I have a question about gender-neutral family references

[florahart]

So, I am all over gender-neutral pronouns, and I want to call people what they want to be called and stuff, but I am wondering if there is a term which is widely preferred among people who identify as non-gender-binary, not for pronouns but for third-party references to them as family members. For example, my children both are male, so I call them

Comments

[tripperfunster]

I'll be watching this post. I'm interested as to what people have to say.

Sometimes, when your pronouns are too vague, people make completely different assumptions.

I once dealt with a woman who referred to her significant other as her 'partner' and I assumed she was a lesbian. I hope I didn't gawk too much when her HUSBAND showed up one day. :D That was just her term for him, and I couldn't have been more wrong about it.

[channonyarrow]

My mother has been referring to my father as her husband (and he her as his wife) because even though they're divorced, it's a lot easier than partner, not least because they have had that exact experience. (I hope you were not at SIFF and were not talking to my mother, but if you were, she thought you were very nice!)

[tripperfunster]

Hee! No. This was a customer of mine, who I'd had several dealings with, over the course of several months, before her husband arrived. ;) Ex-husband doesn't work as a term for her?

[channonyarrow]

Well, they live together, so I think it's mostly that it causes some head-explodey for a lot of people to try to explain it. Plus, they're both older, and my mother does have a strong streak of the conventional. Even though my dad's been trying to get her to remarry him for about 12 years, she's not going to, but she won't take the step of referring to him as her partner.

It was pretty funny that one of the neighbors (super religious family) stopped really speaking to her for about a year when they found out that my parents aren't married. It was a lot less funny that they did not stop speaking to my dad.

[pauraque]

I made the same faux pas a few years ago when I worked at a greeting card store. A woman came up to me saying she needed an anniversary card for her partner. The store's owners were very progressive, as it happened, and I promptly showed her the section of anniversary cards they'd picked out that either showed a same-sex couple or didn't specify genders. I didn't catch her look of confusion as I went on to point out the "To My Wife" cards, just in case she considered her partner to be like a wife (this was before same-sex marriage was legal in the state).

Yeah, she had to explain to me that her partner was a man, and that they weren't married but she considered him more than a "boyfriend"... while I tried to dislodge my foot from my mouth. :P

[tripperfunster]

Ha! Well, it's nice to know I'm not alone!