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Hello! This is the No Gendered Pronouns Day nexus post - if you've written about how the day is going/ has gone for you, could you link your writings in comments? And if you've mentioned this on your LJ, could you ask people to come here and post their links? I think it will be interesting to see what the challenges are for people in different places, speaking different languages, living different lives...

As for me, I've slipped up a dozen times already, under close interrogation from my firstborn at 6.15am. Clearly, that's going to be my biggest challenge.

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I've slipped up once already in email! Since then, my longest conversation has been with my breakfast . . .

Post 1: http://daegaer.livejournal.com/798979.html

I'm not officially doing it but I guess I still could, since *my* longest conversation has been with the cat, so it hasn't exactly been challenging yet.

When it comes to cats I sometimes feel as if the pronouns are "baby" and "bastardface". This says bad things about me, I know.

Post 2: http://daegaer.livejournal.com/799384.html

First thoughts. No slip ups yet, but only me and the sprog at home, so there's plenty of time.

2nd

Crap, I forgot all about this until now, and have already transgressed about twenty times this morning. So, starting from now, 10.24 am, I am making a concerted effort.

I'm not officially doing it, but did think about it during a meeting just now and did pretty well - though I did end up using gendered pronouns a couple of times.

And I did end up writing about it, here.

My first post is here.

Aaargh, I mean here.

I think the best I can say so far is that I'm trying hard. Most of what I've 'said' so far has been in writing, so it's fairly easy! I didn't completely succeed with my meeting. I'll post in a little while.

I am failing miserably. Mostly I am just not talking to anyone, and listening to people blah their blah blah (not by choice, just apathy), but I have not been paying attention when I have spoken and, frankly, I am not up to it. At work it is just too hard to try to make sense in another language while discussing work topics without watching my words. Oh well.

[quickly checks post for genderisms]

:-D Gold Star for me!

I will be an online non-gender-pronoun-ed traballenguas! That is something, anyway.

I'd forgotten it was today because I am a tad frazzled, and then realized I hadn't slipped up much anyway. I suspect this is because I spend most of my working day:

talking to engineers about inanimate things
writing about inanimate things (and I avoid gendered pronouns in my technical writing by default anyway)
talking about myself (I suspect)

I am going home for dinner with my mum shortly, though, which could prove more problematic.

...and indeed it did. I got away with talking about B's work outing by referring to him and his colleagues collectively ("They're going on a boat trip") or not using pronouns at all ("And how did he get on with that thing at work?" "Fine. Going well, apparently."), but was completely scuppered by watching a thriller on telly with my parents ("Who's he again? Is he the guy who pushed the girl into the car? And who's she?").

There was an amusing bit where my parents inadvertently participated in the day because my Dad had forgotten to ask his brother whether my cousin's new baby was a boy or a girl. Sadly, this stopped once Dad phoned his brother again to ask him.

gchat is going to be my pronoun downfall!

And so are my icons. D'oh!

No gendered *pronouns* in that icon!

Trust me to use the one gendered icon I have, however, on a day I'm supposed to be aware of it.

I've slipped up twice today (that I've noticed), both times while having conversations about specific people. Also, one time I used "they" and it caused a lot of singular/plural confusion for the other people in that conversation. Oops. It's hard!

As I said here, I'm doing well, but that's in part by way of being very very quiet.

...and much the same here, wherein I avoided a gendered pronoun by using a gendered noun.

I slipped up earlier whilst talking to myself and I'm wondering if that counts... Other than that sent a text to best friend containing 'he' and 'she' before I remembered.

I've been using 'it' over anything else, which is the main reason that my best friend is now not talking to me, as it thinks that I'm being rude to talk to people as if they were objects. I told it that it was being silly, and that I was simply dropping the gender, not making less of anyone, but as yet we have not reconciled.

I have noticed something strange though I wonder if anyone else is the same... I keep thinking of 'I' and 'you' and 'we', etc. as being gendered pronouns (especially 'I', probably because it's a 'personal' pronoun, so I assign my gender to it) and I keep wanting to use 'it' instead of 'I' or 'you'.

*shakes head*

It's weird, it's not something you'd usually think about, but I think I'd like to use 'it' for 'I' because I'd like to put me in with everything else and not have 'I' separate from 'it' or 'they'.

Anyway... I'm off to make my supper (cheese on toast) and reflect upon the day. I'm also planning on trying to keep this going for the whole week, as I haven't really been that challenged today, what with wednesday being my day off at college and work, and basically with me only speaking to people if I want to.

Turned out to be easy. Largely because both computers and money lack gender, and I spend most of my day talking about one or the other.

Ungendered ad written for really really tiny toy duck named Lewis:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Really-Really-Tiny-Toy-Duck_W0QQitemZ200127988870QQihZ010QQcategoryZ10812QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Never spoke to anyone but my cat all day, so using ungendered pronouns was no challenge.

Butterfly_writing

All sorts of late, regrettably, but here is my entry about the experience.

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