Mastodawn

Sheldon Jul 12, 2023

I finally watched Everything Everywhere All at Once and there was one scene at the beginning that perfectly captures a snippet of life in a Chinese-American immigrant household.

It's the pronoun scene. The main character keeps referring to her daughter's girlfriend as "he" and gets visibly frustrated when the daughter corrects her that Becky is a "she."

First, the bilingual dialogue is spot on! It happens so fast that it's hard to keep up with the subtitles, but if you understand Mandarin, you probably laughed at the exchange.

You might notice that Chinese immigrants are terrible at #pronouns. This is because in spoken Chinese, there is only one generic pronoun, "ta" which translates to "that person"

Any child of Chinese immigrants knows the embarrassment of correcting their parents in front of their friends when they keep calling male friends she and female ones he. It only recently occurred to me why this is.

I love this scene for bringing this to the fore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4kJuZGQPI

Everything Everywhere All At Once, pronoun scene

YouTube

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Likely Jan Lukas Jul 12, 2023

@sysop408

I remember another trans person I know being very upset that a clerk somewhere kept misgendering them, despite otherwise being polite. I asked a few questions about the interaction and learned that the clerk did not speak English well and had a Chinese name.

I don't know the dialect of the clerk, but I did know that Mandarin doesn't distinguish pronouns so shared that as a likely reason: it likely had everything to do with language, not an intent to be rude.

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Sheldon Jul 12, 2023

@likelyjanlukas I think people need to not always assume the worst of people when they don't get your pronouns right, forget your name, or pronounce your name wrong over and over again. There are lots of assholes out there, but also lots of people who are (ahem Mastodon) simply just neurodivergent in various ways.

I really hate when people say things like "if you can't get my name right, it's because you didn't care to get it right." That might be true for the person who says that, but so many people have brains that work far differently.

If I get someone's name wrong, the last thing I need is pressure to get it right. That'll actually make it more likely that I say their name wrong or give them an entirely different name altogether.

I've since stopped caring if I get people's names right and consequently, I got better at remembering their names.

I get called Shelton a lot. Used to piss me off. I've since realized after a well loved in-law has gotten my name wrong for 20 years that it's not intentional.

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Likely Jan Lukas Jul 12, 2023

@sysop408

I agree completely. Have I met people who are deliberately and maliciously misgendering me or screwing around with my name for the same? Sure. But pretty rarely, tbh.

Most folks who mess up are not doing so intentionally and have many reasons for doing so: language, ND, etc.

I suspect we trans folk are more sensitive to this as it may signal imminent danger, vs cia folk who might just find it amusing/weird/odd but non-threatening.

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Sheldon

@likelyjanlukas I've never met a trans or gay person in real life who became demonstrably indignant if someone got their gender wrong. If anything, the ones I've met were experts at diffusing the other person's embarrassment when they use the wrong pronouns.

It's mostly in online spaces like Mastodon and Twitter where I think everyone needs to remember that not everyone who offends you is actually trying to do so. It's too easy to get disoriented by the daily deluge of words and forget that there are people behind it whose behavior might simply be explained by that they have some deficits that aren't obvious.