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Greetings From Dogpatch 2: Your Friend

Greetings From Dogpatch 2: Your Friend published on 28 Comments on Greetings From Dogpatch 2: Your Friend

Sorry this is up a little late. I’m sick!! Bleh!

Also you should check out the Plesiostore. Everything is 20% off if you use the code “JIMINYJAMINY” at checkout! Happy Holidays!

Also, the Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tale books are for sale through my store now!

28 Comments

Does that mean that Eustace would rather take any combination of shutting up, walking or flying than share space with Gabe? And transport chief Myra decided to have a potentially talkative totem in her vehicle cabin rather than the Angel with Dirty Feet? And is that the nightmare skull from the One-Eyed Bear story? He’s not going to use it as a stake in his next poker game with the Grim Brothers, is he?!

I’m sorry I’m late on this and it’s a completely random question dealing with the mythic beings. Do mythical humans exist, I’m not saying warlocks but beings like methuselah and the wandering jew? warlocks like the gent in exchanges or a subsect of humanity that’s a mythical creature?

If Gabe is genderless, the proper pronoun would be ‘it’ would it not? ‘He/she’ would be for a being that was both or combination of both genders.

Certainly not. You’re right in that ‘he/she’ isn’t very appropriate, but ‘it’ is reserved for inanimate objects and concepts. There’s a long list of proposed non-binary pronouns that could be used, including ‘ze’, ‘sie’, ‘co’, and ‘hir’. There’s no consensus on exactly which pronoun is appropriate for which non-binary identity, and we don’t really know how Gabe identifies anyway, so take your pick. Some people also use ‘they’ as a non-binary pronoun, but I’m firmly of the opinion that the singular ‘they’ should be reserved for situations in which the gender identity of the referent is unknown (which, again, it technically is in this case, but we do at least know that Gabe’s non-binary).

I prefer “they” for myself because, although it’s grammatically awkward, it is something that already exists in the English language, so it comes more naturally to most people (including me). I would very much like it if English had a better gender-neutral singular pronoun, but I don’t want to make things difficult either.

As for “it”, you should never refer to a person as “it” unless they want to be called that (or sometimes maybe for infants). It’s generally considered demeaning and dehumanizing. (Depersonizing? Gabe isn’t exactly human.)

Silly me, not reading that two-sentence comment thoroughly before replying. ‘He/she’ indicates that the referent is one or the other, not that the referent is both. Gabe could well be androgynous, or bigender, or genderfluid, or whatever. All the cast listing tells us about Gabe’s identity is that ze is “physically genderless” (which is an oxymoron, by the way – it’s sex that’s physical, not gender), and and the fact the ze’s listed as “Gabriel/Gabrielle” would indicate that zir identity is somehow non-binary (zir lack of sexual characteristics doesn’t automatically mean that ze’s non-binary, much less that ze’s genderless).

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