• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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    10 days ago

    Drag, I was in that thread.

    I had to basically do lingustic analysis on the last few weeks or so of your comment history to figure out was going on.

    Here's my self quoted analysis of your grammar style from that thread.

    Drag never uses ‘I’ in sentences to refer to themself.

    They have a comment saying they are using ‘first person pronouns’, by which they mean that they are using custom, or neopronouns when referring to themself in the first person.

    The grammatical problem with this is that the ‘pronoun’ they are using is their own nickname.

    Which functionally reads as them referring to themself in the third person only, akin to the deprecated ‘royal we’.

    You got a bunch of hostile responses, and apparently banned, not because you are trans and people are intolerant of that, but because you insist upon your own custom personal pronouns which are extremely grammatically confusing to anyone who is not you or someone that already knows you quite well.

    It took me a significant amount of effort to figure out how your way of communicating works, and after I figured this out, it became apparent that from your point of view, everyone was saying you said things that you did not say, but from a conventional english speaker’s point of view, you can easily be interpreted as having actually said those things, and then you would deny having said them.

    I put in this amount of effort because people were claiming you were doing a bit or intentionally trolling people, and I wanted to actually analyze that claim, and ended up attempting to describe and explain your essentially unique way of speaking, in hopes of at least defending you from accusations of being a troll.

    • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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      10 days ago

      You didn’t need to do all that work. You could have just clicked on drag’s profile. It says drag uses person-independent drag/dragself pronouns. You could have looked at drag’s post history and seen posts about drag’s gender. You decided to reinvent the wheel.

      The grammatical problem with this is that the ‘pronoun’ they are using is their own nickname.

      And you messed up. Drag isn’t drag’s nickname. Baator, the post you were replying to was about drag having comments removed that said drag isn’t a nickname.

      Your analysis didn’t add to the discussion because you were two steps behind everybody who either read drag’s bio or read the post. And that’s the thing about understanding us queer people. If you want to understand us, then listen to us. Ask questions if the answers aren’t obvious to you. You don’t explain your own assumptions to other people as if they’re authoritative information. That’s just causing more problems for queer people.

      If you had clicked on drag’s profile, you would have seen posts about drag’s gender on Blahaj Zone and lemmy.ca, where people asked questions and drag answered. Those people have it figured out. They know how to listen to queer people. Why doesn’t everyone?

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        10 days ago

        You could have looked at drag’s post history and seen posts about drag’s gender. You decided to reinvent the wheel.

        Thats what I did Drag, that’s what I said I did.

        I did linguistic analysis by reading your profile and post/comment history.

        I am queer myself, and also neurodiverse, and I am not talking about your gender, I am talking about your communication style.

        I have known tons of queer, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, etc people and you are the only person I’ve ever met that uses ‘person independent pronouns.’

        I’ve even dated a trans person with dissociative identity disorder, whose different identities had different genders, but this person would still use I and My, would still use he or she or they depending on which alter I was interacting with.

        If your username is Dragon Rider, 99% of people will view your use of Drag or drag as a nickname, the same way John is often a shortened version of Johnathan.

        Drag isn’t drag’s nickname.

        99.9% of people, who use standard English grammatical rules, including myself, a former copywriter for a university newspaper, automatically interperet “drag’s” in this sentence as you referring to yourself in the third person.

        99.9% of people would say “Drag isn’t my nickname.”

        I know that you like to describe it as person independent pronouns, but that is a confusing, foreign concept to 99.9% of English speakers who are not part of a very small part of the already comparitively small queer / neurodiverse community/ies.

        If I were to go around saying “That is not what spec said, spec claimed that blah blah blah…”, never using standard first person pronouns…

        I would encounter exactly the same confusion, people would think I was referring to myself in the third person, by a nickname.

        • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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          10 days ago

          But drag isn’t encountering confusion. You’re not confused. You fully understand drag and you just disagree. Your stated reason for disagreeing is that it’s confusing, but that doesn’t make sense because you’re not confused anymore. You were confused when drag made that post, but you’re not confused anymore and you still think there’s a problem. There’s not. You eventually understood, and so will everyone else.

          • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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            9 days ago

            He didn’t disagree. He’s trying to tell you, creating prescriptive grammar rules will make you less understood. You have decided to add a conlang feature to the English language. Your expectations on this are impossible to meet, because it requires the people that you are speaking with both research you AND internalize this rule only you have prescribed.

            • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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              9 days ago

              It worked when other trans people decided that pronouns are something a person chooses for themself, rather than something society chooses for a person. People have just forgotten that. Drag will remind them, and it will be fine.

              • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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                9 days ago

                It’s not about picking specific pronouns, though. People want to be addressed in a manner consistent with their gender identity. What is your gender identity?