“On Twitter, is it ‘he or she’ or ‘they’ or ‘ip’?”

March 9, 2009

what are you doing?As a total addict of Twitter, I was interested to see a CNN article about the use of gender neutral language by Twitter users. It’s something I’ve thought about quite a bit; the deliberate misuse of pronouns is one of the hallmarks of cissexism and a commonly used form of not-so-subtle oppression.

I wrote on the same subject last year and, on revisiting my post, my views haven’t really changed that much.

I’m not sure the CNN piece actually adds anything new to the debate; and the use of appropriate pronouns is, from where I’m sitting, nothing more or less than a trans 101 subject. I – and I imagine many others – would simply rather be asked, if anyone is confused about which pronouns, etc, to use.

This entry was posted on March 9, 2009 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Anti-social networking, she-her-Ms.

One Response to ““On Twitter, is it ‘he or she’ or ‘they’ or ‘ip’?””

  1. imnotbroken Says:

    March 11, 2009 at 9:06 am

    I think it’s nice for a site to not make gender an issue. I don’t know how many times I’ve registered for a site and been asked my ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ (generally sex) as part of the registration process, and a mandatory field; even though sex/gender has *nothing* to do with the site, and it’s completely irrelevant!

    The other day I did register for a site that had ‘male/female/who cares’ in the list, which was nice but I wondered why they bothered. Who does care which gender you are if you’re just uploading photos to a website?


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