Practical Androgyny

2008 article on how teens in Baltimore started using ‘yo’ as a gender neutral third person pronoun (often accompanied by a pointing gesture):

queerandpresentdanger:

“What’s also interesting about the kids’ language is that people — mostly academics — have been trying to introduce a gender-neutral singular pronoun into the English language for about 200 years, with very little success. And then a group of kids in Baltimore just make one up and start using it.”

Grammar Girl: Yo as a Pronoun

(Source: motherfuckerofbabylon)

You would be amazed by how often people respond to my identity and gender presentation as an attack on their gender. Somehow my existence is a personal affront to some people (quite frequently other trans* people, sadly).

artoftransliness:

Wow, so the article I (Zak) recently wrote on gender neutral relational terms has recently kind of exploded. There have been a lot of people arguing about it, which I think is kind of crazy because I didn’t think of it as being particularly controversial when I wrote it. I just wanted to write a bit of a response to clear things up. 

The intent of the article was not to come up with gender neutral terms to use for every single person out there to “coercively non-gender” them. I wrote it so that people who are gender variant or otherwise uncomfortable with gendered terms would have options! Personally I refer to my significant other as my girlfriend and myself as her boyfriend, I have no problem with gendered terms in the slightest….so long as the people they are referring to are comfortable with gendered terms!

I’m kind of frustrated that some people thought I was insisting that we no longer use gendered terms at all. What I meant was, if you’re a person who is struggling with their family and friends calling them “aunt”, “niece”, “nephew”, “son”, etc there are options out there. When I first came out there was all sorts of awkwardness surrounding whether or not my mom should call me her son or my niece should call me her uncle. I was uncomfortable with both female and male gendered terms, and so we got by gender neutral terms and that’s what worked for me. 

Really I don’t get what all the fuss is about, but there you go. 

artoftransliness:

Being trans* has a tendency to make one aware of all the gendered terms out there. “Boyfriend”, “Girlfriend”, “Brother”, “Sister”, “Aunt”, and “Uncle” leave little room for ambiguity, which can be frustrating for non binary identified individuals (and even, sometimes, for binary identified trans* people as well). Here are some options, some already mainstream, some invented.

*Instead of brother or sister, you could use “sibling” or “sib” 

*For niece or nephew, “nibling” or “nephling” (both are used as a gender neutral term for a niece or nephew on urban dictionary) or “sibkid”. 

*Instead of aunt or uncle, have your nibling come up with a nickname for you (for example, my niece calls me “T”, which was once short for “auntie” but now is perfectly gender neutral) or just invent something like “untiee” (a combination of “uncle” and “auntie”). 

*Boyfriend or girlfriend can easily be replaced by “partner”, “significant other”, “SO”, “lover”, or “sweetheart”. 

*Similarly, husband and wife can be replaced by the above words (particularly “partner”) as well as “spouse” 

*For mom and dad there’s always “parent” or “parental unit” (as well as endless possibilities for made-up names, which we absolutely encourage)

I’m currently in the process of gathering gender neutral terms for the resources section of Practical Androgyny, some cute suggestions here :)

lottelodge wrote to the UK Department for Work and Pensions and received a reply addressed using the gender neutral title ‘Misc’:

lottelodge:

As you probably know, I am in the process of getting my name changed in various places and organisations in order to not get done for fraud. I like not being done for fraud.

I just got my deed poll and gender info sheet back from the Department for Work and Pensions, who very kindly give me…

Read more at Spacious Perspicacious

Every example of a government body recognising our preferences is significant as it sets a precedent that can be used, not only when asking other organisations to make similar changes, but when campaigning for legal recognition and protection of our non-binary identities. 

I’m planning a lengthy PracticalAndrogyny.com article on gender neutral language in the future, but until then here’s an article that illustrates how gendered language can even influence how people think about inanimate objects:

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.

Read the full article at Edge.org