Let’s say there’s someone I want to call Mr/Ms/Mrs [Name], but I don’t know their gender, is there a title I can use that doesn’t assume their gender?
“Oi, fuckface!”
“Hey cunt” works for anybody. But your mileage may vary depending on your location.
M’theydy
‘Citizen…’
stolen from a post on mastodon earlier, but: foolish mortal(s)
Lord [name], my [name], my dear [name], the one they call [name], oh great and powerful [name].
Jokes aside, one I’ve heard of that I liked was “misc” like miscellaneous lol. That one works a bit better in writing that verbal though.
Some other popular ones include Mx, M, Ind/Div, N/A, Mt, Nb, and many others.
For my own personal suggestion, I kinda like the idea of using “The” as a gender neutral title. Like instead of Mr or Ms Smith, it’s The Smith. Has a nice ring to it lol
Hello, The Gary…
You can’t tell me that isn’t objectively the best way to refer to someone named Gary.
Chookity!
Not a contemporary one, but during the French Revolution, they used ‘Citizen’ for everyone.
comrade
Slightly off topic but I really like the approach where the honorific is just dropped entirely. So just [Name]. No Mr/Ms/Mrs. It mostly doesn’t serve any purpose anyway.
That’s what we did in Sweden in the 60s. It feels so archaic whenever I have to enter an honorific on documents (i.e when booking hotels and flights) from other countries.
Sometimes they allow for you to write in other stuff. I put in “His majesty” once, it printed out as “His Firstname Lastname” in my hotel reservation paper. Disappointed.
I also put in “Emperor” for some mailing list stuff. I get a chuckle when I get mails from them. “Emperor RaivoKulli, sign up now for the conference”
Too bad we can’t adopt the Japanese “-san” honorific, as it is gender neutral!
Mx. seems the most commonly used for gender neutral. It’s used both by non-binary people and in cases where you purposefully don’t want to put a gender as a prefix.
Is it just pronounced “mix?”
Usually, yes. Or Mixter sometimes.
I have started just using M. Like, “Dear M. Lastname”. I saw it being done in French and just adopted it for English too. No one’s complained yet. (Have also seen Mx. but figure that could be confusing.)
In the sci-fi book Hyperion (which takes place hundreds of years in the future) they use this convention throughout and it works really well, so I’ve also wished that it were widely adopted in our society. (Except for androids, where the title is A. rather than M.)
Just fyi, M. in French is only equivalent to Mr, it’s short for Monsieur. Mme (short for Madame) is equivalent to Mrs, and Mlle (short for Mademoiselle) is equivalent to Miss/Ms.
So using M. for everyone is equivalent to saying Mr. for everyone.
Yeah, I know! That’s why I was surprised when someone addressed me as “M.” (while I don’t present as such, traditionally) in French. So, I thought “that’s neat!” and picked it up.
A sci-fi book from 1991 used that (Hyperion), and I thought it was just futurespeak. TIL!
TIL M. Bison was nonbinary.
Squanch
Sup, fool?
Mx is common-ish among nonbinary people. Here’s a relevant poll regarding people’s usages of it: https://www.gendercensus.com/results/2023-mx/
“My Liege”
