[ SECRET POST #2946 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2946 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 038 secrets from Secret Submission Post #421.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[ariakas]

Xe/Ze aren't commonly used at all. They also sound pretty awful, though I wouldn't have objected if the author had gone that route. "They" is the most commonly used gender neutral singular pronoun by far.

And I don't know, "he" was used in a gender neutral sense in English for centuries. The author explains that it's being used in a gender neutral way pretty much right at the outset, and once you wrap your head around that it's simple. OP is literally the only person I've ever encountered who has struggled with it, and they've made it clear they didn't actually understand what was going on (the character they keep referring to as "misgendered" isn't masculine gendered and is never stated to be such; they're gendered correctly as "she" in the translation of their language we're ostensibly reading. To claim that said character absolutely must be gendered "he" simply because they're biologically male is... ...off the wall bonkers for transgendered person, frankly.)

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Some of the other gender-neutral ways of describing relationships run into other problems. "Sibling" is more distant than "sister." "Daughter of the house," carries a specific relationship and role that "child of the house" does not, and the character in question is hardly a child in age. It's turtles all the way down unfortunately, and I think Leckie would have gotten criticism no matter how she tried to uncouple sex from gender.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, it seems I was misinformed, then.

Still, if you wanted to make a point about being all "gender neutral", the author should have chosen a neutral pronoun, no matter how "clumsy" they thought it sounded because imo, language doesn't exist in a vacuum and just because the author decided "she will be used as neutral in this book", it doesn't mean people will read it that way.

[(Anonymous)]

There is no good, standard, agreed-upon gender neutral pronoun in English. When words that have no English equivalent are translated into English, we have to pick from what's available. We can't make things up, and we can't use words that the average person is going to find difficult to follow. The convention, when coming across the gender neutral, is to translate it as masculine. All Leckie did was flip the convention.

[(Anonymous)]

Understood.

[ariakas]

I don't disagree that a gender neutral pronoun might not have been a better call, my only beef with OP's argument is that someone was "misgendered" when they absolutely weren't.

Heck, even if it was awkward, the only way to make it less awkward is through continual use. It used to be you'd get chewed out for an "improper" singular use of "they" - now it's perfectly normal and natural under most circumstances. I wouldn't mind a bit if English went to "they" as default pronoun until informed otherwise. It's already heading that way from the looks of it. As it stands right now, though... a whole novel of it could get confusing and tiresome, as you'd be constantly wondering if it was intended as singular or plural.

[(Anonymous)]

I hadn't considered that. True, different "they"s might get confusing, though it probably depends on the context. I think using they as a neutral pronoun feels pretty natural, but that's probably because English is not my native language.