‘Parent’? After all, it’s not unheard of even for children to simply use ‘mother’ and ‘father’.
Pama/Pamma(P-ah-mah), maybe? A combination of papa and mama.
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For adopted kids (gay parents), I imagine they refer to the parents as, still the same mom/mama/mother (or the dad variation), but mom would be parent A and mama is parent B.
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I’m a nonbinary parent of two, and my children call me Per (we pronounce it like ‘per annum’), which is a compressed rendering of ‘parent’. (The youngest also calls me ‘Persey’ sometimes and makes a lot of ‘per’-fect parent and purr-like-a-cat puns.)
There are also a number of suggestions on this list.
If the parent or child is your MC, you could also allow the player to input their own preferred term.
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Thanks everyone!
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So, I’m not trying to restart this debate or anything, but I think the point of contention here is actually based an a specific aspect of English as a language and the difference between intuitive and cognitive understanding, as well as just a lack of understanding intent. But I’m cis, so I will fully cop to it, if you all think I’m off base.
Old English was a grammatically gendered language. Every noun had a gender. This began to go away in Middle English, and in modern English, most nouns don’t have genders.
But, in modern English, “he” and “she” and all the conjugations thereof are the remaining instances of grammatic gender, but the grammatic gender has nothing to do with social gender. It is predicated on biological sex. “He” is the pronoun in English used for things presented as physically male. “She” is used for the physically female. “It” is used for nonhumans that either has no sex, or something that has a sex not yet known. “They” is plural which can encompass a group of nouns regardless of grammatical gender or lack thereof. “They” is also singular for a person whose sex is not known.
A lot of people understand this intuitively, but would never be hard-pressed to verbalize it.
But the issue comes because most people link sex with linguistic gender without understanding why. They get easily confused when someone appears to be conflating linguistic and social genders, because they don’t realize enbys are actually not assigning words for whatever social gender they identify as, they’re designating an alternative pronoun so they won’t be referred to by how someone thinks they physically present. Because the words he and she are words that imply a familiarity.
The gender identity of the person is completely immaterial. Because they’re not asking for you to use a word for their gender. They’re asking for you to use a word that denotes their familiarity. They’re saying “If you want to refer to me in a way that implies familiarity, don’t refer to my genitals. Use this word and refer to my person.”
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this completely disregards that many people just believe non-binary people are confused, delusional, mentally ill, deviant, or that a non-binary identity cannot or does not truly exist. I think what you’re bringing up here is far more applicable to people’s lack of ability, slowness, or (sometimes) hesitance/reluctance to adjust to gender neutral pronouns. it meshes well with my struggles with non-b pronouns. I mess up my own pronouns frequently now that i live with and around my catholic family again (very fun).
you’re making an assumption here. I don’t prefer they/them because it is an alternative to he and she. and I don’t prefer it to avoid being referred to by someone’s perception of my presentation. I prefer they/them because I am agender. I personally, internally, thoroughly, do not subscribe to gender. I don’t feel it. They don’t fit me, at risk of sounding pretentious, I experience myself outside of gender. “They” is the only pronoun that is accurate.
I don’t understand this part? Is this familiarity referring to the assumption of using he/she? Because that seems to imply that there are circumstances where or people with whom a non-b person is fine with those pronouns? and I’m sure there are there are nonb people with that preference, but that’s not the blanket case. definitely isn’t the case with me. The point about familiarity and referring to genitals really confuses me. I think linguistically it could make sense, but one just can’t separate social history, reality, and usage from linguistical logic and call it an explanation. it just eliminates too much context.
let me know what I’m misunderstanding here, it feels like a lot
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It’s a very interesting linguistic analysis but … yeah, you’re a bit off base. I felt off reading your analysis but had a hard time trying to parse where exactly the problem was–so thank you to @hotmess.exe , who articulated my thoughts much better than I would’ve been able to. This line especially is just the crux of the matter.
@VoicesFromTheDark , I appreciate that you’re trying to bridge a gap of understanding, and I feel your intentions were good, but …
This is just deeply false, and to a lesser extent so is,
My gender identity is intrinsically part of my presentation and pronouns, and definitely impacts the way people refer to me. I can’t help but bristle at this kind of description–as was already said, it eliminates too much context. Including that oftentimes people don’t necessarily have a separation in their mind of genitals and gender identity. A professor pointing at me across the room and saying “HomingPidgeon has the notes, ask him for help” thinks they are referring to me by my person. The issue is that referring to someone with pronouns isn’t just referring by person, it’s referring by gender, and part of my identity and expression is using they/them pronouns.
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glad i made at least some sense, it was a struggle to articulate my thoughts on it. i don’t even think i totally captured what i meant, actually, but talking about gender is like that sometimes, especially non-binary identity. and esp esp being agender; trying to explain certain things about it to binary folk, sometimes even to genderfluid folks, feels like i’m trying to describe something that is only visible to me… which it sort of is, i suppose? 
* we all exist within the same social structures, conventions, and obligations and yet some of us still end up realizing this one very prominent social structure is something that just doesn’t apply. like, it exists but doesn’t apply. never has. but it’s a trip to explain for so many reasons.
often, i struggle to even understand how some people can say they “feel” like a “insert binary gender” because the only way i’ve experienced something close to that is when others’ treatment of me has triggered my dysphoria. because i so definitively do not identify as a girl or boy and being forced to assume the role of one or choose one as an identifier makes me deeply uncomfortable. i’m a person obsessed with finding myself, defining myself, labeling myself so i constantly strive for accuracy, always accuracy. i play with my presentation a lot and one could accurately say it leans femme much of the time. but if asked what gender i “feel” i am, the word that comes to mind is always, always “none”. i don’t know what gender feels like to people who claim one and as i get older, as i have discussions about gender with more people, as i read and hear more binary trans experiences, i just realize more and more that i never did. whatever that feeling is, i just don’t experience it.
*
metaphorically, i mean lol. we’re all trapped in our own perspectives to an extent. it’s easier to see the perspective of those that share our experiences or feelings but when someone experiences something so far outside of what we know or understand, we sometimes never understand what they feel, how they feel
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Thanks for the feedback you’ve given me on this so far.
Perhaps I was a bit clumsy getting across the point I was driving at. I probably could have been more clear. I’ll try to be more clear now. And I make no guarantee that it’s going to be clear, because I often have to iterate my words until they’re as refined as my understanding. Not going to go in any particular order here, so bear with me.
Most importantly, in my opinion, my statement of “the gender of the person is immaterial” is not a statement of how important a person’s gender is, but rather that the important part of asking someone to use your pronouns is not the gender you identify as, but the simple idea is that the request is the part that needs consideration. I don’t need to know or understand your gender identity or why you feel the way you do, but it is easy to understand that you’ve made a reasonable request and I should make my efforts to abide by it.
The crux of this that it doesn’t matter whether or not a person believes that all the myriad of genders exist, whether they feel that such characterizations are indicative of gender dysmorphia or mental illness. What matters is that if someone makes a reasonable request that makes them more comfortable and that costs you nothing to perform, it behooves you to fulfill that request, otherwise you’re just an ass.
Personally, I will admit to absolutely not understanding how a person can feel like a gender at all. I am male, and the only reason I call myself cis is because that’s what people say I am. I can’t even fathom what feeling like a gender feels like. I’m a person who feels a great variety of feelings over time and in many situations. But I’ve never had the thought of “I feel like a man” or “I feel male” or “Female” or “I feel like something else”
But I’ll be damned if someone tells me they do have those feelings and I choose not to believe them because I have no basis to relate to it. Because I don’t have to understand how someone feels their gender to understand that they are a person, and that as a person, their requests matter.
So far as the he/she familiarity thing, I was not meaning to imply an actual thought by a non-binary person making the request. I was simply trying to illustrate in a very obvious way that the words he and she classify people into two groups by an axis that a given person might not wanted to be classified by.
The familiarity aspect comes from the linguistic difference between he/she and they/them, which is knowledge of sex. If I say he, I’m saying that I’m familiar enough with a person to know what he is. So my last part about “don’t refer to my genitals” I was being a bit glib. It’s more akin to “This word (which is based on my physical representation) does not classify me, because my person has more to it than what that word is equipped to handle. Use this word instead because I have chosen it to encompass me.” It’s not necessarily a discrete thought that someone has, but rather a stab at the inherent reason of the request.
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This is an interesting elaboration, and I don’t disagree with any of it. Linguistics is interesting and looking at pronouns from that angle isn’t a worthless pursuit.
The issue just comes back around to what’s already been said,
Language is fascinating, but most of the time discussions of pronouns aren’t about language per se, so much as just masquerading that way. Rejections of single person gender neutral language (they/them, ze/zir, etc) are often spoken of with linguistics as a defense, but the underlying mindset is consistently one of rejection of nonbinary genders in general.
Your argument is perfectly sound and I agree with the spirit of it, but the issue of acceptance and tolerance is just about a lot more than the words themselves.
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It’s all the really difficult point of confluence between sex, gender, and linguistic gender. The words he/she aren’t based on gender, they’re based on sex. But socially, for a most of human history, sex and gender were seen as inextricably linked, and so, when a person sees the word he, they are conditioned to see it as a word that describes gender, when linguistically it doesn’t. But to aim for a world that is not default binary, we need to divorce the social association of words from the linguistic associations.
The point I’m driving at is that if we can get everyone to see that the linguistics of he/she are different from social gender, and that they are linguistically incapable of classifying everyone then it makes a request for using a person’s preferred words an easier pill to swallow for those who are resistant.
What I’m saying is that people who are resistant to using a person’s preferred pronouns don’t care about the linguistic argument. A person who is genuinely accepting of gender neutral language is also going to accept that any language is a living beast in constant flux. What the words historically have meant is functionally irrelevant–definitions can change, meaning evolves.
I knew a woman who was very invested in the meaning of words. She used my proper pronouns, they/them, uncomfortably, and then in a quiet moment admitted she didn’t think that singular they/them made grammatical sense. We had a five minute conversation where I argued that it did. She said she was convinced, but maybe she wasn’t. All I know is she never misgendered me, so on my end it doesn’t really matter.
The people who are going to respect pronouns are going to respect pronouns. The people who aren’t won’t be convinced with a linguistic argument. Disrespecting someone’s gender is a form of bigotry, and bigotry is illogical. I stand by that I don’t disagree with your amended argument, and that language is an interesting field of study. But if your goal is to talk someone into accepting they/them pronouns by citing linguistics, you’re going to fail, because that someone doesn’t actually care.
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Thank you for this, and your related remarks about respecting all persons.
I personally am usually not looking for, nor interested in, a discussion about gender when I introduce myself and explain that my pronouns are they/them. I would love to more often hear, ‘Right, thanks,’ rather than field prying questions or be ‘treated’ to an explanation of the other person’s thoughts on my – or anyone’s - gender.
This can be true, but it’s also sometimes the case that the word in question does not classify a person because it is not, in that person’s eyes, accurate. This is certainly true for me.
I agree…really any rejection of a nonbinary person’s preferred (pronouns, identity, presentation, you name it) is a microaggression at best and, at worst, outright harassment or more.
Ah, not so. This is an illusion created by certain segments of our present-day society, but it is by no means true for all regions and for all time. Historians in the English-speaking world are slowly bringing more instances to light, but the active effort to suppress any kind of queer history by previous generations makes it a laborious process.
Right, exactly. Pronouns are by no means static in history – the English language’s loss of a regular distinction between plural and singular second-person pronouns is a wonderful example here, but by no means the only one.
They’ll probably still want to argue about it though (speaking from personal experience). Sigh.
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This is a gentle reminder that if you have posted several times on a single thread, it’s good to take a breath to give others a chance to speak and come back to the discussion a bit later. Thank you, everyone. 
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i deffffinitely understand what you mean far better now, thank you for clarifying. i second everything @HomingPidgeon’s said. but i still have some things that don’t sit right with me and i’d like to hear more from you before i can even understand my own response. in fact, i need you to do me two favors:
first: what exactly is linguistic gender? when i tried looking it up, i got results for grammatical gender–which seems to be the concept of certain nouns being gendered or languages having gender systems; not the foundation for the gendered pronouns he and she. Something that isn’t a thing in English, unless I’m missing something. I know you referred to Old English in your original post but the concept still doesn’t seem applicable to these gendered pronouns
second: I’m not meaning to fact-check, but can you please pass on a link or reference explaining the etymology of he and she that you seem to be referring to? this especially isn’t sitting right with me. I know you referred to this being true of Old English but… it seems off to me, this assertion that gendered pronouns only came to be as an acknowledgment of biological sex. it doesn’t mesh with my (layperson’s) understanding of how language would naturally develop…
besides, i think you might be misreading how gendered pronouns are utilized by people who don’t think about or even function within proper linguistics to begin with. “boys have penises, girls have vaginas and breasts. boys are he and girls are she. therefore, penis = he and vagina = she” is the most conservative binary understanding of gender. but this has nothing to do with doing language gymnastics and is wholly based on assumptions and conflation of gender and sex?
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Briefly, linguistic gender is not, as far as I know a term that used anywhere. That’s actually why I chose it. I wanted to distinguish from grammatical gender because grammatical gender doesn’t really apply in modern English, because by and large, modern English does not order its words through grammatical gender. The he/she/it is basically they only remaining uses in modern English from the grammatically gendered Old English. It was an attempt at using a term that would seem self-explanatory and would not be confusing because grammatical gender as a term refers to classes of words, rather than the words themselves, and gender is used for individual words.
I didn’t want to have a conversation where we could end up using one word for something that has multiple concepts attached to it, so I tacked on “linguistic” simply to me clear that I wasn’t talking about social gender without having to explain it in each usage. Because that would get even more convoluted and confusing way quicker.
As far as he/she being based on sex, it’s is a is simply an instance of “natural gender” the words are based on inherent natural characteristics of the subject noun, as opposed to simply grammatical classification. For instance, in Spanish, hombre is both grammatically masculine and naturally masculine. Mujer is both grammatically and naturally feminine. In English, he and she are both pronouns referring to natural gender, and previously, also fell into their corresponding masculine/feminine grammatical genders. When grammatical gender went out of usage over the evolution of the English language, we were left with he and she, words that refer to natural gender, but no longer fall into a grammatical gender.
Now, obviously, we can have a debate about whether or not he/she and natural gender jives with social gender based on cultural interpretation of what natural characteristics constitute male or female, but given that the concept of social gender wasn’t even something that had been thought of at the time these languages were developed, I think it’s reasonable to say that the natural gender of words were based upon physical presentation.
Found a link to a paper that talks about it for you.
Edit: Fixed link
I originally liked this post because of its linguistic approach, but having read the exchange that followed, I think adding another voice to the mix may be beneficial.
Disclaimer: Though I find linguistics fascinating, I have no formal education in the field whatsoever . I know enough to contribute to conversations, but not to teach or the like.
@hotmess.exe’s last post is what finally convinced me to join the conversation — I understand both sides of the “argument”, but I think there’s a bit of context missing that would help everyone understand the topic a little better. The two relevant sections of the aforementioned post are:
I’ll state my opinion in bold so it can’t be missed:
- English third person pronouns no longer codify grammatical gender; their general use is therefore determined by social consensus, while their specific use is dependent on the subject (in this case, the person) for whom they are used — a pronoun may indicate social gender or may be purely aesthetic.
I’ll explain that in a less condensed manner shortly. First, I’d like to address the concept of grammatical gender itself. Another term for this is “nominal gender”, but conlanger and author David Peterson has suggested using “nominal species” as an alternative to avoid the confusion with social gender, though he admits it’s highly unlikely to be adopted.
The reasoning behind this is that in languages with grammatical gender, all nouns, without exception, must belong to one of at least two different genders. In French, you say “le garçon” and “la fille” (“the boy” and “the girl”), yes, but you also say “la voiture” and “le train” (“the car” and “the train”). Cars and trains have no need of social genders, so clearly, they can’t be described as feminine and masculine for that reason. Across languages, the spelling and pronunciation of a word is more likely the reason for grouping it into one gender or another.
Why, then, does grammatical gender exist? Redundancy. By virtue of a noun having gender, it forces the words around it (at least articles and adjectives) to agree with it. Gender makes a language harder to learn, yes, but it also makes it easier to understand what a person is saying even if you didn’t hear the full sentence.
Here's an example of what I mean.
Let’s say I’m with a friend in a noisy, Parisian street and we’re on our way to meet with two of her cousins. I remember her telling me that the one is French and the other English, and I can also remember that one is male and the other female, but I can’t remember which is which. (I also can’t remember their names.) So, I ask her and she replies, “Mary est anglaise et Marc est français.” However, because it’s noisy, I only heard “est français”.
If we were speaking English, I’d only have heard her say “is French”, which would obviously be unhelpful and I’d have to ask her again. However, since I know “français” agrees with a masculine subject and sounds different from “française”, which agrees with a feminine subject, I can deduce the male cousin is the French one.
Granted, this example makes use of nouns that have implied social gender, not just grammatical gender, but it nevertheless illustrates my point about the redundancy. Any kind of nominal or verbal inflection allows you to say more using fewer words.
A very good question to ask would be why so many languages use grammatical genders that appear to be modelled after social gender. Well, they weren’t originally: they were modelled after biological sex.
@hotmess.exe, you said this seems off to you, but the reason I say this is because of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor to all Indo-European (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, etc.) languages. The Proto-Indo-European people are accepted to have been nomadic pastoralists, which means their primary source of food was livestock. They probably used masculine and feminine genders to differentiate between bulls and cows, rams and ewes, and so on — it just happens that you can obviously differentiate between people that way too. (Note that they also had a neuter gender.)
Other gender systems include animacy (animate vs inanimate) and rationality (rational vs non-rational), and you can even get noun classes, which replace not just gender, but also number and case. (Swahili, for example, has fifteen different noun classes.) However, a very interesting occurrence is the common-neuter distinction of genders in Swedish and Danish, where masculine and feminine merged into the common gender. Wouldn’t it be so much simpler if English had done that?
In fact, some languages, like Turkish and Indonesian, have no gender at all. If Middle English had ditched its gendered pronouns along with the genders themselves, differentiating only between third person subjects in terms of plurality, this issue would never have occurred. Perhaps people would have been less protective of the gender binary, but alas.
Having said all of the above (this post has literally taken hours to write 
), I feel we can safely draw the conclusion that third person pronouns in Modern English serve whichever purpose its speakers agree upon — linguistics no longer has anything to do with the matter.
It’s funny how this topic has received more than a hundred replies, yet the conclusion of the first post is still the most relevant thing said:
As humans, we want to respect each other. Thus, as speakers of English, we want our language to reflect that. We can’t prescribe an individual’s first name — an expression of their identity — so neither can we prescribe which third person pronoun ought to be used for them.
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So, as we all agreed upon, this is really an issue about respect. Thats really where the conversation begins and ends.
The reason I brought up the grammatical history of this is specifically because the meaning of words absolutely do change based on societal consensus. But there is great disagreement between segments of people about the meaning of the words, so it makes a claim that society has even reached a consensus about it a bit murky. I offered the view of the words through the lens of linguistic evolution as a way to shed light on a potential reason for the divide between the different segments of people.
The issue comes because these words have two markedly different interpretations that contemporary people have. It’s literally an issue of a couple of different interpretations, one being that he/she are inherently terms relating to social gender, another being that they are words that refer specifically to biological sex, and a third (more ignorant) interpretation that sex and gender are the same thing. People who view the words from a perspective of social gender see them as words that refer specifically to two of the social genders that exist, which is a fairly novel concept. People who believe otherwise fall into the other two categories, where one relies intuitively on the linguistic provenance of the words and dont feel their meaning needs to be modified, and the third which is just simplistic thinking and their minds will probably never change.
Obviously there are other perspectives at play, but those three are the major outlooks, in my estimation. So, as a matter of creating a societal consensus about it, it requires two of these groups to engage with one another to come to an agreement, rather than talking past each other. Irrespective of the outcome of that, the fact remains that if a person wants to be respectful, they need to acquiesce to the very simple, easy request of someone regardless of what their perspective on the actual meaning of the current nomenclature.
Now, I could keep nerding out on the historical evolution of all this, but I feel like if we do that, we’re starting to move away from the central point of the whole thread, which as we’ve all noted, is to treat reasonable people reasonably.
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