docwebster | A couple of mini-rants.

Caveat: The following represents nothing more than itches of the intellect, and as I'm already in a particularly foul mood anyway, please take it with a large grain of salt, or I will be forced to tie a knot in your trachea. Thank you.

Christmas.

You know, I'm not by any means a stereotypical Christian. Not even close, it must be said. But I do get mightily annoyed when people don't treat it with as much respect as they would like for their religion, or lack thereof as the case may be. If you want respect, you give respect. Otherwise, kindly shut your cake hole. Hypocrisy doesn't wear well on anyone, least of all people who presumably have an intelligence quotient somewhat above that of a squashed gnat.

There is one extremely dear person whose journal shall remain nameless (because this person truly is very cool, but if they choose to react to this, it's not my place to say them nay) who had , in their journal, one of the most condescending things I've ever read. To wit, referring to Christ as "An imaginary friend". In other words, if you believe in Christ you're displaying the approximate maturity of a preschooler. Nice.

I reiterate: it's perfectly okay if you don't believe. It's perfectly okay if your religion of choice is worshipping a left handed Albanian dentist from Newark named Morty. But do *not* look down your nose at those who believe in Christ, simply because they believe in the brand that's been (arguably) number one on the metaphysical hit parade for a couple millenia or so.

And don't come to me with "Well the Christian religion has been blahblahblahing the worshippers of blahblahblah for x number of years" (or any of the innumerable variations thereupon) argument. That's not the issue here. The issue is inherent hypocrisy. In short, knock it the hell off.

Now, on to Gender neutrality.

I will be the first to admit we of the male half of the species have been - by and large but by no means all - enormous assheads since pretty much day one. But if I hear or see the phrase "Gender neutral" one more gaddam time, I am going to snap.

Guess what, folks - we have different genders. Deal with it. I am entirely weary of the efforts of some of our citizenry to make this society we live in seemingly as bland and as featureless as Pat Boone music.

I mean.. "sie"? "Hir"? (Don't even get me started on "Zie") By changing one letter, it's supposed to redress the balance? No, it just simply makes you look like you can't spell.

Ah. That's better.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I use GNPs largely as a time-saver (writing s/he and his/her all the time gets boring, too), or when I genuinely don't know the gender of the person to whom I refer. (I've known

pleonastic in passing, both here and in alt.poly, for several years now, and I don't believe I've seen a definitive pronoun attached to hir screen name yet. And sie likes it that way.)

I will certainly agree with you that there are people who take the concept of gender neutrality entirely too fucking far. But it's not something that bothers me in moderation.

If I don't know, I just use "it."

In moderation, I think it's a good way to redress the inherent chauvanism in the English language.

On the other foot, I don't think that I should have to call my mailman a "personperson."

I may not always agree with you on any given subject...but you have hit the bullseye here. Have the happiest of holiday seasons.

The squid in the corner. with eggnog and liberty for all.

Thank you.

You're welcome. Had I mentioned you have a gorgeous smile? Hee. :)

Oooh! thanks again, sweetie :)

Hear, hear, to both of your rants. Remind me to buy you a drink next time I see you in IRCland ;)

I don't know what's worse - the gender neutrality of sie/zie/hir or the whole "let's pervert the spelling of 'women'!"

{During the height of PC-ness, 'women' was spelled any of the following ways: womyn, wimmin, wymyn, etc. Basically trying to estrange itself from the -men aspect. All it did was made the people that used it look semi-literate.}

But I agree with your rants - they're both true. So true.

I mean.. "sie"? "Hir"? (Don't even get me started on "Zie") By changing one letter, it's supposed to redress the balance? No, it just simply makes you look like you can't spell.

That's not what they're about. If I don't know someone's gender, I'm going to use hie/sie and so on, because, I don't care what anyone says, He is fucking well *not* a gender-neutral pronoun. (Big button, which you, my dear, did not press. It just seems to come up in these conversations.) Sometimes, the gender of the person one is speaking of doesn't matter. There are also a few people I know who don't have an easily...categorized gender and prefer that people use hie/sie etc . when referring to them.

For me, gnps are more about preciseness of language. I've been using them for years now, and I'm sorry if they piss you off, but I doubt I'll stop anytime soon, sweetcheeks. Not that you asked me to. I'm just cranky. Hope I didn't get too much on you.

Love you.

Gesi

Thank you, Gesi.

A.

Well said. Have some vodka from one believer (though not necessarily in the same things) to another.

Ah, nectar of the gods.

To me it's a question of respect,respect others belief's and religions (no matter how loopy some are :) )
I'm no fan of so called "organized" religions..seems every religion at one time or another has oppressed some other religion...i don't like hearing people putting down any religion or holiday.
I'm also so tired of people killing others in the name of "God".
Peace and Love is the only way i say :)

If you don't mind my asking, is there anything that you would consider to be a viable alternative for addressing or referring to those who don't fit neatly into one or the other binary gender?

(I'm sorry, the rest of this turned into a bit of a tangential ramble, but I'm going to leave it here by way of explanation for why I asked the question.) For example, 'she' is an accurate description of my physical sex characteristics, but there are times when it really chafes to have that pronoun used in reference to me, because being 'she' carries a whole lot of social implications that just Don't Fit who I am. I don't usually make much noise about it because it's fairly rare for me to feel that way, but I can *definitely* understand why those who don't fit into traditional gender stereotypes-- or whose physical sex characteristics don't match their gender-- might want some alternative, and it seems only courteous to do what I can to respect those differences, if that makes sense. Then again, I have no objection to gender neutral pronouns, and use them regularly when I don't know the gender of a person to whom I'm referring, or when the gender of the person to whom I'm referring is really irrelevant, because it seems more precise and accurate than assigning a gender at random.

When dealing with pronouns in print, I just use the male as a default, unless it is specified that I am talking about a female. This is how the English language works, folks. Having attempted to learn French, I really don't want to have to gender-split all the verbs and come up with really weird GN fixes for everything.

Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Ed. took a lot of fire for using different gender pronouns throughout the books. In the Classes chapter of the Players Handbook they had example characters for the different classes, and used the correct pronoun for that character for examples in the rest of the book. Both the example Sorcerer and Wizard were female, so all pronouns relating to arcane magic were female. I had no problem with this, but it really pissed some people off.

Feh. If sexual reproduction wasn't so much fun, I'd say go back to asexual fissio

A couple of mini-rants.

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