Well, the parents suing for the right to select for a Deaf child lost the court case and Britain made it offically illegal to select for any trait considered a disability, so they stopped pursuing IVF and ended up having another Deaf daughter naturally. So they get their second Deaf child, the first daughter gets a sibling to sign with and everyone is happy. I guess it was God’s will and design all along. 
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I think you are mistaken about how universal your opinions are. Getting a cochlear implant for a child who is congenitally deaf is super controversial ethically within the Deaf community, since it is literally messing with a child’s brain, and there are risks and negative side effects. It is also controversial to decide to arbitrarily assign a gender and perform irreversible surgery on a child born with ambiguous sex traits. Leaving them alone is not “denying treatment.”
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You’d know obviously Mervin.
I’m proud of my culture for that. And it’s nature’s way; genetics. God willing a child to be deaf makes Him… execrable.
I’m aware of one person in this forum who may have something of real value to say about being a hearing kid in a deaf household. That person has not joined in this painful exchange of opinions.
My daughter is visually impaired. I am aware of some of her views and reasoning related to her disability. In spite of that, I am not qualified to make the kinds of judgements about disabilities that I see expressed here or about decisions parents make who have disabilities themselves. This discussion needs those voices. Without them, it’s at best a pool of opinion with no basis in experience.
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Thanks for this, Terry. I watched the video from the OP and I can’t imagine the challenges that intersex people have and the abuses they have suffered. Because our culture, right down to it’s grammar, expects - and therefore requires - binary sexuality/gender.
If we only look at language itself, we see no space for the nonbinary person at all. He, she…it? “It” is our only alternative? Assuming if one is not “he” or “she” one has no actual personhood.
I wonder what truly inclusive language would be like if any already exists..
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It would be Finnish 
. We have just one word for a person and it does not reveal the sex. No ‘he’ or ‘she’.
The same applies to words. We do not have ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ or ‘neutral’ words, all words are just words and treated equally.
If someone wants to be truly equal in this respect, you are welcome to start to learn Finnish.
It would be great if Finnish would become the lingua franca in the world - English has had that position after WW2, so maybe it would be a time for a change.
The latest development in everyday use of Finnish has made some chances. Pet owners have started to use the word for a human person from their dog and at the same time, many have started to use the word ‘it’ from another human. Dogs and humans changing places…
But also for dogs, the word does not reveal the sex.
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AFAIK, the practice here used to be that intersex babies were treated to make them either a girl or boy. In practice, intersexes were made girls because it is so much easier to cut the balls of. That caused some problems with intersexes developing attraction towards women. If the doctors would have known it, they would have treated the baby to become a boy but too late for that.
Nowadays the practices allow more liberty. The child may be left untreated until the person can show whether he feels himself a boy or she feels herself a girl.
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Intersex Realities and the Church: The Unwelcomed, Unwanted Neighbour - by Val Hiebert
- Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and intersex in the Image of God Paperback – May 16, 2015
- Charts a faithful theological middle course through complex sexual issues How different are men and women? When does it matter to us — or to God? Are male and female the only two options? What about those caught in the middle? In Sex Difference in Christian Theology Megan DeFranza explores such questions in light of the Bible, theology, and science. Many Christians, entrenched in culture wars over sexual ethics, either ignore the existence of intersex persons or avoid the inherent challenge they bring to the assumption that everybody is born after the pattern of either Adam or Eve. DeFranza argues, from a conservative theological standpoint, that all people are made in the image of God — male, female, and intersex — and that we must listen to and learn from the voices of the intersexed among us.
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Well - there is always “they”. I know of loving families who refer to their non-binary loved ones using that pronoun, even when it sounds awkward to a binary-oriented culture.
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Using a plural pronoun for a single person because “it” is the other option is another indication of the conceptual limits of our language categories.
Finnish seems our only option.
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Using “they” as a singular non-gendered pronoun has a history in English going back to the 14th century. It was fairly recent prescriptive grammarians who decided it “couldn’t” agree with singular antecedents, despite native speakers of English regularly using it in that way for centuries. Kind of like how you “can’t” end sentences with a preposition because grammarians tried to make English more elegant like Latin. Only English is full of prepositional verbal particles that don’t always take objects and also native speakers end sentences with prepositions all the time.
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We have a neighbor whose child was born with ambiguous gentitalia, had surgery and raised female despite being biologic male. It has been a rather difficult life, seldom venturing outside the family circle.
As some of you know, with my prostate cancer, I am on hormone ablation therapy for a couple of years, one year down, and it has been interesting being chemically castrated and essentially asexual in feelings and attraction, so have some empathy. On the positive side, I’ve mastered that lust thing, just need to work on the other nine commandments.
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Which doesn’t resolve the issue with the current use of English.
Come for the food fights, stay for the education in linguistics and history.
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I for one am ready to acclimate to favoring “they” wherever possible. My niece is questioning and has friends I’ve met who have decided they are non binary. I think meanly hope its to give up the familiarity of the pronoun use I’ve grown up on. (Just don’t ask me to keep sorted which people prefer “he” or “she” who provide no visual clues.)
I don’t follow. People have used they for a singular unknown gender pronoun my whole life in spoken English. (“Anyone who wants to come should send in their RSVP by Friday.”) Many style guides now allow it for publishing in formal writing too. What’s novel is using they/them for a known individual with a non-binary gender identity. I don’t think pronouns are the main issue for non-binary people though, it’s word pairs that don’t have a non-gendered option.
So with brother/sister, we have sibling, and with daughter/son we have child/kid, with mother/father we have parent, with husband/wife we have spouse/partner. All we have to do is take the s off the widely used inclusive plurals. But we don’t have good words for singular non-gendered aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, sir/ma’am, Mr./Ms., etc. Or a word available just isn’t really at the tip of the tongue. Like the prom monarch instead of the prom king or prom queen.
Languages are flexible and defined by usage. They will naturally adapt to fit the communication needs of the speech community. The more non-binary people are visible and included in society, the more normal English usage will reflect their inclusion in language use. Usually it’s not going to be through coining new words though, it’s going to be co-opting existing language and incorporating new usages or expanding the concepts a word triggers. Getting people to use the invented pronouns ze/zir was a failure because it’s not English. Getting people to use they/them for individuals is working fine, even if it takes some getting used to. My kids have some non-binary friends. They have not really struggled to use they/them pronouns when talking about them.
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Would love to know what you’ve learned about coping with wonky prostate function. My female doctor encourages me to allow plenty of time and frequent trips for urinating. Efficiency and rushing is a young man’s game. She says if I start using a catheter I’ll be less happy. I tend to agree.
Maybe take the peeing tips to PM though, guys.
Then what changes? If the argument is this is standard English, then historic usage, which typically distinguishes singular and plural pronouns, can carry on as before. If the object is to change the way people speak, then that is essentially a change in vernacular.