3 places where I feel like gender separation doesn’t really make sense
Sports
Separation of men and women in sports is fairly admirable as it gives people a chance to showcase their skill that would otherwise be outcompeted. It additionally is nice as women are a group that are often discriminated against and exposure in previously limited areas is nice. However, I don’t think that a strict gender separation is really necessary. I think that an ideal system would allow anyone with higher skill to go to the top of their league, relative to the physical ability determined by their genetics. I’m not very into sports, but I get the impression that people’s enjoyment often comes more from people’s character and effort than the absolute magnitude of their ability. Short v.s. tall people in basketball are one example that comes to mind; a shorter person would require much more skill to reach the same level as a taller person currently. I’m not much of a wrestling person, but I think this is addressed there through weight classes. A possible wider idea is be some meta-classification into classes based on the characteristics that cannot be changed with more practice or other self-improvement.
Bathrooms
this is basically a summary of this very silly 2kliksphilip video
Urinals are more space-efficient than toilets, but typically only are found in men’s restrooms. Therefore, with equally sized men’s and women’s restrooms, the men’s restroom gets higher throughput assuming an equally sized demand, and has under-occupied stalls compared to the women’s room. Even if both are perfectly sized for average demand, there will still be inefficiencies when outlier groups come in. There’s really no reason other than tradition to not just separate out the urinals (if desired) and unify all of the stalls, with full height walls if you think it isn’t private enough (Really, as a 6 foot 2 guy, it’s silly how low stall wall tops usually are).
Pronouns
I was working on a thing recently and had to refer back to someone in a sentence that already included 2 men. I know that some other languages have primarily gender neutral pronouns, but a concern that I have had is that it would make it harder to tell who someone is talking about. I think there are some alternate systems that are better at resolving general ambiguity though, like having different pronouns for the person most recently named vs. 2nd most recently named, etc. There might be languages that do this already, idk, I just speak English and a teeny bit of Spanish lol. I haven’t put all that much thought into this but I’m sure there are ways that could make this problem in communication even easier than it is currently. If we could ever get an opportunity to modify common speech.
Gender in sports historically has only been because men don’t like being beat by women. Weight/skill classes make way more sense.
The whole bathroom thing is insane, just fucking make private stalls/rooms for everyone. Nobody should be seeing/smelling any of it.
The pronouns thing is already resolved. If you use a pronoun, you’re referring to the most recently mentioned person. If you need to switch people, just mention the other person’s name again. If people don’t get that, they should go back to fucking grade school.
So yes I agree with you on all points but also I’m just fucking tired.
The entire “gender separation in sports” argument stops making sense as soon as you ask yourself why archery is gender segregated.
Weight class is the only relevant separation in sports where muscle mass is important. For everything else, the differences we see in attainment by gender come down to something much more sinister.
Imagine for a moment that you took two groups of babies, and raised them in controlled environments. Each group is an equal mix of assigned genders. One group is actively, even aggressively encouraged to take part in sporting events, and encouraged to only play video games and other entertainments that rely on reaction time.
The other group is actively discouraged from participating in those activities, and repeatedly taught that, biologically, they will always be at a fundamental disadvantage if they do. This apparent disadvantage is so great that you won’t even allow them to play with members of the first group.
Which group, regardless of assigned gender, do you imagine would produce more successful athletes?
I think it was specifically when the subject of the sentence was not the most recent name that it seemed the most ambiguous.
As in "bob disliked joe because he … " and if the context doesn’t make it explicit who ‘he’ is then you just can’t tell.
yeah, you could just use names when it might be ambiguous, which isn’t all that often anyways, but i don’t think pronouns really need to be that limited
just idle conversation tho because obviously replacing a language on demand requires a huge amount of effort which isn’t going to happen anytime soon for such relatively little gain
Yeah, I do understand your issue with it and that it’s frustrating to have to use the noun again rather than pronoun for clarity, but I’m curious how would you resolve that?
Like if we could just change the language on demand, would you add more pronouns? Remove pronouns all together?
The other day I went to My friend’s house for dinner. While I was there, I played with her dogs.
Did you notice how I didn’t follow your advice? I used the pronoun “I”, even though the most recent person I mentioned was My friend. Let’s try that story again, following your advice.
The other day I went to My friend’s house for dinner. While Grail was there, I played with My friend’s dogs.
Much less natural sounding, I think your advice was counterproductive. I love having different pronouns for different people. And there’s never any ambiguity when someone refers to Me in a story, because I have capitalised pronouns. If more people had unusual pronouns like Mine, we’d run into the Gay Spock problem a lot less often.
That’s not the context I was referring to though. What I’m talking about and what I think the OP was talking about is when the pronouns used are the same and therefore the statement is ambiguous.
For example, say in your statement, we are talking about you both in the third person and you both use she pronouns.
The other day Grail and Alice had dinner at
herAlice’s house [the collective nouns used prevent us from being able to use her clearly in this case]. While Grail was there, she played withherAlice’s [can’t use her because Grail was the last person mentioned by name] dogs.This isn’t really advice, it is the way the English language works and we all already do it without thinking about it for the most part.
Hmmm, no, I don’t think I like being lowercase she/her’ed even for an example.
Well, okay, again assuming you both use the same pronouns:
The other day Grail and Alice had dinner at
TheirAlice’s house [again, using the name because its unclear based on grail & alice being collective in this sentence). While Grail was there They played withTheirAlice’s (Grail was the last person mentioned by name so need to repeat Alice’s name) dog.My point is that my example only makes sense when both subjects use the same pronouns. The rule doesn’t apply otherwise.
I have a simple solution to the whole thing. Everyone should use neopronouns.