People of all genders
Is this real advice or is it satire? I don’t know.
In trying to find the source I found advice from the Unitarian Universalist Association, which included this bullet point:
- Use words that encompass all genders rather than only two
For example, “people of all genders” instead of “women and men”; “children” instead of “boys and girls”; “siblings” or “kindred” instead of “brothers and sisters.”
Hmm.
Jockstraps: bodily appendage supports.
My gym teacher called it The Siberian Nose Guard.
Actually except for the desexed terms for people who menstruate, I much prefer the de-euphemized language.
No, I don’t much want everyone to switch to gender-neutral menstruators, but getting rid of euphemism would be a remarkably good thing. And unless my sex or that of my family members is relevant, I tend to use gender neutral terms for all my relationships. Don’t quite know how we’re going to get rid of gender if we keep gendering stuff when it’s not actually relevant.
I don’t know about the chart, but the UU thing is almost certainly real. I used to be a UU. They wrote god out of their hymnal, and reworked gendered pronouns and references to be gender-neutral. Much of this was minimal and graceful, but some of it really butchered the poetry of the older hymns.
How about fuck that instead of ok?
Some concerns about women’s health include heart attacks having different symptoms and medication, including pain management, working differently in women’s bodies. But let’s pretend no one ever means anything but reproductive care. But then, doesn’t reproductive care include prostate health?
There’s no way to pretend bodies don’t vary on sexual lines.
I love how “women’s health” and “reproductive health” are supposed to be synonymous. Could there be a clearer indication of what they think women are for?
Why not “people” rather than “people of all genders”? Why should gender even be brought up in something that applies to all people?
The initial table looks to me like a satire … but you can never be sure. On the other hand, the advice from the Unitarian Universalist Association sounds serious and I think they really mean it. But the table isn’t from their site, right? Or am I missing something?
Here is a side remark/anecdote about gendered language from my part of the world (I owe this observation to my daughter; it’s something she finds very annoying).
In our language almost everything is gendered: nouns, adjectives, verbs, number words etc, both in singular and plural forms. E.g. to call someone “a student” you must choose a male or female suffix. In plural forms, the presence of even a single male (like: one hundred students, one male student among them) masculinizes the whole grup, so that a male suffix would be used in such a situation. I heard that this is common in many languages, not only ours.
Ok, now comes the crux of the story – the part which makes my daughter so angry :) Consider the word “feminist”. Well, from a grammatical point of view there is nothing special here: like other nouns, it comes with a male or female ending, with the choice between them being obligatory. But here is the thing: it is used *very rarely* in plural with the male ending. The usual practice – in our press, in our conversations – is to apply a female suffix. Otherwise it would sound … hmm, grammatical, yes, but perhaps a bit strange. Still, the general rule is that the presence of even a single male masculinizes the group and the point is that the rule doesn’t seem to work for “feminist”.
My daughter developed a conspiracy theory about this phenomenon. She claims that the constant use of the female suffix serves illicit purposes – that, at present, what sentences of the type “feminists (-female suffix) did this-and-this” purport to convey is something like “these crazy women did this-and-this again“. For this reason, she is on a crusade of correcting everybody. “No, it’s a mixed group, don’t speak like that” – this is what we hear from her over and over again. Oh, my. Oh, my.
Anyone here interested in adopting a Polish teenager?
It’s not “Polish” teenager. It’s teenager. :>)
Ariel, right, the table is not from the UU site (as far as I know). I don’t know where the table came from, so I can’t be sure whether it’s satire or not.
That “one male” rule – I remember being furious in French class when we were taught that about elles v ils. We all were – it was a girls’ school!
Reproductive health is not the same thing as women’s health since the former includes healthcare for both men and women, and they are covered by different specialities. A urologist could treat male infertility, but not female infertility.
“kindred” indicates only two genders????
No, woozy, the quoted part says that “brothers and sister” indicates only two genders, so “siblings” or “kindred” would be better choices.
Alona, #3:
Samantha Vimes, #8:
These all seem eminently sensible to me.
I was married for many years and trained myself to say “partner” by default.
My reasoning was: If I actually believe that people’s committed pairings deserve equal treatment regardless of whether they can legally marry; if I actually believe that I should not receive different treatment depending on the gender of my spouse; then I should have no compunction using a neutral term for my partner in contexts where gender shouldn’t matter — which is most of them.
Likewise, while I do have sympathy for the fact our languages are heavily burdened by sexist assumptions, and the prejudicial connotations keep piling up on any neutral terms we choose, nevertheless there are still rich pickings to express ourselves without clumsy formations like “people of all genders”. If gender is irrelevant, just refer to “people”.
These tactics are not without social cost, of course. Many conversations I would refer to my “partner” casually and keep on with my sentence, and note the confusion or worry on the face of some members of the conversation. One has to own that cost, and make sure to be gentle but firm in correcting people’s prejudices. If they assume from a gender-neutral term that I’m in a same-sex relationship, that’s their prejudice to address, not mine.
Similarly for “they”, and “people”, and “actor”/“host”/“steward”/“waiter”/etc., and “parent” and “sibling”, and so on. Changing the language to be less discriminatory necessarily entails friction with those around us who aren’t yet on board. We will need to bear some of the costs of that friction, but we don’t have to choose inelegant or clumsy language in the process.
I like to say spouse because we’re egalitarian. Husband sounds so tied to old-fashioned, unequal relationships, because it is related to husbandry, etc– caretaking and controlling of animals. No thanks.