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I'm supposed to be emailing my prof about a paper but instead my brain went: in related news, I think there is a psycholinguistic reason for trans and especially nonbinary people picking random nouns as their names
and now I can't stop thinking about it. So, I guess THREAD:
and now I can't stop thinking about it. So, I guess THREAD:
I wanna preface this by saying I haven't done any research on that, nor am I aware if there has been research done - I researched a related topic and this is mainly a hypothesis
But basically the paper I read talked about how while English has no grammatical gender, nouns (and names) are still very much associated with genders. And so "the nurse....she" won't raise eyebrows while "the nurse....he" will make the reader stop for a moment
It's all a matter of familiarity. Words we often see together will become associated with each other. That's not only a phenomenon with pronouns and nouns/names
Given names are some of the most gendered words and so if I gave you a list with names and told you to tell me the persons pronouns...it would probably go like "Katherine?" - "She" - "Thomas?" - "He" - "Alex?" - "mmmmh I'm not sure? She?"
Using "they" with a unisex name like Alex is okay. If we heard someone say "My friend Alex said they'd forgotten their jacket" it wouldn't be weird because we can picture Alex being either binary gender, but "My friend Katherine said they'd forgotten their jacket" sounds weird
(fun fact: after repeating that sentence over and over in my head in the process of composing this thread, it actually doesn't sound so weird anymore)
If we now complicate this principle because gender is not binary....well what do we do with given names for people who don't fit the binary? Unisex names are okay, but until we are culturally used to sentences like "My friend Thomas said they'd forgotten their jacket" those-
aren't really an option. Especially if we now also add neo-pronouns to the mix. Tell someone "My friend Katherine said xe had forgotten xir jacket" and even the most openminded people's first thought will be: are you sure that's english?
("It is," the second thought will say. But until that happens a moment will have passed and we've stopped reading or briefly zoned out of the conversation - both of which aren't bad, but they prove unfamiliarity)
And while saying "My friend Leaf said xe'd forgotten xir jacket" will also give the recipient a moment's pause it's probably going to be much easier to start associating those two than it is to rewire and make the one xe Katherine fit with all the she Katherines that are familiar
And I can imagine that also being a very unconcious and personal bias. You think about a name to give yourself that fits better than the one your parents gave you, and all those names are too binarily gendered, and maybe you don't like the conventional unisex options -
so what do you call yourself? You pick something that traditionally has no gender and make something new.
TL;DR: it's just much easier to take an inanimate noun which doesn't have a gender associated with it and start using as a name than reconfiguring our own brain and the brains of all those around us to start associating established names with different genders than established
(addendum: this gendering of names obvs doesn't just apply to pronouns, it's just very visible in the traditional pronoun usage, and the naming thing doesn't just happen bc pronouns, I'm trying to use pronouns as an example/a way to make the gendering visible)
