(no subject)

[urocyon]

A rather ironic demonstration of the potential for linguistic problems, as mentioned in the last post: I got caught up in writing (ah, the fun of autie hyperfocus!), and did not think to ask someone which pronouns applied to them. So, making some assumptions in trying to be respectful, I got that wrong. And feel like crap about it, because intentional or not, that kind of thing hurts.

The moral here? Don't make assumptions, but find out what people want and need. And even if you try to do that, there's pretty much always room for improvement--and screwups. :(

Comments

[axelrod]

One thing I'm realizing about trans people generally is that we often don't grok each other, even when we share a sub-category. Partly bc society and language makes it difficult to *understand* ourselves. Partly because society encourages us to just make assumptions about people's gender and the language to describe them and where they should go physically.

I've encountered similar clashes re: mental health issues. Different conceptualizes of one's illness, different relationships to it (i.e. part of oneself, or very much not, or something else), different relationships with medical professionals, meds, etc.

In both cases, there is no neutral language. One person's preferred term will erase someone or piss them off or has bad associations or *something*. I mean, a lot of people find gender-neutral pronouns helpful or accurate or exactly what they need. I fucking hate them, for reasons which are both reasonable and not reasonable. I just kind of hate neologisms for gender bc I want to be understood and most ppl don't know what the neologisms mean.

[maevele]

I sometimes wish english defaulted to a genderfree third person pronoun, so unless someone specified a pronoun, we had a default.

[urocyon]

Yeah, that is actually one of the things I've liked from the little I've studied Cherokee so far: you have to specify the gender of the person you're talking about if it's relevant in any way (as in "that man over there" did whatever), otherwise it defaults to he/she/it. Then there's the really inclusive, no gender specified in any way, term for "girlfriend/boyfriend/non-married partner", another clunky one in English.