{"id":1219,"date":"2018-05-29T14:56:10","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T20:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/?p=1219"},"modified":"2018-05-29T15:08:15","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T20:38:15","slug":"me-and-singular-they-on-the-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/me-and-singular-they-on-the-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"My radio interview: “singular they”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u201cHave I ever mentioned that I ❤ DC<\/a>,\u201d by Ted Eytan<\/a>, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>, cropped from original<\/p><\/div>\n

A radio host read my essay<\/a> on\u00a0they<\/em> as a singular pronoun,\u00a0 so I got to advocate for this usage on KGO ‘s Maureen Langan Show in San Francisco. I explained that in order to know for sure what pronouns someone uses, you need to ask. “That’s a lot of pressure on me,” Maureen objected. She wanted to know why she should go out of her way to use this\u00a0 pronoun in such a weird, awkward way, so I told her<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was a nice opportunity to evangelize a bit. Language is embedded deep in our brains, so even political progressives who support people who identify as nonbinary\u00a0 often resist using\u00a0they\u00a0<\/em> to refer to a single specific individual. It just feels wrong. When my essay came out I got a range of messages, from which I concluded that people’s responses to language aren’t always logical.<\/p>\n

Or they’re\u00a0too\u00a0<\/em>logical. One person suggested that, logically,\u00a0we should use\u00a0it\u00a0<\/em> for someone who isn’t a\u00a0he\u00a0<\/em>or a\u00a0she.<\/em>\u00a0 In my opinion people wouldn’t take kindly to being called\u00a0it. <\/em>So\u00a0I suggested an experiment: try calling a few people\u00a0it<\/em> and see what kind of response came back. It makes an interesting thought experiment, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n

Maureen was also curious about a different word-related issue, one that has surprisingly passionate advocates on both sides of the question: do you type two spaces after a sentence, or not? I’ll tackle that in the next post.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A radio host read my essay on\u00a0they as a singular pronoun,\u00a0 so I got to advocate for this usage on KGO ‘s Maureen Langan Show in San Francisco. I explained that in order to know for sure what pronouns someone uses, you need to ask. “That’s a lot of pressure on me,” Maureen objected. She wanted to know why she should go out of her way to use this\u00a0 pronoun in such a weird, awkward way, so I told her. It was a nice opportunity to evangelize a bit. Language is embedded deep in our brains, so even political progressives[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,4],"tags":[174,172,164,170,171],"class_list":["post-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-issues","category-writing","tag-gender-identity","tag-gender-neutral-pronouns","tag-language","tag-nonbinary-gender-identity","tag-singlar-they"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1219"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1230,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219\/revisions\/1230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stephaniegolden.net\/writing_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}