polyglotplatypus:

thatgirlonstage:

Hey French/Spanish/Italian speakers–

I have a friend who recently came out as nonbinary, and uses they/them pronouns. However, I also speak French, and I’m a bit stuck on how to refer to them when I’m speaking French. I plan to ask them for their preference as well, but I wondered if any native speakers had advice for how to deal with a language where gender is built into adjectives and there isn’t a gender-neutral pronoun. Do you generally use the equivalent of “they” (ils), since it’s what gets used when there’s a group of both men and women? Do you default to masculine singular (il, un ami) since that’s what generally gets used if you don’t know someone’s gender? Other solutions?

Hey, French agender person here! I thought a lot about that matter before, and even though it’s not really an official grammar rule, we do use masculine pronouns (singular or plural) to refer to someone whose gender is unknown.