Day 81: Pronouns

Question: Will we just have unisex pronouns in the future and nothing else?

Thoughts: A few years ago, my understanding of the LGBTQ+ community was this: Nobody likes being boxed into anything, nobody wants to be asked to label themselves or others. Everybody just wants equality and to have the freedom to be who they are irrespective of societal constructs - of which boxing and labeling are a part. And that unfortunately, in the journey toward freedom, equality and attaining those basic rights - boxing and labeling had inadvertently become commonplace. Which, of course, is understandable given how much change is feared and moreover how much people fear something they do not seem to understand. Like it’s the unknown.

Anyway, with all this boxing and labeling came the so-called “problem” of pronouns. And after talking to a bunch of people, what I do not understand is this: There seems to be a group of people who do not want to have to apparently complicate their lives by learning to address people with different pronouns. What is particularly puzzling to me is the argument that the pronoun “they” being used for a singular person and a group of people is just confusing.

Here’s the thing, in languages such as ours - pretty much any Indian language, which by the way are the native tongues of all these people - the word that we use when referring to someone with respect - whether it be a group or a singular person is the equivalent of “they”. We don’t say “s/he’s coming over”, at least not all the time. We say “they’re”. And when people don’t know how many or who, we clarify through furthermore communication. There is literally no confusion created, and that seems to be obvious because well - 1. The language isn’t dead yet, we all speak it the same and 2. Since it isn’t dead and being used everywhere all the time, if it did in fact pose a problem, wouldn’t we have come up with a solution for it in either the form of sentences or completely different words for these things?

And moving on, Indian languages aren’t the only ones with this property. Taking a step even further, there are SO MANY pronouns for very similar things in Japanese.

What other problems do you got?