this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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It's less about "dissociation" and more about "indirection". For example:
At least for me that "la" doesn't imply a woman; it's there because "persona" requires it. You could force a "lo" instead, to highlight social gender, but it feels like agreeing with an omitted word (uomo? tipo? ragazzo? etc.).
This shows gendered pronouns in Italian (and other languages with a similar grammatical gender system) aren't directly associated with the social gender; the association is indirect, intermediated by word choice. And people often do exploit that feature to hide social gender, not just for non-binary people but also others.
In the meantime, check how English handles it:
There's no way to interpret that "her" as referring to a man. You actually need a non-binary pronoun, like "them", to avoid implying gender. I believe this happens because English lost the grammatical gender system, so all those gendered leftovers (like "he" and "she") are now referring directly to things outside the language, like social gender.
I've seen both in Portuguese, too. Plus "alt@". But mostly to highlight the issue; "altx" and "alt@" are unpronounceable so usually only written, while "alt[ə]" only in the spoken language (it feels natural or off depending on dialect, since some erode the ending vowels quite a bit.)
Now I'm curious on how to handle this in Latin. For your typical accusative -əm works fine, but for the nominative most masc words use -us, that dangling -s throws a monkey wrench.