A question which just occurred to me

[commodorified]

I am enthusiastically in favour of addressing people as they wish to be addressed, and referring to them by the pronouns, etc, that they prefer, or, if lacking data, using 'they'.

And there has, thankfully, been a lot of discussion of the matter to help me get this right.

So now I am wondering about formal modes of address for general and specific addressing of people whose genders are non-binary.

staranise sensibly points out that when addressing groups, "Honoured Guests" may reasonably be used along with, or instead of, "Ladies and Gentlemen/Mesdames et Messieurs". (ETA anne adds "Amis Distingués")

Suitable substitutes for "Sir", "Madam" "Ma'am", "Mr." "Ms", "M.", "Mmme", and so forth, however, elude me.

Has anyone seen anything good on this?

Comments

[niqaeli]

The context I ran across it in, the person bringing it up didn't care for it because it felt a bit to exotic, rather than being an ordinary workaday. Xs being not super common in English. I don't know that I agree with that assessment (or that I think it would continue to ping that way if it saw regular usage), but it's worth noting.

My particular frustration was in addressing people particularly as a hotel front desk agent -- a brief, retail interaction between total strangers. I was trained to use a guest's name at least three times in any given interaction; it's extremely difficult to do that politely without assuming a gender. (We can argue about whether it's a good thing that we expect retail workers to address all guests as their social superiors, but I tried and found I cannot make myself drop the formality in that context.)

I mean, I cheerfully use all the other options of flexibility for to address people in informal or semi-formal conversation! It's really only within that narrow retail context that it was so impossible to negotiate.