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Archive].
I'll take a sincere stab at explaining, but first know that government documents are irrelevant and a legal argument is the worst kind of argument. We use the name Patty not because it's on government ID but because it's recognizable; we also use Bibby and I used Peter for the time frame when that was accurate, I believe that's respect-neutral but that's not necessarily a factor. This is casual conversation, we aim to be understood. The culture over here is generally disrespectful of gender, and occasionally for reasons more diverse and insightful than lol tranny.
Explanation.
It's a bad comparison, a name identifies an individual whereas pronouns identify groups with shared characteristics, they function very differently in language. A name does not comment on the qualities of the thing it identifies, nouns and pronouns do. Nouns as neutral examples: if I say ‘ball’ we know it’s a roughly spherical item, ‘ocean’ is a large body of water connected to the greater global body of water, ‘chocolate milk’ is a dairy or dairy-like cocoa flavoured liquid for drinking, the noun functions to identify the characteristics of a thing; pronouns refer to nouns in shorthand. Because English doesn’t gender nouns, our pronoun usage in general is extremely gender neutral compared to most languages (in particular
its and
their). There’s only one place gendered pronouns matter in the English language and on that we have a fundamental disagreement.
It's a recent assertion in certain cultures that pronouns have been misused for all of human existence due to misinterpretation of the nouns man and woman, which I find a fairly bold claim to make. I give gender the burden of proof since it challenges the existing framework and is oppositional, making me pick a side. I find that traditional pronouns describe what is observable and universally understood as man + woman = babby and should be preserved in language, whereas gender pronouns describe tenuously connected and unverifiable sets not worth replacing the originals. Gender pronouns, specifically because they contradict sex, are legal argument against what is objectively accurate, and as an accuracy autist I can't accept it.
There was a time when I used probably the polite normie setting, neutral pronouns for sympathetic-seeming trans people, sex pronouns for the deviants, however I learned that as per the culture it’s inadequate to just be polite, one has to actually believe it and it’s not my place to decide. In light of this, I now use exclusively sex-based pronouns, preferring to opt out of anything that tells me to use neither my observations nor my opinion but their belief. In theory I’m fine with not calling you a man but I won’t call you a woman, I would prefer if that didn’t hurt feelings but it’s the lie that’s the problem, not the truth. I continue to think they/them applied to all gender-unknown people is inoffensive but am aware that this does comply.
