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MixedNuts comments on Paris Meetup Saturday June 25 - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: Emile 07 June 2011 07:49AM

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Comment author: MixedNuts 07 June 2011 03:58:49PM 1 point [-]

I'll be there.

Memo that everyone ignored or hilariously misinterpreted last time because I mumble horribly, so this time I'm posting it in advance: My preferred pronouns are gender-neutral. (Your favorite set, or Spivak pronouns, or "they" in unambiguous contexts.) I insist on them in few circumstances, which LW meetups aren't part of. If you don't want to bother with them (gender-neutral French is awkward), male pronouns will be happily tolerated.

Longs meetups are more fun (at least I enjoy them more), so I suggest that we should either finish late (last time lasted past 1 AM, but almost everyone left earlier) or start early.

Walking around seems to get less fun as group size increases - it encourages independent one-on-one conversations.

Comment author: David_Gerard 07 June 2011 06:58:42PM *  -1 points [-]

Well, Wikipedia wasn't helpful ... how do you do gender-neutral pronouns, etc. (particularly the etc.) in French?

Comment author: MixedNuts 08 June 2011 06:26:54AM 2 points [-]

As far as I can tell, you don't! The handful of genderqueer people I know accept both sets, and switch (not mid-sentence, but within the course of a single conversation) when referring to themselves.

As Wikipedia says, you can use both forms in writing ("Il/elle est étudiant(e)."), but I have no idea how you're supposed to say it, and anyway it doesn't solve the problem of gendered language.

The only suggestions I've seen for real gender-neutrality are:

  • Use "y" as a gender-neutral pronoun, from (somewhat archaic) corruptions of other pronouns ("Je lui ai dit" (I told him/her) becomes "J'y ai dit").
  • End words that end in "é" (masculine) and "ée" (feminine) in "ey" for gender-neutrality. This covers a lot of adjectives, but not all.

Neither have caught on anywhere.

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