this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
107 points (79.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43731 readers
1267 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
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
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
God I hate it when people call animals "they". Like "the dog doesn’t like their squeaky toy" - it’s a dog! Call it "it"! "The dog doesn’t like its squeaky toy"
It don't like your comment...
"The dog likes his squeaky toy."
Like everyone is fighting over gender in human race, I would like that you finally understand that dogs/cats/cows even the squirrel in your garden... Those are sentient living beings... Stop treating them like just a fucking object !
But even in English - if you are completely gender neutral - "the human does not like its work in the office" is the same.
That is simply incorrect English, words have more referents than gender. Traditionally "it" is reserved for non-human things of all types, but definitely does not ever apply to a human, and calling someone an "it" without it first being requested by them is near-universally recognized as a dehumanizing insult.
Hummm... Maybe I don't get all the grammatical rules in English, but it's really disheartening to treat living beings as objects.
As I remember
It
is an article for objects and I would never consider my dog as an non-living object. He's way more "human" than most people that I have encountered in my life.To be fair, some languages outside of English reserve "it" (or the equivalent 3rd person neuter pronoun) for "non-living" things. For people whose native language is one of those languages, calling an animal "it" may seem a bit too harsh even while speaking English.
If they say "the goose doesn't like his ball" that is misgandering.