“they” (1 word) is shorter than “he or she” (3 words)
“they” is more inclusive than “he/she”
“themself” flows more naturally than “him or herself”
“they” is less clunky than “(s)he”
it’s time to replace the awkward “she or he”
“hey can you go ask they what does they want for dinner, and when is they coming over to watch movies with they?”
“Hey, can you go ask them what they want for dinner, and when they’re coming over to watch movies?”
Step one is learning how to talk like a human person.
Friendly reminder:
“I shouldn’t like to punish anyone, even if they’d done me wrong.” —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
“A person can’t help their birth.” —William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
“But to expose the former faults of any person, without knowing what their present feelings were, seemed unjustifiable.” —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
“Every Fool can do as they’re bid.” —Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation (1738)
“So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.” —King James Bible, Matthew 18:35 (transl. 1611)
“God send every one their heart’s desire!” —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (~1600)
“Now this king did keepe a great house, that euerie body might come and take their meat freely.” —Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia (1580)
“If … a psalme scape any person, or a lesson, or els yt they omyt one verse or twayne…” —William Bonde, The Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526)
“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, / They wol come up and offre a Goddés name” —Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale (~1380)
“þan hastely hiȝed eche wiȝt on hors & on fote, / huntyng wiȝt houndes alle heie wodes, / til þei neyȝþed so neiȝh to nymphe þe soþe [Then hastily hied each person on horse and on foot / hunting with hounds all the high woods / ‘til they came so near, to tell the truth]” —William and the Werwolf (transl. ~1350-1375)
“Bath ware made sun and mon, / Aiþer wit þer ouen light [Both were made sun and moon / Either with their own light]” —Cursor Mundi (~1325)
We’ve been using they/them/their pronouns to indicate a person with unspecified gender for a long ass fucking time. The only reason it’s become a big issue lately is because it can be used as a semi-respectful term for trans and non-binary folks and we can’t have that can we
These fucks are literally trying to change our language to hurt trans/nb folks, and claiming that’s just the way its always been
Overall, queer was approved of by 72.9% of respondents, with 37.2% of respondents specifying queer was their preferred umbrella term.
Queer is the most widely preferred umbrella term, and the 3rd most approved of umbrella term, behind LGBT+ and LGBTQ+.
Groups that do not prefer the use of queer as an umbrella are: straight respondents, exclusionst-identifying respondents, transmedicalists, truscum, sex-negative respondents, and sex work critical respondents.
Queer as an umbrella was preferred above other umbrella terms by all gender identities, and by all orientation groups other than straight.
I’m fascinated to see that exclusionists are BY FAR the most opposed to the term “queer.” And that the only group that comes close to their 17% approval of the term is truscum, at 27%.
Not that I’m surprised they don’t like it. I’m surprised at the immense gap between what they insist, and scream, over and over – that very few people have reclaimed queer, that we should all avoid using it, that older people hate it because it was used against us but younger people hate it because only older people briefly reclaimed it –
and the reality of it being overwhelmingly accepted, preferred, and used, outside of all but a few very insulated groups.
What tickles me the most about it is that the one group where the majority does agree with exclusionists’ view of “gueer” is THE STRAIGHTS!
Like this makes me think so much of the whole “terfs and conservatives agree on a lot of stuff” -thing. (There’s a whole game somewhere, with quotes from terfs and conservatives where you have to guess which one said it, and it is a real fucking hard game…)
Like maybe you aren’t really all that much on the side you think you are, if you actually have a lot in common with the side that wants to hurt the group you claim to support.
We are officially done arguing about the appropriateness and appropriate usage of “queer.”
Via sending asks to the actuallyadhd blog to tell them “No, special interest is just for autistic people!”Again.
Can it stop at some point, fellow autistic people? Can it please stop? I am autistic and have ADHD. Am I supposed to alternate what terms I use depending on which I think it’s coming from? (Spoiler: Neurotypes don’t get separated in brains that way).
As I said last Augustwhen about an incident of language gatekeeping: “It tells people that we are not a community that welcomes people… It tells many people who are wondering if they are autistic that we are a community who will not welcome them. That may make them afraid to approach us, or learn more about autistic community and autistic culture... [This] is not what I want people to think of the community I love and fight for.”
So: is this is really the preeminent battle to be having with people – other disabled people? ADHDers in this context, who are often in fact what are known as autistic cousins anyway – a decades-old term that refers to someone “who is not NT, is not quite autistic, but is recognizably “autistic-like” particularly in terms of communication and social characteristics.”
There are plenty of things to critique about the ways parts of the broader disability community interact with each other. I would recommend stopping to seriously think about whether this is one of them.
If I could ask only one thing of the community, it would be that we stop arguing over what ‘bi’ and ‘pan’ mean. they can have heavy overlap – they can have the same fucking meaning, even – and still both be valid identifiers. I identify as bi but others might have the same attraction experiences as me and identify as pan. it’s fine! they are both fine! can we stop arguing about this please? especially people who are neither bi nor pan???
To expand on this, my revolutionary idea includes
people who identify as bi not defining what it means to be pan
people who identify as pan not defining what it means to be bi
You can define why you identify as bi or pan without including an explanation for why you don’t think the other identity describes your experience
this post is my big ‘fuck you’ to the people who respond to someone IDing as bi or pan with ‘but why don’t you identify as [the other orientation]?’
it’s seriously screwed up that bi and pan ppl are being pitted against each other like this, as if our experiences have to be completely different for both labels to exist. As though if it turns out we have even slightly overlapping definitions of bi and pan, only one (1) orientation label will be allowed to continue being used
Don’t ask people why they don’t identify as pan if they say they are bi
Don’t ask people why they identify as bi if if they say they are pan
If I could ask only one thing of the community, it would be that we stop arguing over what ‘bi’ and ‘pan’ mean. they can have heavy overlap – they can have the same fucking meaning, even – and still both be valid identifiers. I identify as bi but others might have the same attraction experiences as me and identify as pan. it’s fine! they are both fine! can we stop arguing about this please? especially people who are neither bi nor pan???
Today on Twitter I have seen several tweets about the accounts of people who identify as queer being suspended for posts where they talk about being queer…
For “using a slur”.
This was absolutely forseeable. This is 100% what “just so you know, IT’S A SLUR” aimed at people using the word queer to describe themselves and their activism was leading to.
I’ve seen “gay” used as an insult in my life WAY MORE OFTEN and YET
Worse, there’s reason to believe that these Twitter accounts were suspended because alt-righters and Nazis reported them for using “queer” as a way of getting revenge for all the Nazi accounts that have been suspended lately.
What did I keep warning about? What did I keep saying? That if we keep ‘problematizing’ words that living, breathing LGBTQ+ people use to describe ourselves and our reality, we’d end up where they would be used against us by precisely the individuals who hate us the most. Something that would have never happened had a term’s reclaimed status been respected, instead of people constantly screaming that it’s a slur, in any and all situations.
THIS is why I keep saying “let people talk the way they talk if what they’re saying isn’t malicious.”
THIS. RIGHT HERE.
If the word “queer” triggers you (or “queers,” “queerfolk,” “queer community” and other plural forms)…
…get yourselves a word replacer and Fucking. Stop. This. Shit.
Which also means that we now can’t advertise 90% of LGBT+ anthologies on Twitter. Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Hashtag Queer…Queer is in the title of MOST of them. Which should be enough proof that it’s not that much of a slur to a lot of us, right?
I did some quick research. At least one of the accounts has been reinstated. Is this alt righters or did somebody unleash a badly-coded bot? Either way, they need to get their head out of the sand and use more nuance.
Today on Twitter I have seen several tweets about the accounts of people who identify as queer being suspended for posts where they talk about being queer…
For “using a slur”.
This was absolutely forseeable. This is 100% what “just so you know, IT’S A SLUR” aimed at people using the word queer to describe themselves and their activism was leading to.
I’ve seen “gay” used as an insult in my life WAY MORE OFTEN and YET
Worse, there’s reason to believe that these Twitter accounts were suspended because alt-righters and Nazis reported them for using “queer” as a way of getting revenge for all the Nazi accounts that have been suspended lately.
What did I keep warning about? What did I keep saying? That if we keep ‘problematizing’ words that living, breathing LGBTQ+ people use to describe ourselves and our reality, we’d end up where they would be used against us by precisely the individuals who hate us the most. Something that would have never happened had a term’s reclaimed status been respected, instead of people constantly screaming that it’s a slur, in any and all situations.
THIS is why I keep saying “let people talk the way they talk if what they’re saying isn’t malicious.”
THIS. RIGHT HERE.
If the word “queer” triggers you (or “queers,” “queerfolk,” “queer community” and other plural forms)…
…get yourselves a word replacer and Fucking. Stop. This. Shit.
I just read this piece where Julia Serano (trans activist and author of Whipping Girl) writes, “[T]here is no perfect word: Every term will have its detractors, and so long as trans people are stigmatized in our culture, some people will use these terms in disparaging or exclusionary ways.”
She coined the terms word-sabotage and word-elimination to talk about this. Word-elimination, as you might guess, is when people rally against a particular term. Usually because they find something about it offensive, or inferior to their preferred term. It’s “don’t use this word.”
Word-sabotage is similar, but indirect. It’s when people “sabotage” one term by talking about how this other word is better – in ways that imply negative things about the first term. Or when people decide that one word sucks and is terrible because another word is so great or inclusive.
One example she gave was that when the term “trans*,” with the asterisk, became a popular way to be inclusive, people started saying that “trans” (without the asterisk) was exclusionary. Even though both terms had been used in the exact same way. And, of course, as the asterisk rose to power, people started critiquing it as well.
But she also comes up with the term saving words. Because here’s the thing: words about controversial communities change a lot. We’re constantly under attack, and we’re constantly evolving.
And we tend to turn around and attack the people who are still using the old words. Even when we don’t actively attack them, we’re doing it by implication. We tell everyone not to use FTM and MTF, or trans*, or lots of other terms, when tons of trans people still embrace those terms. And so newbies and cis people come along and assume that those people are exclusionary, or have internalized transphobia, or are practicing some kind of lateral aggression, or are just bad and wrong.
But she explains it better:
“But more importantly, the people who use trans-related terminology the most (by far!) are other transgender/trans/trans* folks. And whether intentional or not, attempts to undermine some specific trans-related term will have the effect of undermining those transgender/trans/trans* individuals who use that term in their activism and/or to describe their experiences.
“It is really easy to condemn a word: to take offense when people say it, to tell others it is disparaging or exclusionary, and that they should not use it. But it is not the only path (or even the best path) moving forward. Perhaps instead, we could try saving words, by calling out the negative or narrow assumptions that sometimes latch themselves onto trans-related language. When someone uses a trans-related term in a disparaging or exclusionary way, perhaps we should challenge the misappropriation of that term, rather than surrendering or undermining the word itself. It is not the words themselves, but the negative assumptions and sentiments behind the words that are the problem—so perhaps they should be our primary target.” (emphasis mine)
I’m all about this. The ideas behind new and changing words are usually great and important, and they’re also often the same ideas that were behind the old words.
We all have different associations with specific words, and usually when it’s a negative association, we assume that the person speaking has the same association and that they’re expressing something bad. What if we all supported each other by listening to and talking about what we each mean instead?
This.
this is very timely BC this is an older post but I have been thinking about it a lot lately
Like, how long before the discourse is “don’t say nonbinary people are trans, that word is only for binary dysphoric people and always has been”
(I’d give that one about a year at the outside, since so many people already think nonbinary people by definition don’t experience any kind of dysphoria ever, and don’t transition ever, and people already say things like “trans and nonbinary people”)
how long until “it’s transphobic to call it transitioning, or to say you want to transition! you’ve always been that gender, you’re not transitioning to it”
how long til “it’s transphobic to use they/them as generic gender-neutral pronouns, because those really are the pronouns for nonbinary people, and you’re implying they could be used by anybody”
(I know the last one excludes neopronouns. I just think a lot of people would use it as a convenient tactic to marginalize and erase neopronouns)
Just want to point out that I’ve seen people already making the argument that the word trans is only for binary dysphoric people.
yeah, I might be splitting hairs here. Because I’ve seen it too, in the form of truscum claiming that nb people just plain aren’t trans – that those of us who transition are “confused” and really binary, and those who don’t shouldn’t be allowed to because they’re “not trans” (??????)
I was thinking that we hadn’t reached “nonbinary people are their real gender (or genders, or genderless) and can transition, but trans isn’t an umbrella term, it only means the binary part of the community.”
But that’s not really all that different.
I’ve seen every single one of these arguments, even the pronouns one. In fact, a while back, there was a blog dedicated to replacing “them” pronouns with their own so-called “universal pronouns” (and appropriating from another religion – Buddhism I think – in the process). I have no idea if that blog is still around or not.
On topic, though, I agree with this post entirely. As long as those same people don’t apply it to people who don’t want it applied to them personally, it should be fine for people to use the terms they see fit. After all, we all should have the right to define our own experiences and language, no?
Perhaps that’s a given, though? Or at least one would hope.
-Ryan
my personal opinion is that nonbinary people are inherently included under trans and there’s no need for the asterisk to be there (we’re represented by the white stripe on the trans flag after all)
but i’m not going to flip shit (anymore, haha thank god i smartened up) if someone uses trans* with the intention of including enbies (plus there are nonbinary people who don’t ID as trans, this includes them)
language is important and in a perfect world we’d be able to seriously sit down and talk about all these words, and even come up with stable definitions- but that’s not really how language works. Words evolve and change and fall in and out of use over time.
People on here love to talk about stuff like who is and isn’t “allowed” to use x or y term or which terms are Valid and which are Problematic but I’ll tell you right now ask a fairly supportive cis person how many genders they know and they’ll probably say male, female, nonbinary/agender/genderqueer/both/neither, and maybe genderfluid.
(Same for sexualities: they’ll say gay, straight, bi, potentially pan and ace)
Gender and sexuality are amazing and diverse experiences, of course people are going to make tons of words in an attempt to describe theirs. Can it get confusing and complicated and risk freaking some people out because they can’t find a label that fits them just right? Yup. Does that mean we should do away with the whole system entirely?
Nah.
So some words will be more popular. Some will only be known by insiders. They’ll change as our collective understanding of gender and sexuality changes. Try to keep this in mind when you hear someone using outdated terms; sure they could be a dick, but they could also just be ignorant, or y’know, from a time when that was the Correct Word.
Normally it’s seen with older people but with how fast information spreads now you can have people less than 10 years apart with completely different lexicons about gender + sexuality.
Basically, chill and try not to jump on someone just because they used a word that you think is Wrong.
(disclaimer: words that are slurs should obviously be used carefully, and only to refer to people who are comfy being called that word. people, especially older people, may make this mistake, be kind but firm in correcting them. and if they’re just being assholes, let ‘em have it if you feel safe to do so)
^^^ This is a really good addition and one we agree with. A lot of things are said here that we wanted to say, but didn’t know how to quite put into words.
(Thank you.)
especially the part about how fast it changes. @rainbro-stache at 37 years old, once said to me: “did you know that FTM is outdated now?!” I was like “yes bc I’m on Tumblr” but like… We used to be able to say things like “on the FTM spectrum” to indicate that someone was not binary but shared life experiences with binary trans guys. And the same for MTF.
And now we’re stuck with things like “AFAB/AMAB,” which describe the person solely in terms of what they were born with (and doesn’t overlap well with a lot of intersex experiences).
Or “transfem/transmasc,” which… to me implies that people on one spectrum are inherently “masculine” and people on the other are inherently “feminine” or “femme”? Which I fucking haaaaate: because I’m fairly high femme… because butch trans women and butch “transfems” need support and visibility really badly… and because where does that leave people who are gender fluid or agender?
Right back in “what’s important about you is what binary box we want to assume you’re in,” that’s where.
/rant
What fascinates me about the “trans*” thing is that I was on tumblr around that time, and I very clearly remember people being really excited for that at first! People loved it and really made a case for using it all the time! …and then, suddenly, somehow, all the same people who were praising it were saying that it’s terrible and no one should use it because “trans is already inclusive of non-binary people, if you have to make an extra show of being inclusive then you’re not really.” The turnaround time seemed to be like…a few months, too?
What’s even worse is that it actually ended up making the whole thing very Americanised, because a lot of British documents and guidelines (for things like the NHS and helplines and other decent trans services) STILL use “trans*” and make notes about its inclusivity. So it’s like the official guidelines are trying to be helpful, and then people are seeing on the internet “actually they’re not helpful, that’s SO outdated and they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
So yeah, this sudden rushing around, creating and then abandoning terms is just…wow is it not actually helpful in the slightest.
Omg yes. I’ve seen posts, that flatly state that anyone using “transgendered” inevitably turns out to be an ignorant bigot. And… maybe if they’re cis?
But for years, in the late 90s, we used both transgender and transgendered. I remember vigorous debate about this on several trans listservs. I still have a trans anthology FROM 2006 where at least one, maybe several, of the authors calls themself “transgendered” in their own bio.
I was rooting for “transgendered” myself. I know, we lost, the community has clearly gone with “transgender.” But I am not a fan of the unilateral “this word and everyone using it is Problematic” bullshit. (Especially since I’ve also seen that said about MTF/FTM, and there are still a LOT of trans people on Tumblr using those terms for themselves!)
Like, I love discussion about what different words imply, what connotations different people have with them, what people personally like to use and why.
It’s when we get into “and therefore this term is Right and these terms are Wrong and if you use them you’re also Wrong” that it gets… “Problematic” to me.
Did you know this has been a term since way before 2015 when it started being used here on Tumblr (it’s supposed to be an umbrella term you guys it is not specific to non-autistic people, according to the person who coined it).
Did you know that its earlier uses have been solely in regard to autism?
Yup.
I have evidence. When you get to the link, just search the page for “hyper” and you’ll find it pretty dang quickly.
And when I do a search specifically for “special interest” ADHD, eliminating Tumblr results and results that include autism, most of the results talk about how professionals who specialize in ADHD… have a special interest in ADHD.
So everyone who says hyperfixation is for ADHD (what even) and special interest is for autism (what even) can go chew on that for a while.
ADDENDUM:
Links about hyperfixation used in contexts other than disability:
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 