this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Please respect other users pronouns even if you politically disagree with them
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I simply wouldn't use misgendering turns of phrase
And not use misgendering language? We all make mistakes at times, it's what happens, and it's fair to ask questions to better understand, but being against it after you've been informed strikes me as silly
The only way I think it can be construed as misgendering language is if the parts of the idiom or turn of phrase are parsed individually, which is exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do with an idiom.
If this sentence is misgendering myself, then I'm the Queen of England. I get that this guy is a shithead but pretending that he's also doing something wrong here seems to be playing for some esoteric own.
"Go off queen" is 100% a thing, which means that "go off king" isn't just a neutral idiomatic expression, but a gendered idiomatic expression.
I'm not saying it's not a thing, but I have literally never seen it used, and I couldn't find an ngram viewer with a corpus end date after 2019.
It would never occur to me to say "go off queen" , in much the same way it would never occur to me to say "yass slay king" regardless of the gender of the referent, making them both gender neutral in my use.
I don't think ronjonguaido is a shithead, I don't think that it was done on purpose or anything, and I can see what you mean - I didn't myself pick up on it being misgendering language. I think maybe it comes down to intent? I dunno. On the one hand sure there are phrases, but on the other, maybe we should question the gendering of idioms? Way out of my league tbh.
The idiom isn't gendered, a component of it is. Likening someone to 'the little dutch boy with his finger in the dyke' makes no claim on the gender status of the referent and is equally applicable across all genders. If they insisted on calling you Mr. Egon, then sure, that's misgendering, but 'go off king' is a established turn of phrase that I have also seen generically applied because it likewise makes no claim to the gender status of the individual referred.
Oh okay, I guess that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation
Then go ahead, we're all waiting
Just "but go off" would work perfectly well.
There's a lot of gendered turns of phrases, which doesn't necessarily make them acceptable. I make a lot of mistakes myself it's alright, it's what happens.
Wait until you find out that "go off queen" is also a thing. I wonder why "go off king" and "go off queen" has to both exist. Could it be that this idiomatic expression is a gendered one and that using the expression on someone who doesn't identify with that gender is a form of misgendering?
I haven't seen either of these phrases, but in my experience even when something is supposed to be the equivalent versions of each other, it somehow feels different to hear and say. Like, it feels alright to call my group of friends "bros" but not "sisses." Could it be that "go off queen" and "go off king" have different connotations despite the fact that they should mean the same thing?
The reason that one version of the "go off" phrase (identical in every way to the other except for one word that specifies gender) might feel to you like it has different connotations is because we live in a patriarchal society that doesn't assign value the same across all genders. That's not an excuse to use the version of that phrase which misgenders someone.
And your example is really weird and obscures what's actually at issue. The difference in meaning between the words "bros" and "sissies" goes way beyond just a difference in gender. One is a common and generally affectionate term that men call each other when being friendly. The other is most often used as misogynistic term to insult men by disparaging their masculinity.
I wanted to give a couple of other examples too, but that's just what I thought of at the moment. "Hey guys" or "hey dudes" also works though.
When did I say or insinuate that it was?