this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
6 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
634 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In polish, calling people with the neutral gender. It's a grave insult which implies lack of agency and dehumanisation, and thank to some rightwinger assholes in parliament is also a specific transphobic insult now.
While in english it's completely normal thing to say if you're not sure of a person's gender.
So definitely not my "favourite", i would never said this to anyone in polish and i occasionally get a hiccup of misgendering someone in english because of that, but interesting from language point of view.
Is it kind of like calling someone "it" as an insult in English?
I'd say so, and I've seen it used in the same transphobic contexts.
Pretty much yes, the closest thing that would be.
Maybe I misunderstand, but you should never call someone "it" in English, except for animals and babies. Calling someone "it" is considered dehumanizing in English.
Yes, what i meant that in english you call people in 3rd person "them", "they" regardless of their gender, but in polish neutral gender would always be "it". That's why it's so insulting to use it despite it is gramatically existing. Polish had pronouns literally build in every noun, verb and adjective.
This seems like a thing in Slavic languages in general. In Russian the equivalent is "одушевленные и неодушевленные существительные" - animate, and inanimate objects, so I guess they add one extra pronoun to the usual three, which is just for objects. I think some genderqueer people prefer using the plural pronoun in that case ("они" instead of "оно"). Is that possible in Polish?
The neutral gender is perfectly grammatical in polish, just it was never used for people other than small babies, i seen some effort to use it in literature for gender fluid or genderless people but it's rare and don't get positive reviews. It might catch some day though, i don't know.