Quote:
Originally Posted by frahse
Yes, I did add further complications to a difficult subject. I can only say that the questions were already implicitly there. I only brought them forward.
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I saw the same questions... but I think we have to talk about cases.
In the case when the gender is not known because the person that fits the pronoun is not known, then the choice of "they" appears to be what American English is adopting. For example:
If someone gets sick,
they should see a doctor.
instead of
If someone gets sick,
he should see a doctor.
which was the proper way not all that long ago.
The case of a gender switcher is different. Lets say Pat was born with a healthy physical girl body, including all girl parts. Then any time we speak about Pat we would use "she." That is obvious. Now Pat for <insert reason> decides she is a boy and starts dressing like a boy, and dating girls. At this point she still is a girl, just dressing up, so I would imagine most would still use "her." At some point she decides to start hormone therapy, and other medical treatments to change her physical body into a male. Then I think many would start using "he" for Pat's pronoun.
The point of that little story about Pat is that Pat's gender is a known condition, so you would use the matching gender based noun to it. In our modern day, some have changed the gender they are, but they still have a gender. It is not an unknown. If you are to be respectful, you would go with the gender pronouns that match the gender that the person choose, otherwise you would go with the gender at birth (assuming you knew this).
Now there is the case where a person is born with both parts, but as I understand it that is exceedingly rare, and one set of parts does not work. It is way out of my experience or knowledge so I would not speak with any authority on it, but my guess is that person has an inclination towards one gender or the other and would choose to take on that gender. In that case, that would be the proper gender pronoun to use.
So in short, I think the language can already handle all the cases, and does not need new words.