zenmonkey wrote:
I was thinking about a question or two I might want to ask and then it occurred to me I could post it to you before the event.
Have you considered that for those languages that have strongly gendered grammatical that the neutral isn't reserved for objects? For example, using grammatical neutral in German does not remove the gender identity of an unmarried woman - das Madchen, das Fraulein, das Madel (primarly used by adult women to designate other adult women) are all neutral and all female.
Gender has two concepts for me: grammatical gender, which to me is simply morphology, and natural gender, which is how we determine whether to use he or she in English. The natural and grammatical gender may not coincide. But we still cannot use "het" (which is how you would refer to neuter nouns) when referring to "het meisje", even though het meisje is neuter (and similar for das Mädchen in German). So here natural gender trumps grammatical gender. This often happens in gendered languages.
Or perhaps that gender typed romance languages may allow for more play within the language? A language like Spanish, as difficult as it may seem in grammatical gender typing, also allows for wordplay that just cannot occur in English. One can say "el papacito" or "la papacita" which is a type of fluid construct that one can play with. While "los chicas" might be grammatically incorrect, I've heard it as a repossessed structure (in one case in a friendly and informal way for a cross-dressing group). Some gender neutral structures are reserved for objects "eso" o "esto" are improper for people but so is "esta" or "este" (and my mother would have raised an eyebrow if I ever addressed someone with "this one" or "that one"). Spanish also has a lot of epicene structures which are gendered independent of the sex of the subject - the frog (la rana), the judge (el juez), etc... Or words that are ambiguous in grammatical gender like sea (el/la mar) and depend on use. And obviously the language has grammatically gendered generic neutrals plurals which may include people of both sexes - like "las enfermeras".
Sure, but my key point is this - this is about gender pronouns, and that's different from gender on nouns. The real issue is how do we create pronouns so that non-binary people don't feel excluded, and Spanish doesn't have a way of doing that, even though certain cases in the gender system allow for ambiguity despite the grammatical gender.
Which refers me back to my previous point - las enfermeras is of course a feminine plural noun (because nurses were nearly always women in the past, although it can refer to men nowadays as well). But if we know we are referring to a group of male nurses, we say "ellos se ocupan de los pacientes" because we know we are referring to men. And that's what I mean by natural gender. Pronouns are often but not always determined by natural gender as opposed to grammatical gender. And precisely that leads to neuter pronouns being completely unsuitable for non-binary people, because normally neuter pronouns cannot refer to people at all even if the grammatical gender of the noun is neuter. They can only refer to objects or things or perhaps animals instead.
If you call a trans person "het" in Dutch, that is the HEIGHT of offensive.