[seba_dos1]

Of course it narrows down specificity. My point is that in today's society, it seems mostly useless to me. Most of the time I don't need to narrow it down this way at all. This may have been different in a world where people were segregated by sex so intensively that half of the population didn't even have the right to vote, but today I fail to see the usefulness of it.

[guerrilla]

> but today I fail to see the usefulness of it.

Then you fail to see the usefulness of specificity and efficiency in speech, which is both weird and explains why it took you so many words to say that.

[seba_dos1]

If I'll want to refer to you and this conversation when talking to someone else, I don't need to refer to your gender at all. Just like I don't need to refer to your race, your social class or color of your hair. Stopping to consider whether I should use "he" or "she" (or maybe something else) is the exact opposite of efficiency in speech.

It seems to me that it's actually you who misunderstands the usefulness of specificity. It's not useful to be overspecific.

[guerrilla]

Obviously it depends on your goals and the context. Both specificity and generality are useful. To ban one is foolishness. They coalesced into short words for a reason: people use them, a lot.

[seba_dos1]

We can exchange truisms all day ;) But that doesn't change the fact that in my experience specificity related to gender pronouns is needed (or even helpful) only in a very tiny minority of everyday contexts.

For the record, my native tongue is much more gendered than English (it has gendered nouns, verbs and adjectives; not just pronouns) - I don't understand how it's useful at all, I don't miss it in English.

[TOMDM]

I think you're underselling the importance people find in their gender.

Personally I agree, for me gender holds little importance, if I'm being most true to myself I identify as non binary simply because I don't really identify with a gendered label. That motivation has also lead me to being ok with being gendered male, because it just doesn't matter to me.

I understand I need to look outside of my own experience to see the importance people place on gender though. You can say all you want that most people don't care, but I feel if you misgender people, a lot of them would be very upset. Trans people are very vulnerable to suicide because of this, to diminish the importance of gender (this includes the binary, of which many trans people want to fit into) to these people is to be at best lacking in empathy.

Now if you're approaching this from a gender abolitionist angle where you believe all this attachment to gender is socialized and that we should push to de-emphasize genders role in society, then I believe that's a far more defensible position, but I feel you need to at least recognize the importance gender has to people today (socialized or not) if you're to have any hope in bridging that gap with people.

[seba_dos1]

To the contrary, I believe that people's gender is usually extremely important to them. What I find less important is having to specify their gender whenever I'm talking about them just because of language constructs. In English it isn't actually that bad, since it's limited to using correct pronouns; but in some other languages I have to be careful to not misgender anyone pretty much whenever I talk about them or to them - regardless of whether their gender is relevant to what I'm saying or not.

So I'm only a grammatical gender abolitionist :) I don't see the point of gendering people when I talk about them unless I talk specifically about their gender. As a happy side effect, this would also massively reduce the risk of accidentally misgendering someone.