He, she, they: how not to get into trouble with appeals to the USA

Living in the USA, journalist "Voices of America" Oksana Bedratenko was faced with the fact that here the direct designation of the gender of a stranger can be perceived negatively. Among young people and trendsetters, it is becoming a bad idea to assume which gender your interlocutor / interlocutor has before he / she explicitly indicates this.

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Next - from the first person.

Social media companies and even Wall Street are actively implementing rules calling for greater respect for gender identity. Even in business correspondence, you can sometimes see a postscript that determines the gender identification of the author of the letter. For example, the phrase “Pronoun: she/her” after the name and position in the signature.

What's your pronoun? This is the question that high school students at a regular American school near Washington, where my daughter studies, ask when they meet. And there are more options for answering this question than “he/him” and “she/her.”

“You just assumed what my gender was?” Teachers in the classroom are afraid to hear this phrase, so as not to seem insensitive to the child’s self-identification.

Also, when applying to an American university, applicants are often asked to indicate which pronoun to use when addressing them. There are more than a dozen options to choose from, including male, female, transgender, and non-binary for individuals who do not identify with their sex assigned at birth, but somewhere in between - between two genders.

On the subject: 5 Russian habits that surprise Americans

Last November, Wall Street giant, an investment company, gave advice on the use of pronouns Goldman Sachs. She advises her employees not to make assumptions about a person’s gender by his name or physical appearance, but to train in his spare time to use gender-neutral conversations in colloquial speech.

In February of this year, the Google application refused to indicate the gender of a person through the face recognition function.

“A person’s gender cannot be judged by appearance, so we are eliminating these markers,” the company said in a statement.

How to turn to a person who has not yet informed his gender, and at the same time not seem rude?

Elon Musk's girlfriend, Canadian singer Grimes, calls her unborn child a gender-neutral “they.” The singer, who is eight months pregnant, when asked by a fan on Twitter whether she was expecting a boy or a girl, said that her child would decide his own gender.

“They will determine their own gender and identity,” she wrote on Twitter.

It is the pronoun “they” in the singular denoting a non-binary person that became the word of the decade 2010-2019 according to American Dialect Society.

The choice of the pronoun “they” in the United States is also due to linguistic features, since this pronoun is in some cases historically used in English to designate a single possessive pronoun (Everybody likes their mother).

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