Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Vinod Khare's avatar

Strongly agree!

Also note how the three or four examples presented here are all about changing of speech norms, without any effort to change the underlying social relationships. The plethora of words we have used for handicapped persons over the decades is an archetypal example of this. We have gone through so many iterations - cripple, handicap, disabled, differently-abled, physically challenged, or the latest one from India - ‘divyanga’ or ‘the one with divine body parts’. 🙄 All this change of language is useless if we don’t change how society actually relates to disability. In the absence of such change, the speech codes become merely a way of gatekeeping, a marker of membership to a certain elite class. Not very different from how the aristocracy of old used language to limit membership to that group.

(Cross posted elsewhere.)

Expand full comment
Andleep Farooqui's avatar

I swear, even for binary trans women, probably the best case scenario for mandatory pronouns, many people I know hate them because they put us in an impossible bind or act as insulting. Who is this norm for? it doesn't seem to ever have been for trans people!

Expand full comment
4 more comments...

No posts