Forum - View topicINTEREST: Kingdom Hearts, Evangelion Singer Hikaru Utada Comes Out as Non-Binary
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JoelBurger
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Language is not "naturally" anything, it is constructed. However, as has been pointed out multiple times here, the English language as it has been constructed has used the singular "they" since at least Chaucer. There is nothing strange about it. So the fact that you're making such a fuss about a facet of the language that has been around for centuries is suspect. |
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Florete
Posts: 374 |
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I'm not making as much of a fuss about it as people are making a fuss over the fact that I want a better gender-neutral pronoun in English. |
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 674 |
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Maybe you don’t think you’re saying something in a cruel way but this for instance
Is actually pretty unreasonable. Because what you’re saying is that rather than use someone’s preferred pronouns you’ll throw out the entire concept of pronouns. That is not respectful at all. That’s saying you’re mad about the rules and taking your ball and going home. English as a language is perfectly accommodating to what is being asked of you, and you’re refusing. You cannot keep couching this argument as a language one. It is not. This is entirely on you and that is what everyone else has noticed even if you’ve blinded yourself to it. |
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roxybudgy
Posts: 132 Location: Western Australia |
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I'm not bothered if people want to identify as anything other than male/female. At work, I deal with a lot of customers via e-mail only, and would sometimes encounter names that are not blatantly male or female, so when I leave comments on their files, I generally go for "they/them", for example: "The customer called about their Internet service not working, they have already tried rebooting the modem". More often than not, I do this even if the customer's name is John or Jessica.
I used to wonder if I was agender/non-binary, because I didn't like the same things as other women, I don't like to wear make up, drool over shoe sales, own multiple handbags, and that I'm "not like other girls". But I've come to realise that "not like other girls" is actually a misogynistic thing to say, as it implies that there's something wrong with being "feminine", that it's somehow a bad thing that you want to distance yourself from. I cringe at my teen/early20's self that went around saying "I'm not like other girls" as if that somehow made me better than other women. I think of gender as a social/cultural construct and would love to see a world where 'gender' doesn't exist. Maybe I am agender, but after looking at the discussions going on in agender communities, a lot of it is people being oversensitive about pronouns. Gender is nothing to me, and if people want to think of me as female and use she/her, it doesn't bother me at all. Utada Hikaru coming out as non-binary? Good for them. Everyone should be non-binary, but I don't think that will happen in my lifetime. |
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DavetheUsher
 Posts: 505 |
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Is that different from being a tomboy? Back in my day girls who were more into sports or video games or just didn't care about girly stuff like fashion and make-up were just called tomboys. I dunno if the Millennials and Gen Z generations still use that word or consider it outdated or anything though. |
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Alexis.Anagram
 Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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As an enby for whom Exodus is basically my spiritual soundtrack: yay!
That said, policing pronoun usage when none of us know whether or not Utada's preferred pronouns have changed is silly, both on principle since insisting on some imagined "default" pronoun for NBs contradicts the entire premise of positioning oneself outside of binary gendered thinking, and also because Utada is a multi-millionaire who isn't going to be remotely impacted by some random Interneters maybe possibly getting it wrong. I see Hikki putting out really deliberate feminine power vibes of late (not to mention the mannnny times she has referenced her own womanhood affirmatively in her art and lyricism) and using she/her as a method of acknowledging that projection of self-image is perfectly reasonable. Maybe it's wrong and if so they have a pretty gigantic public platform to easily correct the record. Utada is extremely candid in most matters they choose to comment on-- if she wants us to use a specific pronoun, she'll tell us, lol. Or maybe she'll be like "Darenimo Iwanai" and we'll just all have to live with wondering... 
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15546 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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My understanding is that tomboy is still in use, and there isn't really any movement to remove it. Although some understanding that tomboy did used to have some connotations of growing out of it or something. The Not Like Other Girls, was a phenomena that I understand of it were girls who were found to have mostly done the rejection against anything feminine out of some level of internal misogyny. The sort of saying that other girls are 'basic' but they are quirky, weird and like non-feminine things. You can probably get a good idea by doing a Google image search. The discourse I have seen recently is to speak out against the pitting of women against each other, not just seeing women as either quirky or shallow. https://preview.redd.it/7mqciq9ztts21.jpg?auto=webp&s=e2778ef2b35f1abc13302376a98fa6295d0d2f3c There should be more support too for the likes of gender inverse tomboys (whatever that word is). But the whole thing regardless is different from being non-binary. |
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Takkun4343
 Posts: 1546 Location: Englewood, Ohio |
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Tomgirls, I think. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16961 |
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Time to agree to disagree with the debate on the use of the word "they" in the English language. It's going in circles now with users not budging.
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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Longtime Utada fan here, I'm really happy for them.
As an aside, in the English language I wish there was a generic, gender neutral title: Something instead of "ma'am or sir." |
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Alexis.Anagram
Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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The notion of identifying as feminine but possessing more masculine-perceived traits (in either appearance or demeanor or whatever) or vice versa absolutely can fall within the continuum of ideas which characterizes non-binary conceptualizations of gender. Being non-binary is not simply or solely the act of *not* identifying with polarized gender constructs. Though there are plenty of non-binary folks who do reject male/female social categorization, there are also plenty of non-binary men and women (cis and trans) who use the pronouns typically assigned to those genders. Rather, non-binary thinking seeks to extract gender itself (particular as a means to socialization) *out* of binary constructs altogether. Hence why it's so counterintuitive to posit that there is a "default" NB pronoun-- it represents an essentalist model of creating another binary categorization for gender that stands in opposition to the "existing" binary, in essence formulating a new gender format around which rules must be structured and to which people must be conceived as either "belonging" or "not belonging." It also inherently reinforces the presumption of the existing gender binary which posits a male-female/masculine-feminine/man-woman dichotomy but then fails to effectively capture, describe or account for the full variation of experience which is characterized within these social monikers. Non-binary discourse exists as a critique of precisely this paradigm of thought, not an alternative option for identifying within it. Gender is a nuanced experience which is both extremely personal in its nature and functionally integral to society. We need gender because it enables us to consider our perceptions of ourselves and others using interrelational cues and reference points which code to certain social roles and behaviors, but we don't need rigid or fixed frameworks which restrict individual modes of expression or drive fatalistic modes of social determination (like the "traditional family"). The non-binary argument recognizes that there is no easy or perfect way to strike the balance between these conversant inclinations except to strive to see and understand gendered experience with as wide a social lens as possible. Advancing a prescriptive theory of non-binary as "not a man or a woman" presupposes that, in the first place, "man" and "woman" are definable and singular and static constructs. They aren't, and it's exactly that question of how we create common conceptions of our gendered selves while knowing there is no unifying factor of identity to reference which non-binary theory specifically endeavors to interpret and demystify. So yeah, boiling it down to the assimilative tendency towards pronoun politics and celebrity validation culture is not a particularly generative form of discourse, and it kind of misses the entire point of Utada's own statement with relation to their social experience of herself. I can relate on a personal level with that sense of distance and disassociation from these sort of conventional demarcations which confer cultural value upon a person accordingly to how well they tick certain relational boxes, and like her I specifically reject titles that allude to my "status" as a gendered subject despite not really minding what pronouns folks use for me-- or even so much what gender I'm perceived to be. "Sir" and "ma'am" have to be the worst semantic constructs in all of language I swear. |
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Suxinn
 Posts: 249 |
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Huh, from the sounds of the article, it seems like this was a long time coming, yet I had somehow managed to miss all the signs before this. Congrats, Utada! Good for them.
Is there a gender-neutral third-person pronoun in Japanese? There used to be one in Chinese before western imperialism happened and folks in government decided to introduce gendered pronouns to the language in the '50s. Speaking of pronouns, I have a transmasculine nonbinary friend who, when asked about their pronouns, would always list practically every pronoun under the sun, including it, and it was always interesting to see how people reacted to that. They'd always have a super academic reason up their sleeve when asked about it (something about "eliding the differences between the human and nonhuman object") but honestly I think 80% of the reason they did it was to troll people. Anyway, pronouns are such small things, so I don't get why we just don't call people what they want to be called. I mean, I'd never want to be called "he" but my cis male friends don't seem to mind, so I don't judge them. 
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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DuskyPredator
Posts: 15546 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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I think you are saying a lot can kind of say that gender for non-binary is not a monolith. Part of my understanding are kind of what the colours for the non-binary flag represent. An enby could be agender in having no gender, a gender separate from masculine or feminine, a mix of genders, and genderfluid in switching between genders. These can have different interactions with things like pronouns. |
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Aresef
Posts: 914 Location: MD |
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I know I’ve slipped up a couple times and edited comments I’ve made elsewhere. But I’m a journalist and the “they” pronoun has made its way into our stylebooks. It’s not like we just discovered NB people or they didn’t exist before. It’s that they are more comfortable making themselves known and language has to adjust the same way it always adjusts. We as a people used to use pretty awful language to describe not just gender-nonconforming people, but sexual minorities, people of color and people with physical or mental disabilities.
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