#good ol' drifting into the weeds of epistemology and metaphysics

[jodjuya]

i use it/its and it makes me much more euphoric than any other pronouns, it doesn't feel dehumanising to me at all. if you'd like to ask any questions to understand it/its better I'd be happy to answer them

Thank you for reaching out with this kind offer. I do want to understand it better, but I currently don't know what questions to ask. I'll think about it and get back to you. ❤️

I think the main thing I'm struggling to reconcile is that just because some people don't feel like it's a dehumanising pronoun, that doesn't mean it stops being one?

That is a good question, actually! How do you reconcile your euphoria with the historical/contemporary usage of "it" as an intentionally dehumanising pronoun, used to convey hatred and contempt? (Eg by white-supremacists & transphobes)

Like, a whole bunch of the feedback I've received for my bullshit has been along the lines of "your stance against it is the same as the stance transphobes take against 'they/them' pronouns! See how dumb you sound?"

When, like, the remedy for that is to accept the usage of a pronoun that those shitcunts very explicitly use as a hateful derogatory slur??

That seems like a pretty incoherent stance to take. "You're a bad person if you use the same type of argument that those assholes use, but you're also a bad person if you don't use the word that those assholes love using as part of their being-a-giant-asshole schtick!"

Like, ...what???

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This is a pretty bad question, but I can't think of how to distil it down to a better one: how/why does it not feel dehumanising to you, to use an object's pronoun rather than a person's pronoun?

I don't know the linguists' lingo for talking about these concepts so I can only do it very badly, but, like, I have the felt-sense of an utterly irreconcilable split betwixt [things] and [people]. [things] are not, and cannot be, [people]; and vice versa.

The edge-case exceptions being death: when a person becomes a corpse, transforming from [person] to [thing]; and gestation/infancy: when an embryo gradually transitions from [thing] to [person] over the second to forth trimesters.

(And, I guess, robots, wherein we project personhood onto them once they reach some close-enough level of complexity that the felt-sense of our perception of them tips from [thing?] to [person?] ??)

But you are not a corpse, robot, or embryo; so why do you feel affinity for the pronoun used for things?

Also, what is your gender? Why does 'it' feel more appropriate for you than the traditionally indeterminate pronoun 'they'? (Or one of the many neo-pronoun options out there?)

#good ol' drifting into the weeds of epistemology and metaphysics #no better way to spend a Sunday morning #blogging #gender discourse