Comment on How embarrassing
dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 2 weeks agoYou didn’t need to do all that work. You could have just clicked on drag’s profile. It says drag uses person-independent drag/dragself pronouns. You could have looked at drag’s post history and seen posts about drag’s gender. You decided to reinvent the wheel.
The grammatical problem with this is that the ‘pronoun’ they are using is their own nickname.
And you messed up. Drag isn’t drag’s nickname. Baator, the post you were replying to was about drag having comments removed that said drag isn’t a nickname.
Your analysis didn’t add to the discussion because you were two steps behind everybody who either read drag’s bio or read the post. And that’s the thing about understanding us queer people. If you want to understand us, then listen to us. Ask questions if the answers aren’t obvious to you. You don’t explain your own assumptions to other people as if they’re authoritative information. That’s just causing more problems for queer people.
If you had clicked on drag’s profile, you would have seen posts about drag’s gender on Blahaj Zone and lemmy.ca, where people asked questions and drag answered. Those people have it figured out. They know how to listen to queer people. Why doesn’t everyone?
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Thats what I did Drag, that’s what I said I did.
I did linguistic analysis by reading your profile and post/comment history.
I am queer myself, and I am not talking about your gender, I am talking about your communication style.
I have known tons of queer, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, etc people and you are the only person I’ve ever met that uses ‘person independent pronouns.’
If your username is Dragon Rider, 99% of people will view your use of Drag or drag as a nickname, the same way John is often a shortened version of Johnathan.
99.9% of people, who use standard English grammatical rules, including myself, a former copywriter for a university newspaper, automatically interperet “drag’s” in this sentence as you referring to yourself in the third person.
99.9% of people would say “Drag isn’t my nickname.”
I know that you like to describe it as person independent pronouns, but that is a confusing, foreign concept to 99.9% of English speakers who are not part of a very small part of the already comparitively small queer community.
…
If I were to go around saying “That is not what spec said, spec claimed that blah blah blah…”, never using standard first person pronouns…
I would encounter exactly the same confusion, people would think I was referring to myself in the third person, by a nickname.
dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
But drag isn’t encountering confusion. You’re not confused. You fully understand drag and you just disagree. Your stated reason for disagreeing is that it’s confusing, but that doesn’t make sense because you’re not confused anymore. You were confused when drag made that post, but you’re not confused anymore and you still think there’s a problem. There’s not. You eventually understood, and so will everyone else.
bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
He didn’t disagree. He’s trying to tell you, creating prescriptive grammar rules will make you less understood. You have decided to add a conlang feature to the English language. Your expectations on this are impossible to meet, because it requires the people that you are speaking with both research you AND internalize this rule only you have prescribed.
dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
It worked when other trans people decided that pronouns are something a person chooses for themself, rather than something society chooses for a person. People have just forgotten that. Drag will remind them, and it will be fine.