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!
Yeah, that's the thing. How do these norms even get decided? Whose views are considered and whose aren't? I've heard people in the movement start adopting the disability slogan "nothing about us without us", and I hope they start taking that more seriously, because so far the new norms have felt like "*everything* about us without us."
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.
Yes, I agree. I think the amount of effort spent on changing speech norms is really sadly misguided. None of these new words are going to stop anyone from getting beaten up by the police. I don't think they're even going to get in the way of people being insulted - "handicap" was originally intended to be the polite and respectful word, and became perceived as an insult.
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!
Yeah, that's the thing. How do these norms even get decided? Whose views are considered and whose aren't? I've heard people in the movement start adopting the disability slogan "nothing about us without us", and I hope they start taking that more seriously, because so far the new norms have felt like "*everything* about us without us."
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.)
Yes, I agree. I think the amount of effort spent on changing speech norms is really sadly misguided. None of these new words are going to stop anyone from getting beaten up by the police. I don't think they're even going to get in the way of people being insulted - "handicap" was originally intended to be the polite and respectful word, and became perceived as an insult.
Well put, totally agree, especially with the Latinx thing.