My perception as a nonbinary is that this order of events makes things difficult
Many non-binary people adopt it as their pronoun. People get practice referring to specific named individuals with it: Pat said they might be early.
Usage expands into cases where the person’s gender is not relevant: The person who gave me a ride home from the dance last night doesn’t take care of their car.
Edit: A more succinct way of saying this is; making the neutral pronoun mean “third gender” will make it harder for it to come to mean “indeterminate gender”, although The Third Gender is often defined as indeterminacy, I’m not sure how true or obvious that is for a lot of nbs
Having the nonbinary identity enter public consciousness seems to have caused the neutral pronoun to take on a weight and colour that makes it harder to apply it to non-nonbinary people. In English, since use in situations where gender is irrelevant is already grammatical, so I’d guess this has a negligible effect on usage (though it does seem to have caused a notable amount of brain inflammation in terfs and reactionaries that I must mention but probably shouldn’t go into depth about), but in a different place, seems like this might be more of a thing
If you make it about identity first, gender-neutral terms become charged, and the second phase of making them common and truly neutral and uncharged will be delayed.
Some other force I’m not aware of could overwhelm these ones. I just find it a little hard to imagine. Oh well. Most cultural shifts, at some point, were hard to imagine.
But, as an alternative: The internet is an environment where reference-without-knowing-gender is likely to frequently occur. Maybe it would be better to start by advocating the use of genderless pronouns on spanish internet as a default, and talk about why that’s important for everyone (why is it important for everyone?), and then start talking about nonbinary people later.
Having the nonbinary identity enter public consciousness seems to have caused the neutral pronoun to take on a weight and colour that makes it harder to apply it to non-nonbinary people. In English, since use in situations where gender is irrelevant is already grammatical, so I’d guess this has a negligible effect on usage (though it does seem to have caused a notable amount of brain inflammation in terfs and reactionaries that I must mention but probably shouldn’t go into depth about), but in a different place, seems like this might be more of a thing
This isn’t how I think the path of ‘they’ has gone in English? Using it where gender is irrelevant is super new (“my friend said they might be late”) and felt wrong to me ten years ago. Having there be specific individuals who go by ‘they’ feels like it has done a lot to get people to practice and be comfortable with ‘they’, though it’s possible I’m paying too much attention to my local communities?
It’s interesting to hear that, I didn’t realise that much change had occurred.
I would guess that the normalisation would have come from people spending a lot of time online/being in more situations where they don’t want to and don’t have to disclose a person’s gender. Hm. I can see how the “they seem queer, don’t want to assume their gender” might have promoted adoption by a lot.
My perception as a nonbinary is that this order of events makes things difficult
Edit: A more succinct way of saying this is; making the neutral pronoun mean “third gender” will make it harder for it to come to mean “indeterminate gender”, although The Third Gender is often defined as indeterminacy, I’m not sure how true or obvious that is for a lot of nbs
Having the nonbinary identity enter public consciousness seems to have caused the neutral pronoun to take on a weight and colour that makes it harder to apply it to non-nonbinary people. In English, since use in situations where gender is irrelevant is already grammatical, so I’d guess this has a negligible effect on usage (though it does seem to have caused a notable amount of brain inflammation in terfs and reactionaries that I must mention but probably shouldn’t go into depth about), but in a different place, seems like this might be more of a thing
If you make it about identity first, gender-neutral terms become charged, and the second phase of making them common and truly neutral and uncharged will be delayed.
Some other force I’m not aware of could overwhelm these ones. I just find it a little hard to imagine. Oh well. Most cultural shifts, at some point, were hard to imagine.
But, as an alternative: The internet is an environment where reference-without-knowing-gender is likely to frequently occur. Maybe it would be better to start by advocating the use of genderless pronouns on spanish internet as a default, and talk about why that’s important for everyone (why is it important for everyone?), and then start talking about nonbinary people later.
This isn’t how I think the path of ‘they’ has gone in English? Using it where gender is irrelevant is super new (“my friend said they might be late”) and felt wrong to me ten years ago. Having there be specific individuals who go by ‘they’ feels like it has done a lot to get people to practice and be comfortable with ‘they’, though it’s possible I’m paying too much attention to my local communities?
It’s interesting to hear that, I didn’t realise that much change had occurred.
I would guess that the normalisation would have come from people spending a lot of time online/being in more situations where they don’t want to and don’t have to disclose a person’s gender. Hm. I can see how the “they seem queer, don’t want to assume their gender” might have promoted adoption by a lot.