Professor Z
@Professor42 · 4:23
Prounous She/Her-He/Him. Rant/Advice?
Greetings. Well, professor 42 is I am doing this well today to do sort of a rant slash swell asking for advice. So I want to paint a hypothetical situation. But in order to do this, I want you to keep something in mind. And that is two things. Pronouns, as in she or her, he or him, and gender neutral names. So one example of a gender neutral name would be Skyler. So Skyler is a name that could be a male or female voice
Sontaia Briggs
@PKBriggs · 5:00
Right. And I think it's because when people look at me like how you said you heard a voice, not you. But I'm assuming this is hypothetical. It's you. Either way, you heard a voice, you said it had attributes that you associate with. Right. Like the dominant community has attributed to what is femaleness or maleness. But again, those are assumptions
Sontaia Briggs
@PKBriggs · 1:14
Oh, so sorry for the long swell and having to do another one. But the last thing I was going to say as a person, just, you know, full disclosure, I did a lesbian woman. I misgender people sometimes I have in the past, I've I haven't in a while. So it can happen to me. It can happen to anybody. And the greatest lesson I learned is just to not assume
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Professor Z
@Professor42 · 1:05
Pk. Thank you for your response. Is always I think that the swells that you did do offer very good insight. And I think your suggestion your both suggestions of just addressing by name and also not assuming. I think that was probably my mistake. Even if you do have characteristics that could give indication of a certain gender, I think you have again a good suggestion of just address them by name and leave genderpronounced everything out of it. Thank you for your response
Sontaia Briggs
@PKBriggs · 0:33
Hey professor, you are quite welcome. It can be confusing, right? And like I said, as a person in the community, still sometimes I get it wrong. And once I started doing that and things just got a lot easier. Nothing to figure out, just use the name. And yes, I was looking at that. I was thinking today I better enjoy this 50 deg or whatever it is because it is not looking pretty in the next couple of days. It's not looking pretty
Finley Ave
@finnave · 2:00
But usually you don't have to bring pronouns in until you're talking about that person to someone else. For example, if you were on that call and you needed to bring in somebody else to help out with the situation or whatever, you might start out by explaining that Emily here is having problems with their dishwasher and really whatever it might be, from what I understand and I could be completely wrong. But most people aren't going to be offended by gender neutral pronouns
Tasha Frank
@NLOFrank · 4:59
But I wanted to bring that up to say that please be kind to yourself, you know what your intentions were and it sounds like you have taken it on board and you're learning and you're going to look into a bit more details and try new things that work for you in terms of how you address people and stuff. So it sounds like you're doing everything right and everything you can. We all misgender
Paul OMahony
@omaniblog · 4:06
Not sure how to start. Maybe I will start my new reformed life by saying I'm he him, I am being educated and today is the first day of my life without using the word guys in groups that I don't know what gender everybody wants to be referred to as. I have often in WhatsApp group said Hi guys, let's do this or let's do that anyway, whatever
Finley Ave
@finnave · 3:13
Hey, Paul, you brought a couple things up that really sparked my attention. First off, addressing a group of people as guys, that's something I'm actually guilty of myself. And I don't know. It to me, it feels like something that's just underneutral, even though it is definitely not. So that's something I need to work on. And thank you for bringing that up
Tasha Frank
@NLOFrank · 2:53
I just wanted to say again that I'm really loving this conversation and thank you so much to everyone who's contributed to this. It's just a really good example of how these conversations can go, but we do sometimes get things wrong. Some of the conversation has been talking about when we use different terminology, and I am the same as some others. I still refer to a group of people as guys
Sontaia Briggs
@PKBriggs · 2:54
So that's how I got to become more educated because I only knew my own context, which is I'm 45. So I have a different sort of experience as being a queer person. And I've just started using that word back in the day. That was not a word that people like my age range used. It was associated with like negative experiences. So you just say gay and I use gay as in relative. But that's not obviously some people are not comfortable with that