It’s just not “elite” “liberal” colleges, folks. I teach at a non-elite directional, and our syllabus asks students to let us know what pronouns they would prefer.
It’s courtesy, people. You can handle it. It’s just not that difficult. Not in Ann Arbor, not in my nondescript run of the mill university. But Fox News has you all babbling. Congrats.
And @scipio --frankly, I’m disappointed.
I am over 50 and no longer have enough brain cells to relearn the English language and 30 more funky new pronouns. These newfangled ideas discriminate against the elderly population! If necessary, find a single new pronoun that means “other.”
@garland I say scrap the constitution and laws. I’m a compulsive liar and thief so all is good, right? Thanks for your Porsche and courtesy.
< You can handle it. It’s just not that difficult.>
It may be easy for you, but it is difficult for me. If you have a class of 500 students, and they want to be addressed by 30 different pronouns, and they are very sensitive if somebody makes a mistake, and Prof. is referred to HR for making a mistake, and Prof risks loosing job / reputation for making a mistake …
Hey, it is difficult! It’s courtesy, people, choose ONE pronoun and lets respect each other.
…??? This is incomprehensible logic.
I work at a graduate art school. We solicit students’ legal gender, gender identity if it doesn’t match legal gender, and preferred pronoun in our admissions application. I am good with whatever, but I have a difficult time with the pronoun one student asked us to use: they/them. I have trouble using a plural pronoun for the singular! 
I do too, @kelsmom, but it’s actually accurate. We’ve been using “they/their” as gender neutrals in our language for a long time.
Let’s face it: we all use it.
Only one pronoun works for everyone : “Comrade”. Perhaps that was the original intention.
Singular they, which The Post officially adopted in its Style guide in 2015, is already a common habit in American speech. An example: “Everyone wants their cat to succeed.”
I really think the example it’s more about using “everyone’ as a plural noun, then using " they” as a singular.
" Alicia wants their cat to succeed" would be very confusing to most.
Sure, because you have a preconception of Alicia as a female name.
What about “My friend wants their cat to succeed”? I say that all the time, when the gender doesn’t matter to the story or the person doesn’t know the friend. I make an effort to say “their” on the internet because the default is “he,” and I cannot count how many times I’ve been referred to as “guy,” “dude,” “man,” “bud.” It grates.
The way I understand this sentence is that Alicia is married or lives with a boyfriend or a roommate and they share a cat.
How often do pronouns even come up in a college classroom? It would seem like titles would come up a lot if students are called on by last name. But pronouns? I really can’t think of many times that with even come up.
Maya, it doesn’t really. Which is a large part of why this is an absolute non-issue in the classroom.
(Titles don’t come up either. We use first names. Whatever their preferred first name is.)
If such a non-issue, makes you wonder why U-M spent the time on it.
This is not about gender sensitivity. We know it’s not because the strident insistence that everyone change from perfectly valid vocabulary the minute a few take offense at it, has been going on for a long time.
Take the example of “retarded.” It simply meant slowed down or delayed in development, which rather adequately described people like my own daughter. What happened? Rude people defiled the word by using it as an insult. But rather than decide that the rude people were the problem, the SJW’s of that day pronounced the WORD itself to be the issue.
“Disabled” used to be considered the polite alternative to the now disapproved words like “lame” and “crippled,” but before long it was suggested that “disabled” was insulting since it implied inability. “Differently-abled” was suggested as an alternative, but for obvious reasons never caught on. Handicapped became the usual replacement word, but there has been some distaste expressed over that word too.
Another example is the word “janitor.” How on earth did that become a demeaning term? Who knows! I guess a small minority of rude people also misused it. Regardless, when years ago I wasn’t aware of the fact the term had fallen out of favor and dared utter it, I was accused by a teacher of insulting a school staff member. And I’m a native speaker, so keeping up isn’t just a problem for immigrants. The powers-that-invent-affronts had determined that the correct term was “custodian.” No doubt the day the latter is deemed to be insulting, it will have to be replaced as well.
Consider the racial term “black.” It came into usage after first the term “Negro” and next “colored” fell into disrepute. This was justifiable, I agree. However it didn’t end there. The preferred term “black” soon began to lose some respectability as well for various reasons, and so people started replacing it with “African-American.” Unfortunately, that particular designation is a bit confusing since it seems to denote those who have recently immigrated from Africa and become naturalized US citizens. If I recall, there was some uproar from African immigrants over that. Now, since we don’t want to offend other non-white groups by leaving them out of discussions of minorities, “people of color” seems to be becoming the PC-validated catch-all. I’m sorry, but when I hear the phrase “people of color,” I wonder why it isn’t considered terribly offensive since it sounds an awful lot like the old allegedly racist label “colored.” (My husband thinks “people of color” is very odd, having grown up in a country where the group of indigenous people who paint their bodies red are called, translated, “the colored ones.”) So we have almost come full circle in the language and I think that is in indication that this changing of acceptable words will be a never-ending and fruitless cycle. The problem is true racism and rudeness, not the words themselves.
This pronoun outrage is truly unjustifiable, since I don’t think “he” or “she” have been very commonly used as insults. This is a form of immature, attention-seeking rebellion that if not stopped now will spread like a cancer to other categories of people. King Cole is suddenly going to claim he’s offended you called him “old” and will accuse you of ageism. After all, people have used “old” as a euphemism for “senile” and “weak,” haven’t they? You should have used the term “senior” instead. Oh wait, that sounds too hierarchical. Distinguished? What, do you mean younger people AREN’T distinguished?
What about the label of “student”? Doesn’t that imply a subordinate and inferior position? After all, who’s to say the student isn’t actually smarter than his teacher and therefore the teacher should learn from him/her/zir? It’s a demeaning over-generalization to suggest students should always be just learning rather than teaching. What if students decide they are offended by the word and demand they be referred to as colleagues or something else. Oops, did I say “teacher”? So sorry. I should have remembered that some professionals dislike that term as juvenile and prefer “instructor.”
I give up.
Feeling like you’re neither male nor female has nothing to do with those labels being used as insults. I think you’re coming at this from the wrong direction and therefore “giving up” when there’s a wall to understanding in your way. Come around the front, there’s a door.
Feeling like you’re neither male nor female doesn’t give people the right to decide gender neutral pronouns such as “they” are insults. While people have the right to say they prefer a gender neutral term, they don’t have the right to insist everyone else change their vocabulary to accommodate them.
It’s like calling someone who has changed their name by the old one. “It’s too hard! I don’t care that you have a new name, I understood the old one better and it inconveniences me to have to remember what you do or don’t like! Your new one isn’t even a real name!”
It’s just polite to not insist upon using something that person regards as wrong.