Did you know that Chinese didn’t have a word for “She” until about 100 years ago? In fact, Chinese operated without a female 3rd person pronoun for thousands of years, and it wasn’t a problem – until interaction with the west. Watch this video to learn the fascinating (albeit winding) history of Chinese gendered pronouns.
I remember watching a documentary about trans people living in China. The subtitles were making it look like ordinary Chinese folk were misgendering someone by translating ‘tā’ as ‘he’.
The fact that they did not care that this would be an obvious bad faith translation to anyone who spoke Chinese while being uncritically absorbed by Westerners pissed me off so much.
Exactly. It’s not the person speaking who is making the assumption about the subject’s gender, it’s the person writing the subtitles. The fact that they decided to go with the male pronoun for the trans person says more about them, the translator, than it does about the Chinese person who was speaking.
Even then, in spoken language he/she sound exactly the same. The distinction only exists in written form.
The funniest part: just as interaction with the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries led the Chinese to introduce gendered pronouns, now exposure to the cultural trends of the West may once again be leading to the introduction of another pronoun: this time an explicitly gender-neutral one. One cannot help but feel that this whole complication could have been avoided by just sticking with a single non-gendered pronoun, as many other languages still do.
2020: HOMOPHOBIC China KILLS femboys live on TV. SAD! 2025: WOKE China FORCEFEMS their PROUD and MASCULINE MEN. SAD!
Back to gender neutrality
The gender neutral pronoun is literally just TA now
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
