describing anything. The world isn't a perfect place. A lecturer once informed me about 'The Death of The Author'. Probably the only valuable thing I picked up after switching to an English degree for awhile. Narrating fallible people...reflections of reality. I don't know. Burned out.

 

I think that's exclusivity, technically speaking. People can be suspicious of the word as it sounds negative but this is of course how languages are constructed and how most people view the world. It's only with the rise of relativism and postmodernism thst things have become ultra-inclusive--and sometimes to the detriment of reason and logic. Male and female, this or that object, good or bad, meritocracy... As opposed to fluid everything, the rise of feelings over logic, and those silly word police on Twitter who demand you say a certain word lest you offend, etc.

 

Language evolves over time, and sooner or later there will probably be words that unambiguously describe various gender manifestations. My problem, at the moment, is that many writers who don't want their characters to identify as male or female seem to want to co-opt other existing words that are gender-neutral—but which have other specific meanings in our traditional language. To identify a gender-neutral person as 'they or them' for example. Why? Why not invent another word, instead of co-opting a word that nearly every English speaker is going to assume means plural ...whether gender neutral or not.

One of my writer friends (in real life) attempted to write a short story with a gender-neutral character in it. (An angel, who, in this story, is always gender neutral.) However, when my friend referred to this angel as 'they' or 'them,' the confusion soon became hilarious ...as there were several different characters in each scene at the same time. She read the story out loud to us, and we soon—literally—lost the plot.

By all means, don't use male/female words to describe people who don't fit those characteristics. But we need to invent NEW words, so meanings are clear—rather than co-opting words that already mean something else, and will cause confusion in readers. I'm not sure why there is so much opposition to this idea. Sci-Fi writers have been doing it for yonks.

 

Sadly the trend for new pronouns has been taken to the extreme. That's why there's zir/zer/xir/xer and all manner of Protean labels now used by certain political ideologies. I'm sorry, I think I'll use the traditional labels that have been around for centuries.

 

Yeah, but if you use them for non-traditional meanings—especially such a plethora of different meanings—it's going to get confusing for readers. Sooner or later, I suspect, some of the protean pronouns will drop by the wayside, while others catch on. If we want to celebrate diversity, we need to be willing to create diversification in our language. Not just co-opt something that's already in use, and arbitrarily decide to use it for a different purpose.

Humans are supposedly a very creative species. Surely we can create a few more pronouns. Just like we create new words for technologies. A computer is not a 'book.' A telephone is not a 'voice.' An airplane is not a 'bird.' A single gender neutral individual is not a 'them.'

 

sure we can, but the real question I think is whether we should.

 

I don't disagree with anything you've said, really. I agree that using 'them' is silly. And, yes, we can create more pronouns, but who gets to be the judge of this? What do certain of these pronouns even mean? I'm not going to start referring to someone as Zir because he or she asks me to. This is a very contentious issue at the moment, but it's fairly straightforward for me. Yes, using this pronoun would be a kindness and it'd take a second to say, but I'm not going to change my own worldview and my understanding of reality to accommodate an arbitrary made-up set of letters. Honestly? I put the more "out there" pronouns on the same level as "Otherkin." Look that one up.

Anyway, I realise this is getting a bit political. I'll stop.

 

Germans get away with der, die, and das, which is like him, her, and it. Why did “it” get demonized in English?

Now, before anyone goes ballistic over my suggestion that any person is an it, think about how many gender-woke activists who are comfortable with another form of “it.”

It’s not correct to say “activists that are comfortable,” we must honor our fellow thinkers by saying “activists who are comfortable.” We see the former almost as often as the latter.

If we’re not offended by “that” instead of “who,” why is “it” so off-putting?

 

I like "ye" for angels. Sounds almost traditional.