They/Them

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Calling people what they ask to be called just doesn't have to be this difficult.

And yes, his royal lordship Starn, the majestic, that goes for you, too. It's fine. We're cool with your chosen name. And I admit, the opera cape absolutely works for you.

And I don't need to know what genitalia most other people are rocking. That's none of my business, unless we're really into each-other, in a very intimate way.

It takes all my willpower not to be get pretty inappropriate every time a government form asks my birth sex:

"Oh! We just met at this office of motor vehicles...I didn't know you felt that way about me! This is so much to process. I admit there's a mutual attraction. Of course I feel it too. I'm delighted that you had a special form made up to ask! I'm flattered! Want to grab dinner, and see where this goes?"

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Yeah. And Y'all also used to be plural. Now it can be singular and we use All Y'all to clarify when we need people to know we mean plural. Language is bonkers.

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I've never understood the hatred. It's nonsensical.

It's just basic respect and courtesy to call someone what they want to be called.

If someone wants to identify as a tuna melt with "it" pronouns, I will do that. It doesn't make my life harder, and it seems important to them.

Just so long as I'm not expected to know what to call them telepathically before they've told me.

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Remember when we just conversed like human beings and didn't have all this convoluted nonsense about worrying over pronouns?

If the person is called John, 99.9% of the time, you know what the pronouns would be, because not everyone is terminally online.

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Man Christmas dinner is gonna rock this year. Just like my mom will play dumb and look confused that I used "they" as a singular, I'm going to play dumb and look confused when she says "you". I see no downsides.

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English is so inconsistent at this point.

At this point? At this very point, specifically due to the historically valid usage of one gender neutral pronoun? Now is the time that it's finally become an inconsistent language? Singular "they" is the thing that has pushed English over the edge from logical and sensical to arbitrary and confusing? Of all the foibles and quirks, this is the one that is simply unforgivable and must be changed?

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Oh yeah it took me a while to default to 'they' instead of 'he/she' lol
Sometimes I still mess up and assume, and sometimes I say 'they' when I don't mean to also. Brains are weird.

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Calling people what they ask to be called just doesn't have to be this difficult.

Yeah, I don't really understand why people get so upset about Drag specifically, like it's not that hard once you figure it out.

CarrotsHaveEars

I didn't say anything you said.

I think a more sensible way to include LGBT+ group is to just make "she/her" obsolete. We are all "he/him", and we are "they/them" when in a group. Way cleaner than this, excuse me, shit that we foreign English speakers have to adjust to for every few years.

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me copy pasting a line of code in 20 different places just to go back and make a function for it

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naw bro I get chopsticks on amazon

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because not everyone is terminally online.

LGBT people exist irl too, you'd be surprised how many there are once you get to know them. People you never would've thought were lgbt you can now recognize. I'm from Florida which is pretty conservative and I know 5+ trans people (including non-binary).

They're pretty cool too! I have a trans guy friend who will absolutely LOVE to talk about how cars work and fishing spots given the chance. He taught me how to change the oil on my car. I'm hoping to get him a blahaj for Christmas

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Calling people what they ask to be called just doesn't have to be this difficult.

We in fact do it all the time. It's just people have gotten used to using names. But it's not like you were born with a Dave chromosome. Your parents decided to call you Dave, so in the end it's also just a made up name/sound.

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We agree. We make he/him obsolete and we're all she/her.

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The singular "they"
Pre-dates singular "you"

The same way rights were ore-dated by no rights?

'older' is not always 'better'. Make your point, but don't hinge it on a false comparison.

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Tea hers didn't know vapid influencers would exist.

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On the internet nobody knows you are a horse.

merde alors

"he/him" probably isn't he/him in their non-gendered language. In some languages there's no he or she, there's only a pronoun that means "that person"

Armenian, Persian, Tagalog, Finnish, Georgian, Turkish &c

Skua

Other commenters have already covered the you/thou thing, so to cover the printing press bit: that did happen, but with a different word. "Ye" as in "Ye Olde Village Inn" is the one. The "ye" here is "the", and it was pronounced as "the" too. It would have been spelled "þe" before, and in blackletter style (𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰 𝔰𝔱𝔶𝔩𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤), "y" and "þ" looked awfully similar. If your press came from a country that didn't use the thorn - and many presses in Europe did - and therefore didn't have that character available, then you'd just use the y since they were close enough anyway

A similar thing happened with the letter yogh (ȝ) in Scotland. It wasn't in most presses, but it looks close enough to a z, so just use a z, and now the name "Menzies" is spelled that way despite being pronounced "ming-iss"

That this "ye" is spelled the same way as the second person plural subject pronoun "ye" is a total coincidence

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Yeah it can take a while to get used to, especially if you knew the person before they changed their pronouns. But the point is it isnt incompatible with our language at all. I think the last panel would be better if it showed the (transphobic) guy and another person and he says "this activist said the craziest thing to me today" and then the second person says "oh yeah, what'd THEY say" because then the 'they' pronoun would be directly referring to the person who wanted to be called 'they' in the first place.