#Multiple instances of the same pronoun referring to different people can be confusing

[ailithnight]

His voice was so quiet. But it traveled well in the cavernous space; echoing around the rocks until it seemed so loud it shake the whole earth. Or maybe that was just Dick's perspective of his own world crumbling around him.

He had tried, at first, to help Alfred stem the bleeding and bandage the wounds. But as they uncovered his body, revealed the nature of his injuries, Dick's hands grew too unsteady. All the ways he had already failed his-. It felt like he was shaking apart in tempo with the code breathed it in unsteady bursts as he flickered on and out of consciousness.

There was a great cacophony of noise as the other bats made their way in. Each on edge, desperate to know who Dick had called the extraction for. The noise only increased as a headcount proved everyone they knew was accounted for. It only grew quiet when Batman swept up beside Dick with a grunted "Report."

Dick waited a moment, letting the silence permeate the cave, giving him a chance to answer himself. He could tell Batman was getting ready to demand answers again. But a quiet voice, fading in and out and echoing loudly in the quiet cave, said everything Batman needed to know.

"G'mma 'Lpha Ups'lon Tau 'Ota Mu Eps'lon For-too Sicky-tree Tenny-ay un c'l'n sicky-fie d'sh nie."

Dick was surprised there wasn't a total uproar. The cave remained remarkably silent, all heads turned and all ear strained to hear it again. To verify. Timmy was the first to gather himself to speak, barely whispering himself so as not to overpower the other voice.

"Is that-?" Dick nodded. "Fuck." It spoke volumes that Alfred didn't even glance over to admonish Tim's foul language.

"He was muttering it when I got to the roof. He recognized me at first, but then passed out. Since then, I don't think he's been lucid enough to understand he's safe."

"The roof? With the meta? What happened to them?"

"They changed. Shapeshifted or something. Right in front of me. Maybe shapeshifted back? Like they ran out of energy for the transformation."

"Okay, but what-"

"That is them, Timmy. That's the meta those vans were chasing. Those goons were hunting our brother."

Family Dinners - dpxdc

"Holy shit, you're Bruce Wayne!" Danny gaped, jabbing a finger at the man sitting at the head of the table.

The bustling dining room goes silent as everyone turns to look at him.

"Danny, who did you think was going to be here?" Tim asks, disbelief plain in his voice and Danny feels his face flush red.

"Sorry, I, uh, I guess I just never put it together. Tim Drake-Wayne. Wayne Manor. It, uh, makes sense now." He laughs sheepishly and scrubs at his neck before slumping back down into his chair.

"Well," Tim says with an indulgent sigh, "at least I know you're not just friends with me for my connections."

"Yeah, I'm really sorry, I just never thought about it, I guess."

Danny sinks lower as everyone around him laughs. Come to dinner, he said, the food is the best, he said, ignore the family, he said. Danny really wishes he'd listened to Tim and just ignored them—almost as much as he's regretting accepting the offer in the first place—but... he's having dinner with Batman.

Ancients, that's so weird!

The last time he saw Batman was in the future and, suffice it to say, it was not going well. There hadn't really been time for family dinners there.

Wait. Family dinners?

He peers around the table, openly gawking at everyone as it all clicks into place.

"Everything alright, Danny? Now realising who everyone else is?" Tim asks with a roll of his eyes.

"Uh... something like that..." Danny mumbles as everyone laughs again.

From further down the table, the smallest Wayne scoffs and clicks his tongue.

"I thought you said he was smart, Drake?"

"So, you all do it, too, then?" he asks, ignoring the jibe. Danny's only a little bit jealous as he thinks of how much easier they must have it, how much easier it'd be if his family had been on his side, too. "You all work together?"

"Nah," Dick says from across the table with a brilliant grin. "Tim's the only one that works with Bruce, we all have different jobs. I'm a police officer in Bludhaven."

"Disgusting." Danny blurts out without thinking—because seriously, what kind of self-respecting vigilante would also be a police officer?—before clapping a hand over his mouth. "Sorry."

The whole table laughs again, the loudest being the blonde girl a few spaces down from Dick. Look, Danny wasn't really paying attention to names when they were all paraded in front of him. Dick only gets remembered because his name is a joke.

Come on, Danny, recover!

"That's, uh, not what I meant, though."

"Oh?" Dick asks, cocking his head slightly to the side. Is it Danny's imagination or does his smile tense slightly?

"Yeah, I mean like, you know, in costume. It must make it so much easier to have everyone together like this."

"Costume? What do you mean?"

Yeah, Danny's not imagining it, everyone tenses up at that. It's really only now that he's realising that this probably isn't how he should bring up that he knows about their... night time activities. In fact, he probably shouldn't be bringing it up at all.

"Uuhhh..." Danny looks wildly around the table as he continues making his stupid noise. Think, think, think! There must be a way out of this!

"Danny?" Tim asks, looking concerned.

"Oh, Ancients, this isn't how I wanted it to go at all," he mutters, slipping even further into his chair. He's almost on the floor now and he so, so wishes it could just swallow him up.

His real first meeting with Batman was meant to be cool! He had planned to be Phantom, maybe save them from a tight spot, prove his worth as a mysterious and powerful ally as thanks for the help Batman gave him in the future.

"Danny, what are you talking about?" Tim starts tugging on his sleeve in an attempt to pull him back up from his pit of despair.

Eventually, Danny relents and sits up straighter, hiding his face in his hands and whining all the while.

"I'm sorry, I just didn't expect him to be here and it threw me off so now I look stupid and it's so embarrassing!" he wails, flailing his arms wide. "Why wouldn't you warn me that Batman was your adopted dad, Tim? Couldn't you have let me know?"

"I'm sorry, what? Danny are you alright? There's no way Bruce can be Batman, look at him!"

"Yeah," the blonde girl laughs from the bottom of the table, "look at him! That's a wet noodle of a man! Batman can actually do things, B is incapable of pretty much everything."

"Thank you, Stephanie," Bruce sighs, massaging his forehead.

It's... Those are the first words Danny's heard Batman say since everything went down and it's enough to knock him out of his embarrassment.

It's really good to hear his voice again. Especially now, when it's strong and healthy and full of personality—even if that personality is little more than a tired father right now—far better than how it had been, at the end.

Danny sits up, back straight, and grins. He's got this. He remembers it perfectly. Some people count sheep to fall asleep, Danny repeats his mantra to be certain that he'll never forget it.

"Gamma alpha upsilon tau iota mu epsilon, 42, 63, 28, 1 colon 65 dash 9."

Once again, the whole table falls into silence.

"Holy shit..." breathes the other D name (Duke? Danny's pretty sure he's Signal) from opposite Stephanie. "Isn't that...?"

"The time travelling code." The littlest Wayne says stiffly. "We have met in the future?"

"That's not just the time travelling code, Dami." Dick says, looking between Danny and Bruce. "That's the family time travelling code."

Danny's grin freezes in place.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"1 colon 65 dash 9." Dick explains, still flicking between him and Bruce. "It means you've been adopted into the family and we should all treat you as such, no questions asked."

"Tell you what, I'm about to ask a question." Danny says, dumbstruck. "You just told me it was a code to identify time travellers, not anything about being adopted! What the hell, B?"

Bruce looks about as shellshocked as Danny feels.

"We must have been close," he says finally, after opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water a few times.

"No! Not that close!" Danny reels back, taking a deep breath ready to refute it all, but... "Well, I mean, you found me when I first got stuck, and you helped me get better despite being... And then we fought together against the, uh, bad guy, before he, um, he... before you couldn't."

An uncomfortable beat passes while they all pick up on what Danny tried so hard not to say.

"So, you're not from the future, then, you travelled there and came back?" Tim asks, breaking the tension and leaning forward with a glint in his eye.

"Yeah, it was a whole end of the world thing, but don't worry about it," Danny says with a hand wave, "It's all kosher now, won't ever happen."

"What did happen?"

"Seriously, don't worry about it, we cool."

"How long in the future was it?"

"About ten years? You were pretty spry for an old man, B," Danny laughs, wishing they'd get off the topic of what happened and get back to the adoption bit.

Everyone shares degrees of a cautious smile as they relax out of the shock, and Dick—whose grin is the biggest—says, "No wonder you got the family code, you're already riffing on him like one of us. How long were you there for?"

"A week, before I managed to get back to my present and stop him then."

"A week? Jeez, B, that has to set some kind of record, seriously."

"Oh!" Danny says, sitting bolt upright and blinking in surprise before pointing at Dick and bouncing in his seat. "You're Nightwing!"

"What?"

"That's exactly what Nightwing said when Batman told me the code! Makes so much more sense now."

Dick laughs and claps his hands, delighted.

"You were not formally adopted?" The grumpy small one—Dami?—asks, his face pinched.

"I didn't even know I was informally adopted."

"And your parents? Are they alive or dead?"

"Damian, stop—"

"They were dead in the future, but they're alive now." Danny says, looking down. He fiddles with the tablecloth, twisting the fabric around his fingers as he fights down the pang of sadness that he always feels when he thinks of them now. He forces a bright smile on his face and hopes it doesn’t look too strained. "I just, uh, can't talk to them much, anymore."

"Damian," Dick warns, "1 colon 65 dash 9. Treat them as family, no questions asked."

"This is Damian treating him as family, the little turd has no manners." Tim scoffs, rolling his eyes, but he gently bumps shoulders with Danny to knock him out of his funk. Danny can't help but send him a watery smile.

"I have the most exemplary manners, Drake, unlike some people." Damian spits, crossing his arms with a pout. "I was merely ascertaining his status to see how he could possibly fit into the family."

"I know this is all a bit sudden, Danny," Bruce smiles, ignoring Damian and reaching out to lay a warm hand on his arm, "for all of us. But if I felt strongly enough to give you that code after spending a week with you in the future, then you are more than welcome in this family, if you so choose it. I think I can speak for all of us when I say we'd like to get to know you a bit more."

"I know a threat when I hear it, Bruce." Danny snorts. "But, yeah, I get it. I'm sorry this is all so weird, it really wasn't how I wanted to find you again, but... I'm glad I did."

"So are we, Danny." Dick says, with a warm smile. "And formally or not, 1 colon 65 dash 9 means you're family. Welcome to the fun house! No take backs or refunds, sorry. You're stuck with us."

[scriptlgbt]

im writing a nonbinary character with the pronouns he/they, in third person. should i switch the pronouns out or stick with one. they're okay with either, but i feel like if i do switch it out it'll get confusing.

There are so many different ways to approach this sort of thing!

I think when it comes to characters where the pronouns are switched up, it can be helpful to develop different rules about when to use a given pronoun just to make it clear who the pronoun refers to. Like if someone is talking about the Multiple Pronoun Character (to be called MPC here on) and another character who always uses he/him pronouns, using they/them can help make it clear you're talking about MPC without being too confusing.

Something I've thought about doing in my own writing is, when I rotate perspectives, I will label the chapter with the pronouns the character is using that chapter, alongside their name.

Another way to approach this would be to have a character use he/him in specific settings and they/them in another. I've known some people who only use they/them around other trans people for instance. It's also pretty common for some people who have multiple pronoun sets to use one set to correct people with, and one when people take initiative to ask what pronouns they use. I've done this for years by using they/them to correct people, and ey/em/eir when people specifically ask, because I see the ability to abide by the more niche pronouns as a sort of honoured position. It also signals to other trans people in my social circles who meet these people, what the situation was with these people and how they learned of my pronouns at all. I also know people who will correct people by saying he/him or she/her because a stranger might understand that more than they/them. Not pronouns, but I also have 5 different names I go by in different settings. (I also know of friends who have a home name and a public name as a cultural thing, not related to gender.)

You could also use very specific parts of different sets of pronouns. Like he/they/theirs/himself, but not switch between them within each grammatical niche. That might be confusing to an audience but there's ways to clarify it.

One idea for clarifying is in the beginning with a sort of character list or descriptions thing, the names of characters and their pronouns, to help readers keep track more easily.

But I don't think that a character using multiple pronouns should be too too much more confusing than if someone is talking about multiple people who use the same pronoun, needing to specify that they're talking about Rose and not Blanche.

All that said, if you're really struggling to write this, you don't have to be a pioneer about it. It's fine to just have one pronoun set. Nonbinary people are widely varied and any pronouns you use for this character, will not diminish the fact that you are still representing a nonbinary character.

-mod nat

[annikathewitch]

So, due to a number of reasons, I’ve been writing about characters who use neopronouns and/or more than one set of pronouns a lot more in the past year than I ever have before. And at some point, I noticed that I started thinking less about them as simply a necessity to accurately portray a character’s identity, or something that I did just because “why not?” or because it’s something that’s important to normalize, but as something I could use as a tool in the way I told stories.

Let me explain. Take a moment to just imagine the possibilities playing around with pronouns could give you. Here are some ideas (Admittedly, I only really write in English, so I don’t really know how well any of these ideas would work with languages with different pronoun systems, but I’m sure their are similar things you could do):

Imagine a character that uses multiple pronouns, and, say, the narrator trades off every scene or so (just to avoid confusion; other characters switch pronouns midsentance while referring to the character), but in some circumstances the narrator refers to someone who otherwise appears to be that character by only one of the pronouns that that character uses, which initially appears to be a part of the normal switching between pronouns thing, but is actually foreshadowing to like, a secret twin, or a shapeshifter, or any other of a wide variety of plot twists. (Ex: character who uses multiple pronouns getting weird dreams in which the narrator never refers to them by name and only uses he/him pronouns foreshadowing the fact that the dreams are actually their past self’s memories, since their past self only used he/him pronouns).

Neopronouns used to make language more clear. If every character goes by different pronouns, there’s no ambiguity, right?

On the flip side, characters using similar pronouns in some scenes to make them harder to tell apart in certain circumstances, or else to draw parallels between different characters in certain scenes. Messing with different pronouns gives you better control over ambiguity or lack thereof, even when referring to well-established characters.

Having a character with multiple pronouns makes writing dialogue like 10x easier. Y’know that issue where you have a scene with two characters who use the same pronouns talking and you have to either repeat their names a bunch or find other ways to refer to them? Well, if one of those characters switches pronouns, and you have a scene where they’re interacting with a character who uses he/him pronouns, you can have them use she/her pronouns or neopronouns, if they’re interacting with a character that used she/her pronouns you can use he/him or neopronouns and boom, problem solved!

If you’re writing fantasy or sci-fi, imagine world building a culture where which pronouns people are referred to as change based on something other than gender, such as rank, class, particular types of magical ability, job, relationship to the speaker, or any other societally relevant distinction. Even if this is never explained, readers will probably start to pick up on it, and then you can use a character’s pronouns to convey information about their background quickly and seamlessly.

Characters using neopronouns that reflect elements of their character. Pronouns are a part of gender expression, just like clothing or hair, and just like clothing or hair, people could pick certain pronouns for reasons entirely unrelated to gender. For instance, a character who has been dehumanized a lot could use it/its pronouns, not for gender reasons, but to reclaim them from those who abused it.

On a similar note, a character might use gender-neutral pronouns not because they’re nonbinary, but because their native language doesn’t have gendered pronouns, so they’re more comfortable with gender-neutral ones. Or maybe they start out using gendered pronouns and then switch to using gender-neutral ones to help show them reconnecting with that aspect of their heritage.

Characters deciding to change their pronouns as a sign of an important moment in their character arc. (Pronouns can be an expression of A LOT more than gender, as explained in the above two points, and I’m sure you can probably come up with even more ideas than just those listed here.)

One character could go by pronouns that none of the other characters do, so the audience still get hints that it’s them even when they’re not mentioned by name.

Neopronouns are shorter than names, but theoretically, if you did it right, they could carry just as much symbolism, foreshadowing, and/or other meaning.

…for example, you could use different pronouns in different situations to tell something about that situation, or as some form of symbolism, though for the latter, you may wanna stick to neos to avoid playing into traditional gender stereotypes or otherwise potentially seeming like you’re making a point about male vs. female or binary vs. nonbinary genders. Neos don’t have the gendered connotations of she/her or he him, so they’re usually judged on the vibe of the sound.

In historical settings. Historical neopronouns exist! Or, in modern, real-life-or-close-to-it settings, you could have a character use older neopronouns to indicate that the character may have been a) around for a long time (maybe there’s some fantasy elements and they’re immortal?) and involved in the queer community for a long time b) really interested in history in general or queer history in particular. They don’t necessarily have to have these meanings, but still.

This is just scratching the surface. I’m tired of writers seeing nonbinary pronouns, especially neopronouns, as a roadblock or hassle, something that detracts from their work, or else something that is necessary solely for the sake of representation, rather than the potential valuable addition to the writer’s toolbox that they are.

I’m tired of the lack of representation not just because of the lack of representation in it of itself (though that is also a big issue; normalizing gender neutral language and neopronouns is very important and literature could go a long way to help with that), but also because it’s so clear to me that in refusing to use that representation, in declaring it “too hard to write with” or “too confusing,” writers are cutting themselves off from a vast array of fascinating narrative opportunities. If you don’t know how to use them, great! It’s never too late to learn, and who knows, you (or your readers) might end up using the knowledge you learn in real life! I’m sure you weren’t born knowing how proper sentence structure or dialogue formatting works either.

Your story doesn’t have to be about gender or have a deeper message about its role in society for non-standard pronouns to be something you can use. Let your dragon be referred to as ae/aer. Let your superhero switch between multiple sets of pronouns. Let your escaped lab experiment reclaim “it/its.” Let your characters go by an array of pronouns as wide as the distribution of their names.

You don’t have to explain. You don’t have to have an in-universe explanation, not if you don’t want one. Your reader should be able to figure it out on their own, and like with most symbolism, explaining could detract from its power unless it’s a specific focus. At the end of the day, pronouns are just words, and as a writer, words are your tools to use as you see fit. Some might carry certain historical or real world baggage, but that’s true outside of just pronouns; just do some research, handle it as respectfully as you can, and don’t let it stop you from exploring this whole entire aspect of the language you use.

[starlessea]

Ultimate Guide to Writing Accents and Dialogue

I recently saw an amazing post on how to keep your characters ‘in character,’  and I wanted to make my own about writing accents, dialects, and overall just creating dialogue that suits the people you are trying to portray.

I’m a language/linguistic student, so here are a few tips I think you should consider!

1) Standard Pronunciation: 

First you need to think about where your story is set, and what is the standard dialect of the majority of your characters compared to your main character. What I mean by this is, if your story is set in the South, and all of your characters therefore have that Southern drawl, then it becomes the STANDARD, and has nothing to contrast it unless you introduce something.

If your main character (your POV) has a different accent, then make it NOTICABLY different from the standard of your story. It’s good to have accent variety, otherwise all of your characters start to sound the same.

2) Constructing your Vocabulary: 

Next, you’ll want to consider the vocabulary of your character. Ask yourself questions about them: are they educated, what was their upbringing like, do they work in a field with specific vocabulary? You can strip it back even further than that - when you think of your character how would you describe them? Could you see a badass biker using long, sophisticated diction on a regular basis? Or an old woman swearing like a sailor?

Don’t get me wrong, these are very much stereotypes, and often the most interesting characters are created by subverting your expectations. But use these questions as a springboard for your characters. If you’re writing fanfiction, and know the characters well already from a movie / tv-show, then try to IMAGINE them saying your lines to see if they are something they would actually say. 

However, also note that the register of your characters is bound to change given the situation. Obviously, someone is more likely to use heightened vocabulary in a certain setting - e.g. within a classroom - and more casual language elsewhere - e.g. in a bar. See below for such a distinction:

Formal: Yes/No

Informal: Yeah/Nah

3) Orthography, Syntax and Morphology: 

Okay, so those words might look a little scary, but don’t worry. Orthography is just a fancy way of saying spelling (specifically, the standard spelling system of a time/place and how we might see a character deviate from it), syntax is word order, and morphology is how words are formed (such as grammar, inflections etc.). I’ll give some examples of what I mean.

Orthography: I’m going to use Daryl Dixon from TWD for reference (keywords: Southern drawl, redneck, country). For Daryl, some words he says I write phonetically (according to how he says them), so that the spelling matches the phonology. E.g.:

Standard: “Take care of yourself.”

Daryl: “Take care of yerself.” 

I tend to do this alot with pronouns, such as ‘you/ya,’ ‘your/yer.’ But I also use the long, standard forms for variety and emphasis - e.g. ‘you’re right.’

Syntax and Morphology:

Often, a character will use different syntax or morphological patterns that we aren’t used to. Often, non-native speakers are portrayed using types of English we often categorise as ‘incorrect’ - but are just non-standard. You can find good examples of this within Creole literature.

For example, past-tense verbs are usually conjugated in the present-tense form:

‘we was / if I was you’ instead of ‘we were / if I were you’ 

“I go now.” 

“She gives it to me yesterday.” 

Unfortunately, a lot of these conventions are also stereotypically used to portray characters who are uneducated - think of Joe or young Pip from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, for example.

But, you also want to avoid STEREOTYPING your character too much, as that can come across as amateur or cliche. What I mean by this is don’t over-rely on certain patterns - don’t overuse them. It’s okay to have variety, even if its with the SAME character. Just do it in a way that fits your overall construction. You can even change these speech patterns DURING your story to represent the development of your character, or them picking up an accent, or being around different people.

4) Apostrophe and Negatives:

Apostrophe: These can be used to mark a number of things - such as abbreviations, contractions, possession etc. If your character has a certain accent, they might roll certain words into one another - not stressing specific consonants, for example. We can see this in ‘C’mon.’

Alot of abbreviations are now recognised slang words, too. For instance:

C’mon = Come on 

‘Cos = Because

Lil’ = Little

‘Ma = Mama / mother

Ol’ = Old

Think about whether certain abbreviations and slang matches the register of your character, as well as their location. For example, slang words like ‘cuppa’ (cup of tea) are usually expected in a British setting.

Also, remember that the apostrophe goes in the position of the letter/letters you are getting RID OF, which is not always necessarily in the place of the contraction. E.g:

‘Do not’ contracts to ‘donot’ which abbreviates to the standard ‘don’t.’

Going back to my Daryl Dixon example, other common abbreviations I use for him include the following:

‘Ing’ contraction - walking becomes walkin’.

 Anyone, anything - becomes ‘nyone, ‘nything

Pronoun contractions - her becomes ‘er.

Connective contractions - and becomes an’ or n’.

Other contractions don’t even need apostrophes - such as ‘gonna,’ ‘gotta,’ ‘sorta,’ ‘wanna.’

Negatives: 

Even though Standard English doesn’t use double negatives anymore, we can use them in our writing of characters as an indicator of their background or dialect. They can also be used for emphasis.

Coming back to Daryl, he tends to use a lot of double negative constructions:

“I ain’t nobody’s bitch.”

“Don’t want nothin’.”

“Ain’t go no reason to.”

If you want to get even more complex, you can have a proclitic negative (where the negative attaches itself to the verb - e.g. don’t), and contract it further so you get a multiple contraction. For example:

You (pronoun), Are (verb, form of ‘be’), Not (negative) = you ain’t = y’aint.

“Y’aint never done shit for me!”

Because this is a three way contraction, it becomes a bit confusing where to put the apostrophe - is it y’aint or y’ain’t? To be honest, it becomes mostly your choice after that (stylistic). 

5) Loanwords and Imposition:

Loanword: This is a word borrowed INTO the native language FROM another one. For example, think of an American speaker using a French word or phrase in a sentence.

“Thought we were all takin’ a laissez faire approach now?”

Think of how this changes the sentence, and the impact it is going for. French is still seen as a prestigious language, so it can be used to heighten register, or can be used to mock/patronise/be sarcastic in a certain context (as in this example).

Imposition: This is when a speaker uses a word FROM their native language in the context of a non-native language they are speaking. It has connotations of power and agency. 

For example, a French speaker might use a French term in a conversation, despite it having a perfectly good English counterpart. This might be in order to demonstrate that a character is trying to show off, or is reminding their peers of their background or status.

6) Non-verbal Indicators:

This is more on the border of style, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Sometimes, the descriptive words you use can reflect a character's dialect. An obvious example can be how ‘drawled’ is associated with a Southern accent.

Although it might sound cliche, you should think about the vocabulary you want to use in order to describe a certain accent. If we were to compare perhaps Scottish or Welsh with French, for instance, you would be able to hear the distinct sound differences. The former are more harsh, guttural, have a lot of sounds that come from the back of the throat, whilst the latter is nasal and flows more.

Use your descriptions to emphasise this. Look up synonyms that describe the WAY in which your characters are pronouncing the words. Are they guttural, harsh, gravelly, thick? Or are they soft, fluid, smooth?

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. Good luck writing, everyone!

Disclaimer: Even though this post is long, it’s actually really basic on a linguistic level - so I hope no true linguists read this haha. These are just some personal observations, but I hope they help!

[near-seth-experience]

This Pride Month, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relation to Gender.

Before I get too deep into this post, I just want to preface this by saying I am not well-informed on the matter. At least, not anywhere near as informed as I’d like to be. I don’t know which terms (if any) may be offensive. If I make any broad statements about gender, I am referring to it specifically in regards to the topic of MY gender. That is to say, if I write something like “gender is insignificant”, this should be read as “my gender is insignificant to me.” It is not my intention to diminish others in any way, and I’m not trying to provide any hot takes or spark debates and conflict.

This post is just for me to lay out my thoughts with the hope that someone who actually has a clue what they’re talking about might help me figure out where my gender identity might lie. This is a long post of personal rambling, so sorry in advance, thanks for reading, and here’s a “Keep Reading” cut for the sake of your dashboards:

Truth be told, I’ve never actually sat down and seriously thought about my gender before now.  Heck. I didn’t even know Aromanticism was a thing until last year, and I didn’t know that it (or asexuality) had their own spectrums of varying identities. This past year, upon realizing that I’m Aspec (I’m still trying to pinpoint where specifically on those spectrums I stand tbh) I’ve focused most of my LGBT+ related internal reflection in that area. This past year, I’ve been pondering attraction:

Who am I attracted to?

Do I experience attraction?

How do I experience attraction?

Are there any prerequisites in order for me to experience attraction?

Am I actually attracted to someone or am I just really freakin’ lonely?

Am I actually attracted to someone or am I just really freakin’ horny?

Things like that.

Frankly, I won’t exactly know how to identify in that regard until I actually have romantic and sexual experience, and I’m a big ol’ 26 y/o virgin who has never even had a relationship or first kiss (lmao I know, right?) I can’t say for certain how I respond in those situations, so I can’t say with certainty that I’m one thing or another. So, anyways, I’m at a bit of a standstill in that department, so like I said at the beginning of this post, I’ve been thinking about Gender recently.

Gender!

So, I’ve always identified as a (cisgender) male. I’ve got the corresponding bits, and until recently I did not recognize the dichotomy in definitions between Gender and Sex. I thought the two words were interchangeable because that was what I was raised and taught to believe. But now that I know better, and recently I’ve been thinking “oh, so I’ve been identifying my gender on the basis of my sex, but is there a gender identity that is more applicable?”

I don’t have any issues in regards to accepting my physical attributes, but I do not like gender (or at least the binary) as a concept, and I cannot stand the idea that this stuff should have any sort of influence or bearing over my behavior and interests.

Like a lot of people, I grew up having to put things back on the shelf. The only time my mom bought me something that was a “girly color” was when I got a necktie to match my friend’s dress for a school dance (She was wearing a hot pink dress, so I was in all black with a hot pink tie, we looked fresh af). My childhood wasn’t mine. I grew up playing soccer, wrestling, baseball, football, hunting, and fishing, all because my ancestors ate up some ancient rhetoric that declared boys shall be athletic outdoorsmen, and any who aren’t are deemed lesser.

I never liked being told I couldn’t have or do something because it was supposedly intended for a different type of person, and similarly, I didn’t like being held to the standards and stereotyping of conventional masculinity.

I don’t want to write an essay about every instance and aspect of my personality that goes against the notions of gender and society’s expectations of me in regards to gender, so I’ll leave that there, but as things stand now, I just.... don’t care?

I don’t care if I’m sharing a bathroom with a transgender individual because it’s a bathroom.

I don’t care if I’m wearing a feminine color, because it’s a just color.

I don’t care about what pronouns people use for me, because they are referential. If people are referring to me with pronouns, I’m probably not around to hear them. Pronouns are for talking about me, not to me. Even if I’m in a conversation with multiple people where I can hear myself being referred to, I’m not gonna jump in and correct people because I just don’t care.

If someone see’s me out in public, they’re gonna talk about me with he/him because they see I have a beard most of the time, and that’s a very visible and predominately masculine feature. It’s my understanding that pronouns are frequently assumed because it is up to the speaker to convey their subject clearly to their audience.

I think it’s for this same reason that I will continue to tell others that I am a man despite not personally identifying based upon that which it entails. A lot of people haven’t wrapped their heads around the whole gender vs sex thing. I don’t want to cause any unnecessary confusion because that’s just more trouble than it’s worth for me. I’ll still say I’m a cis male online and on dating sites because if people want to find a hairy person with male hardware, that’s what they’ll search, and I do want to be found.

My gender doesn’t really matter to me, so my gender shouldn’t really matter to you. I’ll say I’m a man because it’s easier for you, but I’m not gonna think less of myself for going to college to write poetry while others expect me to be doing something macho. I’ll say I’m a man because, if you must know, I’ve got a penis, but I’m not gonna think less of myself for ordering a fruity drink while the rest of the guys get their beers.

I’ll say I’m a man, but really, I just don’t care.

“Male” isn’t my identity. Seth is.

I’m still learning, and so there might be something that is more fitting, but I suppose I’m actually something like Agender, Non-Binary, or Gender Non-Conforming???

anyways thanks for reading I love you

[bemused-writer]

VNC Chapter 40 Review

Mochizuki may have had to skip a month’s update but she is back and better than ever. The sheer amount of stuff she’s given us this month is just ... woah. Two covers for volume 7, colored picture for the inside of volume 7, colored picture for chapter 40, a 45 page chapter, all those extra drawings (including two colored images) if you buy volume 7 in person, I just... Sometimes you have to take a moment to appreciate how much effort she’s really putting into this series; it’s really admirable.

So, let’s take a look at our gloriously long chapter! The color picture is already pretty interesting:

“Delight always follows pain.” From what I can tell, the French is supposed to say the same thing as the English. The chapter itself is called “Alone Together.”

There’s a lot to take from that right there. “Alone Together” is surely referencing Chloé and Jean-Jacques’s relationship. They were each other’s confidants for years and years, they had an innate trust in one another and yet, as we see in this chapter, Chloé did not confide one very important detail to Jean-Jacques: she no longer wanted to live. So, even though they are together, they are each quite alone, trapped in their own worlds. As for “delight always follows pain” I think this is foreshadowing more than a reference to anything in this chapter. I wouldn’t describe anyone as being particularly “happy” here, but understanding, especially for Jean-Jacques, was gained. It was painful for him to learn that Chloé was suicidal, but now they can really understand one another and that understanding can bring real joy. 

Should this be taken to mean they will get a happy ending, though? I’m still hesitant to say yes. I’m expecting something more bittersweet where they may both die but they will never be parted and they’ve achieved the real union of complete trust and understanding. Still, Mochizuki could give us a curve ball and we might see them alive and properly happy by the end of this. There’s still time for this to go either way. 8D

As for the art itself, I like that the only person looking vaguely happy is Roland. That seems about right. XD I also like that even Vanitas’s sweater is blue. I honestly expected it to be brown, and I’m now wondering why I ever thought he’d depart from his aesthetic at this point. XD

This chapter we also get to see some more of the dhampirs, which is really awesome. I can’t remember if it was mentioned before, but we finally know for a fact who sent Johann and Dante to investigate: Marquis Machina.

This entire exchange really says a lot about Johann and Dante’s relationship. Johann assumes the position of caretaker and treats Dante a little bit like his child, to be honest. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen that either and it’s not just toward Dante but all the dhampirs under his command including Riche in volume 1:

Johann: Whaaat? You sent Riche trailing a curse bearer? What in heaven’s name were you thinking?

Dante: Whaddaya mean “what?” She said to let her help, so I let her take the job, that’s all.

There’s also his attitude towards Vanitas’s threatening attitude in chapter 29:

So, Johann isn’t just protective over their physical safety but also their mental soundness. He doesn’t want them doing anything too dangerous, is willing to fight on their behalf, and willing to talk to their employers about signing them up for anything too dangerous as well. In ever instance of this, Dante appears either exasperated or angry, so he’s apparently had to deal with a lot of Johann’s over-protectiveness over the years. It seems the dhampirs really do function as a family. 

In this chapter, something about Johann’s words seems to remind him of actual bullies, people who felt he wasn’t worth anything because of what he is and we get to see his first introduction to Vanitas.

This is a radically different reaction from Noé’s and shows what it is Dante wants most: acceptance, equality. Vanitas may be seeing the world through a bitter, pessimistic lens, but for Dante it means this is one person who won’t judge him for simply being a dhampir. To Vanitas, he’s exactly the same as everyone else and for Dante this appears to be a revelation, a kind of relief. It’s what urges him to help Vanitas this chapter. That simple acknowledgment that he is a person, even if he’s trash like all the rest.

That definitely isn’t how Noé felt about Vanitas’s statement, but Noé has also never been judged simply for what he is. For him, hating everyone is no kind of equality, it’s simply a dismal outlook that brings everyone down a peg. It’s no surprise he and Dante would have different outlooks on Vanitas’s pessimism; Noé is an optimist while Dante himself is a realist or, perhaps more accurately, also a pessimist.

Anyway, I’ve always wondered if Dante is loyal to Vanitas at all or if it was just a business relationship. We can now say it isn’t; there’s something persona here. “No way could I cut him loose and run in a situation like this!”

Another interesting thing this chapter is that we learn there are multiple kinds of astermite:

All right, so I’m pretty sure “God’s Tear Stone” and “Divine Tear Stone” are supposed to be translated the same way. Basically, it’s some kind of heavenly stone. What’s interesting is “Blue Tear Stone” because we’re hearing this from someone known as Vanitas of the Blue Moon. Is astermite possibly directly related to the blue moon in some way? Is this where so much of VotBM’s power stems from? Some kind of direct connection to astermite itself through the blue moon’s power? Regardless, it doesn’t seem like you have to be born under the blue moon to use it since Chloé’s been using it with her machine and she’s a red moon vampire to the best of our knowledge.

Also, every time VotBM is shown, she’s always portrayed as a calm instructor. Not exactly the height of evil like Vanitas’s reactions to her memory would imply. Either we haven’t been shown her vindictive streak yet, or Vanitas’s issue with her is regarding something else entirely.

As for VotBM’s pronouns, there is some understandable confusion happening in the fandom. She’s called “Father” but Vanitas refers to her as “that woman.” So, what’s going on? I figure we have two possibilities as of this chapter: “Father” may be a religious title and may be meant to shown status rather than any kind of gender or VotBM is a transman and Vanitas is disrespecting his pronouns (I could kind of see that being the case with him, unfortunately...). As of right now, we have no way of knowing and we likely won’t know what the correct pronouns to use are for a while yet. For now, I figure she/her on account that the only reference we’re really gotten to gender is from Vanitas himself.

At any rate, Chloé is determined to destroy her alteration device, no doubt because she suspects Vanitas’s plan or simply because she’s lost herself almost entirely at this point. Jean-Jacques can’t get the device to work, but upon learning what kind of astermite is being used, Vanitas seems to reach some kind of conclusion and it relates to his mark:

It’s not made very clear but I think Vanitas cut his arm using the claws on his glove here. Before, they couldn’t get the device to work, but after Vanitas releases some of his blood he can play it. This seems to heavily suggest that this astermite is reacting directly to his blood or, more likely, the mark of possession’s power that now runs through it.

Jeanne ends up distracting Chloé through battle so Vanitas can focus on playing the sheet music (apparently he can both read sheet music and play the piano, two skills we had no idea he even had until this moment; perhaps VotBM taught him this as well?) but he gets distracted by Jean-Jacques’s personal plight, which results in some interesting revelations about Vanitas.

Vanitas: Once she’d accomplished her revenge, it’s likely Chloé d’Apchier intended to die. I know that face.

Okay, there’s a lot happening in this sentence. Vanitas is definitely remembering someone from his past, but we can’t really say who at this point. Could it be Misha? Unlikely, we saw him alive a few volumes back. VotBM? Possibly, but that also seems unlikely; his mark is still active, which probably indicates she’s alive one way or another. My guess is it’s the mysterious “Lou” that we know nothing about as of yet.

But you know who I think this will become?

Vanitas’s expression is alarmingly similar to Chloé’s, wouldn’t you say? And he often treats death as a kind of salvation for his “patients.” Vanitas eventually deciding to die alone would fit in with his self-loathing nature and the cruel irony that seems to surround him. Think of the fact he models himself after the woman he presumably hates, constantly befriends people he claims are foolish, etc. Would it really be a shock if he ends up killing himself in a way he previously claimed was sickening? And my guess, judging by all the things Vanitas hates, is he’ll do it for someone he cares about. He hates people who sacrifice themselves for others, who withhold their power out of kindness, and apparently people who are willing to kill themselves “arbitrarily.” I don’t know, there have been a lot of similarities between him and Chloé, and I feel like this is all going to add up at some point but only time will tell.

Anyway, while Vanitas is thinking of someone we don’t yet know, Noé is also thinking of someone who we do know:

All of this is painful for Noé to hear because he also had a suicidal friend he cared for deeply, but he never got around to telling him how much he cared. He wasn’t able to save him. He desperately wants Jean-Jacques and Chloé to have a different ending and he’s doing his best to encourage Jean-Jacques to make it so. Whether or not Chloé lives... it has nothing to do with The Book of Vanitas, not really. She has to know there’s someone who cares for her. She has to know there’s a reason for her to keep on going.

I think it’s safe to say that Vanitas and Noé have a similar background in this situation. They’re both remembering someone who wanted to die and they’re both having profound reactions to it. Vanitas’s is rage and disgust while Noé’s is fear and compassion but they both want Chloé to live.

And let’s not forget Jeanne in all of this. She also had someone in her past that killed herself and it was Chloé herself. While she survived, Jeanne didn’t know that for years. She really thought she had died. And we see that she holds the same regret as Noé and possibly Vanitas: she wishes she could have saved her. She wants to save her now.

Jeanne: If I have the chance to do that over again... If I’d been able to stretch out my hand without hesitating, in order to save you--!

...I really hope Chloé lives. I’ve been predicting a bleak end to this arc, but it would be nice to see her have a happy ending.

Also, I didn’t expect suicide to be such a prominent theme in this series, but I guess if we’re dealing with death, salvation, love, and what it all means, then I guess it also fits in. 

Jean-Jacques is being forced to come to terms with all of this very quickly as he realizes on some level, he knew Chloé didn’t want to live. She never spoke of her own future, she just made sure Jean-Jacques would have someone when she was gone: Noé.

He also realizes that Chloé has never once forgiven herself for ruining her human family’s lives. She sees that as her fault and she believes they deserve vengeance upon her.

Furthermore, it seems Chloé believed her presence was holding Jean-Jacques back when she says she needs to “break the pathetic world, herself with it, and free Jean-Jacques.” When he tells her he could never be happy with a freedom without her, Vanitas’s stabilization technique finally works. She has returned to herself. Vanitas can finally cure her.

This last panel is really getting me. Both Vanitas and Jeanne (and everyone else) are trying so hard to make this happen. Vanitas has promised her he will break Chloé’s curse and Jeanne has chosen to believe him. For the sake of everyone involved, I really want to see that happen. I want Chloé and Jean-Jacques to live and for this cycle of death to pause. Given the nature of this story, I fear that might not be what happens, but salvation doesn’t have to be death. Salvation can be Chloé and Jean-Jacques finally being free to live their lives without fear and regret. It really depends on what Mochizuki wants the ultimate message of the series to be and it’s way too early to be predicting that.

Ahh, after writing all this up I feel a little sad, to be honest. This was a heavy chapter and we’re still in the thick of it.

I think I’ll make a separate post to give a few thoughts on our new covers--there are ... things to be said about them. XD Anyway, I’m really looking forward to the next chapter! This cliffhanger is agony. 8D

[tanadrin]

Realistic phoneme inventories 1: Vowels

All of the old webpages that I used to rely on for at-a-glance information about vowel systems when designing new phoneme inventories for my conlangs seem to have succumbed to various forms of link rot; and I’ve never found a good overview of how to build consonant inventories in a systematic way. So I want to set out, for my own reference and for others, an overview of both vowel and consonant systems as they tend to exist in natural languages, with an eye to creating conlangs with natural-feeling distributions of sounds.

A phoneme inventory is, of course, only one of the most basic elements of a conlang. I won’t be dealing with phonotactics, with suprasegmental features like tones, and certainly not with grammar or syntax or anything like that. A good starting point for lots of those topics is the LCK, either online or in print.

Also, phonology is not my strong suit; I’m more of a morphology person by inclination, and all my knowledge of linguistics comes essentially from years spent conlanging as a hobby. So apologies in advance if I get any terminology messed up. My primary references for this post specifically are this paper on vowel systems, this paper on consonant systems, the relevant chapters from the WALS, and conlanging resources like the LCK.

For length reasons, I’ve broken this post into multiple parts. Part 1 will deal with vowels; part 2 will deal with consonants.

1. Background information

You could, when creating a conlang, select sound arbitrarily based on what sounds pleasing to your ear, what you can easily pronounce, your favorite natural language, or your favorite IPA symbols. For conlanging as a purely artistic enterprise, those are all perfectly fine criteria; but if you want your conlang to reflect trends in natural languages--perhaps as for conlangs which are the putative natural languages of science fiction and fantasy settings--it’s helpful to understand why humans make the noises they do with their faces, and how.

The human vocal tract is a resonant column of air, stretching from the vocal cords to the lips (and nostrils, for nasal sounds), not unlike the pipe of a pipe organ, or the body of a flute. Air expelled from the lungs moves through the vocal tract and, thanks to our well-developed throat, mouth, and facial muscles, and the elaborate control over them provided by a region of the brain called Broca’s Area, we can rapidly reshape our vocal tract and manipulate the resonances of the air passing through it, producing speech.

In principle, we could make an almost infinite number of subtly different motions with our various speech-producing organs to produce an equally limitless quantity of different sounds. In practice, however, speech has to be an effective way of encoding information, or it’s useless as a communication tool. Therefore, we want sounds to be as different from one another as possible, as distinct to the ear as they can be, so they can be clearly distinguished from one another, and clearly heard over noises like wind and crackling fires and loud music. And because we talk constantly, we want speech to be as easy as possible; we are going to tend to restrict ourselves to the easiest sounds for the human vocal tract to produce.

So the IPA, the system for transcribing human speech sounds, only has about 107 basic symbols for consonants and vowels.

The IPA consonant chart. Shaded areas are “articulations judged impossible.” White areas with no symbol are sounds that aren’t impossible, but which aren’t widely attested in the world’s languages to need a specific transcription.

Of all the sounds covered by the IPA which actually show up in natural languages, only a small subset are truly common. Some, like the plosives /p t k/, are nearly universal. In general, the easier to produce (and more acoustically distinct) a sound, the more common it is; and languages will tend to make use of commoner sounds first (like plain plosives) as their phoneme inventory grows, before they have recourse to less common sounds (like pharyngealized plosives).[1]

The other important thing to note about phonemes is that they’re not atomic. The human brain is an extremely powerful pattern-recognition machine, and whether we’re learning our L1 as babies or learning our sixth L2 as an adult, we break languages down into many different patterns and systems as we learn them. It’s easier to learn, for instance, the general pattern that “third-person present verbs in English end in -s” than to learn, as separate pieces of information, “okay, after ‘he, she, it’ the verb ‘put’ is ‘puts’ and the verb ‘see’ is ‘sees’ and the verb ‘run’ is ‘runs’...” etc.[2] But we usually do not learn these patterns explicitly, and even when sitting down in a classroom to learn a language, there’s only so much use you can get out of memorizing a table of conjugations or declensions--it’s hard to speak fluently if you have to pause in a conversation to go, “hmm, okay, but what’s the dative femine form of the article?” Most language learning requires acquiring an intuitive grasp of the patterns of language; and you only acquire that intuition through lots of speaking and listening.

A consequence of our dependence on intuitive understanding is that two people’s intuition can differ. For instance, many people learn the rule in English that “I” is nominative, and “me” is objective; and so, unless the first person pronoun is the object of a verb or preposition, you must use “I”: “Gowron is better at Klingon politics than I.” Sometimes, this is analyzed as having an implied verb: “Gowron is better at Klingon politics than I [am].” But over the centuries of people speaking English, many people internalized a different rule. Because pronouns crop up as the objects of verbs or prepositions more than as the subjects of verbs, the objective forms came to be reanalyzed as the default forms. The nominative form became a special, marked form--one that only occured in certain cases, which was, over time, simplified into “only when the subject of a verb.” Therefore, for these speakers of English (me included), the rule became: “when appearing to the left of a verb, use ‘I’; otherwise, use ‘me.’”

Out of the steady accumulation of such petty reanalyses, great changes in grammar are born.

The same process is at work in the sounds of a language. Just like grammar, sound is heavily systematized, and encapsulated by the brain as a set of patterns. Only instead of cases or persons or numbers, the component features of sounds on which patterns are based are called their “features.” And, as with any good Saussurian principle of sign-distinction,[3] we only care about a minimal set of features which, as a community of language-speakers, we all agree are the relevant ones for distinguishing sounds. For instance, if our language has the consonant sounds /p t k b d g m n/ (the unvoiced and voiced plosives, and some unvoiced fricatives), we might need only the feature [voiced] and [nasal] to distinguish the sounds of our language. But, because we learn these rules implicitly, and we don’t have to give our youngsters a background in up-do-date phonetics research before they can say “papa”, maybe later generations of speakers, or the next village over, notices a different set of features. After all, we have to physically produce these sounds with our mouth; they don’t exist in a perfectly idealized acoustic realm. Some speakers of our language may come to see the defining feature of the voiced stops as only [+voiced], and since there are no fricatives which they can be confused with, start pronouncing them with a less constricted airflow to make them sound even more distinct from the unvoiced stops. So gradually /b d g/ become /v ð ɣ/, the voiced fricatives produced at the same place in the mouth. As far as the speakers of the language are concerned, the sounds haven’t changed--[+fricative] is not a phonemic feature of their language! The pattern isn’t changed, at least not yet. But more sound changes will accrete over time, and they may affect the new series of fricatives differently than they do the stops; and with a few more changes like this, soon you may have a version of the language that sounds completely different and is entirely mutually unintelligible.

Sound changes are 1) regular, and 2) have no memory. While sound changes can be triggered only by certain phonetic environments (say, the voicing of /p/ to /b/ between two vowels), if the conditions for a sound change are met, it will be triggered everywhere it applies.[4] And later speakers of the language won’t remember that /v ð ɣ/ used to exist in opposition to /p t k/ (unless they take a class in historical linguistics); they’ll treat these sounds on their own terms.

When the exact production of a sound varies within a language, usually altered by context due to the physiological considerations surrounding making that particular face-noise, this phenomenon is called allophony. Different versions of the same underlying sound are allophones. The sound as a unit of the formalized pattern stored in your brain is a phoneme. A phonemic transcription (between slashes /like this/) is a transcription of a sound or sounds as these abstract phonemes. A phonetic transcription (between brackets [like this]) is a transcription of a sound or sounds as something like their actual acoustic realization.

2. The vowel space and vowel planes

Consonants involve obstructing or redirecting the flow of air through the vocal tract, often entirely (as with plosives), or turbulently (as with fricatives). Combined with the large number of distinct places of articulation, involving the teeth and tongue and palate, consonants can all sound very distinct from one another. As a consequence, small consonant inventories can restrict themselves to a small subset of the full space of possible consonants, and still be fairly distinct from one another. In fact, in languages like Hawaiian or Rotokas, with very small consonant inventories ( /m n p t~k ʔ h w~v l~ɾ/ for Hawaiian and only /p t k b~β d~ɾ g~ɣ/ for Central Rotokas; the ~ symbol indicates allophonic variation between two sounds, depending on speaker or context), it’s very unlikely there’s going to be any sound that’s really difficult for a speaker of a language with a more complicated consonant inventory like English to pronounce.[5]

Vowels, though, don’t involve specific points of contact between different parts of the vocal tract in the same way as consonants; vowels are produced by the relative position of the tongue in the mouth, with an unimpeded air flow and the vocal cords engaged. This means that vowels can vary subtly--and, as a consequence, that languages tend to spread the vowels they have out, throughout the entire articulatory and acoustic space available to them, in a way they don’t have to do with consonants.

Here’s the IPA vowel chart:

The reason it’s longer at the top and on the left side is because there is more acoustic differentiation possible when the mouth is more closed versus more open, and when the tongue is more front than back. Languages will especially tend to have more close (or “high”) vowels than open (“low”) vowels. That’s not the only property that affects how vowels tend to be distributed though. Here’s a schematized diagram of the vowel space based on the actual acoustic components of the vowels: 

Speech sounds are composed of different-frequency elements called “formants;” the lowest-pitch formant is F1, the next-lowest F2, and so forth. For most vowels most of the time, F1 and F2 are the really important formants. Open vowels have higher first formants, and close vowels lower first formants; front vowels have higher second formants, and back vowels have higher low formants. Here’s a similar chart, showing actual values, from the Hitch paper: 

But we don’t recognize vowels just using their pitch. If it did, we could in theory have languages with hundreds of vowels: the ear and brain together can detect extremely subtle gradations of tone. Rather, what matters more is the relative value of vowels, the distinctive features like [+front] or [-high]. 

Most languages have small vowel inventories; in terms of the psychological perception of vowels, the vowel space is quite small. WALS classified any language with 4 or fewer values as “small,” languages with 5-7 vowels as “average,” and any language with more than 7 as having a “large” vowel inventory. Germanic languages like English, which have anywhere from 10 to 17 (!) vowels, are monstrously bloated by global standards. Usually for larger vowel inventories, additional features will be added besides the spatial features so that vowels don’t have to compete for space: Latin doubles its vowel inventory (/a e i o u a: e: i: o: u:/) by adding a length feature, and Turkish (/i y ɯ u ɛ œ a o/) accomplishes something similar with rounding.

Additional sets of distinctions like these, which are not spatial distinctions, create different vowel planes, where vowels do not have to compete for space with one another directly. Vowel planes may be parallel (as in Latin or Turkish), or not. There may be phonological or grammatical processes that trigger vowels moving from one vowel plane to another, as languages with vowel harmony, where vowels in a word must share a particular feature like frontness or roundedness, or vowel planes may simply exist to provide additional acoustic contrast within a language’s vowel inventory.

Traditionally, languages with large vowel inventories have been analyzed as having many degrees of front/back or height distinction: four, in languages like Danish, or even sometimes five, as in the case of one Bavarian dialect Hitch cites in his paper. However, Hitch argues that the psychological space available for the vowel plane is really divided by reference to a perceived “neutral” vowel, one that may not be phonemic in a language, but will still crop up in paralinguistic utterances (like English “ugh” or “uh-huh”). It is by comparison to this vowel that vowels acquire distinctive spatial features, and as such, there are really only nine ways, at most, to divy up the vowel plane:

No language, in Hitch’s analysis, really has more than three distinctions of height or backness. When you think you have more, as in Danish, it’s time to take a look at the possibility that some apparently spatial feature really reflects an underlying contrast that isn’t spatial. Remember, it’s only the phonemic features of a sound that are fixed: the non-phonemic features can vary, sometimes by quite a lot.[6] Anything higher and fronter than the neutral vowel will count as a “high front” vowel, and its exact spatial realization may not be the same in each vowel plane.

Danish, for instance, has the vowel inventory /i e ɛ a y ø oe u o ɔ/ and is analyzed as Hitch as having the primary vowel plane

The three front rounded vowels /y ø oe/ form a distinct plane, one in which the only distinctive feature is height: high round, mid round, low round. The “frontness” of these vowels is a phonetic feature, but not an important phonemic feature. They don’t contrast directly with the rounded back vowels, because back vowels are usually rounded--it makes them more acoustically distinct from mid vowels, and round back vowels show up in tons of languages, like Latin, that don’t make a phonemic contrast for rounding. And rounding has a side effect on front vowels, making them sound a more central: thus, the “front round plane” is, perceptually speaking, more of a mid round plane distinguished by the [+round] feature. Languages can have multiple secondary planes. According to Hitch, Jalapa Mazatec “may have six parallel planes.” 

Vowel harmony doesn’t have to operate across planes: Hitch provides the example of the three-vowel language Jingulu, which as /a i u/. A suffix in /u/ or /i/ will raise the preceding vowel unless a high vowel intervenes: bardarda, “younger brother” + -rni > birdirdirni, “younger sister.” But if often does, with apparent height distinctions being better understood as plane distinctions: “In these languages, the vowels in a particular word will all be from one plane or the other. It seems that the choice of plane is determined at the lexical level. In the lexicon, the words contain archiphonemes spanning both planes, and each word is marked with a feature indicating plane membership.”[8]  Even if a language doesn’t have clearly non-spatial articulatory features distinguishing its planes like nasalization or length, it can still have two vowel planes that exist side by side. For Ogbia, a language of Nigeria, Hitch gives two vowel planes corresponding to one with the advance tongue root feature (+ATR) /i e u o ɐ/ and one without (-ATR) /ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ a/. For Nez Perce, five surface vowels /i u o æ ɑ/ correspond to two planes /i u æ/ and /i o ɑ/; a word can have vowels from one plane in it, but not both. /i/ happens to exist in both planes (possibly due to a merger of two distinct underlying vowels).

3. Vowel systems

So for any vowel system on a single plane, we’re going to have a maximum of nine vowels. Secondary systems may be the same size as the primary vowel plane; or they may be smaller. Either way, our vowel systems will tend to have one of two shapes, triangular or rectangular. In a triangular vowel system, acoustic considerations are dominant. We will have fewer open vowels, and more close vowels. In a rectangular vowel system, the psychological considerations are instead dominant, and vowels will be distributed in the nine-vowel grid in a more symmetric fashion.

These nine potential positions or “archiphonemes” don’t always reflect the same division of the vowel space given on the IPA. 7 and 9, for instance, might be open-mid vowels rather than true open vowels. 2 might be a rounded front close vowel. 5 may or may not be a schwa. 8, the bottom of the IPA trapezoid or the idealized acoustic triangle, is usually [a], despite [a] being, tecnically, a front vowel! I will simply quote Hitch at length here: 

With those caveats, we can then look at the possible arrangements of vowel systems, from zero vowels to nine. 

Zero vowels. “A zero-vowel language would insert vowels according to rules of epenthesis, then colour the vowels according to phonetic context. It sounds theoretically possible, but no completely convincing cases have yet been identified.”

One vowel. “There would seem to be no indisputable examples of one-vowel systems on a primary plane.” But there are languages with one-vowel secondary planes. If a language has one long vowel, for instance, it will be /a:/. But if a language has one nasalized vowel, it can be just about anything. 

Two vowels. This includes languages with a two-vowel front round plane; also, languages with a primary plane that has just a height distinction. All Northwest Caucasian languages have /ə a/ (but feature lots of allophones). Most examples Hitch cites for two-vowel systems have some kind of central vowel (/ə/ or /ɨ/) plus /a/; but Witchita has /i a/. “But this type reveals something fundamental about vowels: that [low] is the most basic of the four spatial features.”

Three Vowels. The triangular system /i u a/ is a very common system among the world’s languages, with /i/ and /u/ having lots of vertical freedom.

Hitch is very down on the idea of a three-vowel on the primary plane; of the potential examples he cites, none are undisputed. But “Parisian French has a vertical three-vowel configuration /y ø oe/ on a front-rounded plane (primary /i u e ə o ɛ a ɔ/). While vertical three-vowel systems may not exist, primary plane triangular three-vowel systems are exceedingly common.”

Four vowels. The triangular 4-vowel systems (4a and 4b) add a neutral vowel to the classic 3-vowel system. A straightforward rectangular system is possible (4c); as well as a slightly more complicated variation with more room for allophony (4d).

He also gives the unusual example of the Lummi dialect of North Straits Salish, which “appears to have no low vowels” /i e ə o/, though this is clearly an outlier.

Five vowels. The Latin vowel system (5a) is an extremely common triangular system; a rectangular 5-vowel system is also pretty common (5b). Three other five-vowel systems are given that are “relatively rare,” being a triangular system that combines 4a and 4b (5c), a 4c-like rectangular system with a mid front vowel added (5d), which is “asymmetrical, because the acoustic space is dominant,” and a different variation on 4c that instead adds a high central vowel. As an unusual exception, Hitch notes that Tohono O’odham “appears not to fit the pattern of any other language, and to violate a universal by having more back than front vowels with /i ɨ u o a/.”

Six vowels. Adding a central mid or central high vowel to 5a gives two common triangular six-vowel systems (6a and 6b). A rectangular six-vowel system, with no central vowels, is also possible.

Seven vowels. There is one possible triangular configuration, 7a, with one low vowel. Otherwise, 7-vowel systems are rectangular systems that differ only on where they place the central vowel.

Eight vowels. Similarly restricted: there are only three possible configurations of eight vowel systems, depending on which central vowel is omitted. None appear to be very common, however.

Nine vowels. Nine is the maximum number of vowels on a single plane, and therefore there is only one nine-vowel configuration possible. All analyses of more than nine “basic” vowels means you should start examining the possibility of multiple vowel planes.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at consonant systems.

Footnotes:

[1] https://wals.info/chapter/1 (ctrl+f “size principle”) 

[2] Languages do have irregularities, where historic patterns have been obscured by sound change or other processes. But there’s a reason irregularities or fossilized forms tend to occur in commonly-used words and phrases rather than rarely used ones: it is harder to remember variant patterns for rarely used words, and so they tend to become regular by analogy.

[3] Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. This is one of those texts that was mind-blowing to me when we read it in our Critical Theory course in undergrad, but now seems so obvious as to not be worth discussing. The key insight can be summed up very succinctly, though: human brains care about differences between symbols, not their absolute values. When it comes to the kind of meaningful differentiation required for communication, it’s the relative differences between signs that matter--so any sign-system can be simplified to the minimum required number of distinctions, without the loss of information or without impeding communication. This insight is relevant to everything from linguistics to information theory.

[4] Apparently irregular sound changes--why does the Early Modern English sound spelled <gh> get pronounced as /f/ in “enough,” but is silent in “through”?--are usually the result of patterns being obscured by analogy or borrowing. In this case, it’s because the prestige dialect of English that coalesced around London in the Early Modern period, and was influenced by speakers of English from all over England, sometimes borrowed words from other dialects that had undergone different sound changes. In some of those dialects, the <gh>-sound was lost. In others, it changed to /f/.

[5] The only sounds in either Rotokas or Hawaiian given above that don’t crop up as a phoneme or allophone in English are probably [β ɣ]. The former is just [v] pronounced with only the lips; the latter, the voiced equivalent of German or Scottish [x].

[6] For instance, the Middle English long vowels /iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː/, had as their distinctive feature their length, not the exact contour of their sound. That meant that these long vowels could “break,” becoming diphthongs, but as long as they remained mostly distinct from one another, no confusion resulted. That breaking, plus the general reorganization of the vowel system that changed the pitch of the pure long vowels (the high ones, which could not acquire a high offglide because there was no space above them acoustically) later yielded the corresponding modern long vowels /aɪ i: i: eɪ aʊ u: oʊ/

[inclusivelanguageblr-blog]

Inclusive Language

Justicia para todos, reads a sign hanging from a bridge in Mexico City. The black <o> from todos has been crossed with red, and above it there is a scribbled <x>. Todxs. The same word that has been taking social media, especially Twitter, by storm on the last few months. Hispanic people from across the world seem to have something to say regarding this grammatical, and social, issue. The truth is, most people wouldn’t normally bat an eye at some badly written street signs. But it’s different this time. Swapping the <o> for an <x> is part of a trend called Lenguage Inclusivo, or Inclusive Language, a trend set of freeing nouns of their gender by replacing the vocals <a> (used for feminine words) and <o> (used for masculine words) by neutrals such as <e>, <x>, or even <@>. This has angered linguists, but teens and young adults continue to stubbornly plaster the words across billboards and social media. It is a rightful fight. Language helps us understand the world, and language cannot remain static in the face of accelerated progress towards social equality. Gendered nouns no longer encompass our reality, and therefore the language must be adapted to the needs of those who use it.

Inclusive language has defenders and detractors across Hispanic countries such as Spain, Colombia, Chile, Perú, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The phenomenon of de-gendering the language has been registered, however, in other languages. Santiago Kalinowski, director of the Department of Linguistic Investigations of the Argentinian Academy of Letters, pointed to the Swedish Academy which introduced to its glossary the neutral pronoun “hen”. On the other side of the spectrum, a French school manual that integrated inclusive language into its writing sparked a prohibition on inclusive language in all official texts back on 2017. The decision of the Swede government to adapt the dictionary to the needs of the people comes to show that inclusive language is a doable reality, even if some other countries, such as France, are still resisting the change.

The push for a non-sexist language is nothing new. Dora Barrancos, Argentinian sociologist and militant feminist notes that since the beginning of the second wave of feminism in the 60´s there has been an interest in eliminating sexism from the language. She explains: “Language denotes us as people, therefore correcting the language to eliminate the male default is an incredibly important task in order to have equality between the sexes.” Language is a crucial component of our lives: it ties us to a culture, a time, and a place.

The biggest defenders of Inclusive Language are people under 26, young writers and artists who argue that a gendered language does no longer reflect our reality. Oscar Conde, Doctor of Literature and member of the Porteña Academy of Lunfardo, explains that its people under the age of 25 that make up nearly ninety nine percent of words. “Teenagers have naturalized inclusive language and that is understood due to the unprejudiced way they live sexuality in. For them, it’s not about males or females but about people. And we must be willing to incorporate this into our language,” he says. After all, if teenagers modify the language, it will be passed down to the generations to come.

Changing a language to fit current events will always be met with backlash from those who came before, tied to a different time. Real Academia Española (RAE), a cultural institution based on Madrid is dedicated to regulating the language by publishing norms which strive to unify the different variations of it. When the debate around inclusive language grew, this institution took to twitter to clearly express their disapproval of the trend. Through several tweets, they have consistently explained why there is absolutely no need to change the language. Most notably, the tweet that reads: “The use of @ or of the letters <E> and <x> as supposed marks of the inclusive gender are alien to the morphology of Spanish, as well as unnecessary, since the grammatical male gendering already fulfills the function of a non-gendered denominator.”  Inclusive language poses a threat to the very core of the language, which is its masculine default. Linguists and Spanish enthusiasts alike praised the institution.

The forms of discrimination towards women in grammar and dictionaries have been multiple. The director of RAE, Darío Villanueva, said in an interview with El País that the problem lays in confusing grammar with misogyny. He also qualifies political correctness as a perverse form of censorship, and he complains about how determined groups demand that RAE retires several definitions from the dictionary. “If the words are there, it’s because people use them. The problem would be creating a dictionary made up of only pretty words. Words are also used to be a scoundrel,” Villanueva stated. Statements such as this one has been used by opposers of inclusive language, who fail to realize that the claims made by feminists and youths are not unfounded. Until 2014, the RAE defined the verb gozar (to enjoy) as “To know a woman carnally.” Currently it has been modified as “To have sexual intercourse with another.” This way, misogyny is avoided, and different sexual orientations are included, showing that language can and should be adapted to the demands of those who use it.

It is a well-known fact that language shapes the way we interact with the world. A study conducted by Standford researchers, How Language Affects Thought in a Connectionist Model, highlights the fact that being a native speaker of a gendered language does affect the way we connect with our environment. In the English language, only people are referred to with he and she while nouns are without gender. However, in languages such as German and Spanish all nouns are gendered including those that refer to objects. An experiment conducted by Boroditsky et al. (2003) studied native Spanish and German speakers, asking the participants to describe an object using only three adjectives. The objects they were describing were male coded in Spanish and female coded in German, and this difference was highlighted in the words chosen by the participants to describe the objects. For instance, the word for ‘key’ is feminine in Spanish and masculine in German, and the subjects whose native tongue is Spanish chose feminine adjectives as opposed to the German subjects. The perceptions we gain from our native language transcend even when we speak a different, gender neutral language such as English. This study proves that changing our language will change our minds, giving us a broader understanding of things once we are free from the boundaries of gender and its conceptions.

Language is one of the means by which the conception of the world in which we live is transmitted and it is also a social element that allows us to interact daily with others. It can be permeated by cultural biases that maintain discriminatory ideals, such as the one directed towards women by minimizing them, making them invisible by taking men as a measure of things. For example, when masculinizing professions and trades, or by the generic use of the masculine when talking about both women and men. The trend started by feminists back in the sixties has resonated within today’s youth, and they have decided to take matters into their own hands, to revolutionize the language that their parents and grandparents failed to change. No number of linguists, angry twitter users, or mocking teachers can stop the tidal wave of youthful determination. Amid such backlash, young writers have been slowly and steadily introduced their ideas into the mainstream, and it’s only a matter of time before we all find ourselves changing our <o> for a new, neutral <e>.

[letsdowebsite]

Natural language processing

Normal language handling endeavors to construct machines that comprehend and answer text or voice information and answer with text or discourse of their own similarly people do.

What is natural language processing?

Natural language processing (NLP) refers to the branch of computer science—and more specifically, the branch of artificial intelligence or AI—concerned with giving computers the ability to understand text and spoken words in much the same way human beings can.

NLP combines computational linguistics—rule-based modeling of human language—with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models. Together, these technologies enable computers to process human language in the form of text or voice data and to ‘understand’ its full meaning, complete with the speaker or writer’s intent and sentiment.

NLP drives computer programs that translate text from one language to another, respond to spoken commands, and summarize large volumes of text rapidly—even in real time. There’s a good chance you’ve interacted with NLP in the form of voice-operated GPS systems, digital assistants, speech-to-text dictation software, customer service chatbots, and other consumer conveniences. But NLP also plays a growing role in enterprise solutions that help streamline business operations, increase employee productivity, and simplify mission-critical business processes.

NLP tasks

Human language is filled with ambiguities that make it incredibly difficult to write software that accurately determines the intended meaning of text or voice data. Homonyms, homophones, sarcasm, idioms, metaphors, grammar and usage exceptions, variations in sentence structure—these just a few of the irregularities of human language that take humans years to learn, but that programmers must teach natural language-driven applications to recognize and understand accurately from the start, if those applications are going to be useful.

Several NLP tasks break down human text and voice data in ways that help the computer make sense of what it's ingesting. Some of these tasks include the following:

Speech recognition, also called speech-to-text, is the task of reliably converting voice data into text data. Speech recognition is required for any application that follows voice commands or answers spoken questions. What makes speech recognition especially challenging is the way people talk—quickly, slurring words together, with varying emphasis and intonation, in different accents, and often using incorrect grammar.

Part of speech tagging, also called grammatical tagging, is the process of determining the part of speech of a particular word or piece of text based on its use and context. Part of speech identifies ‘make’ as a verb in ‘I can make a paper plane,’ and as a noun in ‘What make of car do you own?’

Word sense disambiguation is the selection of the meaning of a word with multiple meanings through a process of semantic analysis that determine the word that makes the most sense in the given context. For example, word sense disambiguation helps distinguish the meaning of the verb 'make' in ‘make the grade’ (achieve) vs. ‘make a bet’ (place).

Named entity recognition, or NEM, identifies words or phrases as useful entities. NEM identifies ‘Kentucky’ as a location or ‘Fred’ as a man's name.

Co-reference resolution is the task of identifying if and when two words refer to the same entity. The most common example is determining the person or object to which a certain pronoun refers (e.g., ‘she’ = ‘Mary’), but it can also involve identifying a metaphor or an idiom in the text (e.g., an instance in which 'bear' isn't an animal but a large hairy person).

Sentiment analysis attempts to extract subjective qualities—attitudes, emotions, sarcasm, confusion, suspicion—from text.

Natural language generation is sometimes described as the opposite of speech recognition or speech-to-text; it's the task of putting structured information into human language.

NLP tools and approaches

Python and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)

The Python programing language provides a wide range of tools and libraries for attacking specific NLP tasks. Many of these are found in the Natural Language Toolkit, or NLTK, an open source collection of libraries, programs, and education resources for building NLP programs.

The NLTK includes libraries for many of the NLP tasks listed above, plus libraries for subtasks, such as sentence parsing, word segmentation, stemming and lemmatization (methods of trimming words down to their roots), and tokenization (for breaking phrases, sentences, paragraphs and passages into tokens that help the computer better understand the text). It also includes libraries for implementing capabilities such as semantic reasoning, the ability to reach logical conclusions based on facts extracted from text.

Statistical NLP, machine learning, and deep learning

The earliest NLP applications were hand-coded, rules-based systems that could perform certain NLP tasks, but couldn't easily scale to accommodate a seemingly endless stream of exceptions or the increasing volumes of text and voice data.

Enter statistical NLP, which combines computer algorithms with machine learning and deep learning models to automatically extract, classify, and label elements of text and voice data and then assign a statistical likelihood to each possible meaning of those elements. Today, deep learning models and learning techniques based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) enable NLP systems that 'learn' as they work and extract ever more accurate meaning from huge volumes of raw, unstructured, and unlabeled text and voice data sets.

NLP use cases

Natural language processing is the driving force behind machine intelligence in many modern real-world applications. Here are a few examples:

Spam detection: You may not think of spam detection as an NLP solution, but the best spam detection technologies use NLP's text classification capabilities to scan emails for language that often indicates spam or phishing. These indicators can include overuse of financial terms, characteristic bad grammar,

threatening language, inappropriate urgency, misspelled company names, and more. Spam detection is one of a handful of NLP problems that experts consider 'mostly solved' (although you may argue that this doesn’t match your email experience).

Machine translation: Google Translate is an example of widely available NLP technology at work. Truly useful machine translation involves more than replacing words in one language with words of another. Effective translation has to capture accurately the meaning and tone of the input language and translate it to text with the same meaning and desired impact in the output language. Machine translation tools are making good progress in terms of accuracy. A great way to test any machine translation tool is to translate text to one language and then back to the original. An oft-cited classic example: Not long ago, translating “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” from English to Russian and back yielded “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten.” Today, the result is “The spirit desires, but the flesh is weak,” which isn’t perfect, but inspires much more confidence in the English-to-Russian translation.

Virtual agents and chatbots: Virtual agents such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa use speech recognition to recognize patterns in voice commands and natural language generation to respond with appropriate action or helpful comments. Chatbots perform the same magic in response to typed text entries. The best of these also learn to recognize contextual clues about human requests and use them to provide even better responses or options over time. The next enhancement for these applications is question answering, the ability to respond to our questions—anticipated or not—with relevant and helpful answers in their own words.

Social media sentiment analysis: NLP has become an essential business tool for uncovering hidden data insights from social media channels. Sentiment analysis can analyze language used in social media posts, responses, reviews, and more to extract attitudes and emotions in response to products, promotions, and events–information companies can use in product designs, advertising campaigns, and more.

Text summarization: Text summarization uses NLP techniques to digest huge volumes of digital text and create summaries and synopses for indexes, research databases, or busy readers who don't have time to read full text. The best text summarization applications use semantic reasoning and natural language generation (NLG) to add useful context and conclusions to summaries.

Natural language processing and IBM Watson

IBM has innovated in the artificial intelligence space by pioneering NLP-driven tools and services that enable organizations to automate their complex business processes while gaining essential business insights. These tools include:

Watson Discovery - Surface high-quality answers and rich insights from your complex enterprise documents - tables, PDFs, big data and more - with AI search. Enable your employees to make more informed decisions and save time with real-time search engine and text mining capabilities that perform text extraction and analyze relationships and patterns buried in unstructured data. Watson Discovery leverages custom NLP models and machine learning methods to provide users with AI that understands the unique language of their industry and business. Explore Watson Discovery

Watson Natural Language Understanding (NLU) - Analyze text in unstructured data formats including HTML, webpages, social media, and more. Increase your understanding of human language by leveraging this natural language tool kit to identify concepts, keywords, categories, semantics, and emotions, and to perform text classification, entity extraction, named entity recognition (NER), sentiment analysis, and summarization. Explore Watson Natural Language Understanding

Watson Assistant - Improve the customer experience while reducing costs. Watson Assistant is an AI chatbot with an easy-to-use visual builder so you can deploy virtual agents across any channel, in minutes. Explore Watson Assistant

Purpose-built for healthcare and life sciences domains, IBM Watson Annotator for Clinical Data extracts key clinical concepts from natural language text, like conditions, medications, allergies and procedures. Deep contextual insights and values for key clinical attributes develop more meaningful data. Potential data sources include clinical notes, discharge summaries, clinical trial protocols and literature data.

[snarktheater]

Wait... if gender's a social construct, then does that mean being trans is a choice? It sounds like you're saying that being trans is a performance. I can't see how one can be born trans without there being anything innate about the two genders.

“If gender is a social construct, being trans is a choice” makes about as much logical sense as saying “if money is a social construct, being poor is a choice”. Which, you know, money is a social construct. There is no inherent “value” to anything, regardless of when it was based on something tangible like gold or how it is today, based on…I don’t know, the trust of banks or something. I’m not an economist. Point is: monetary value is decided by us, so it’s a social construct, but just because it’s a social construct doesn’t mean it’s not real or doesn’t have real effects. It’s similar with gender: just because we define what it means as a society doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Also, being trans is not a performance. You’re confusing gender and gender presentation. The difference between the two is best exemplified in drag: people who are usually men (and usually even cis men) are presenting as women for the sake of a performance. Their gender remains male, only their gender presentation changes. I’m only saying this here because I’m probably going to use presentation later so I’d rather we be on the same page about what it is.

As for gender in particular, I have two three things to say. And just to be clear: I am a cis person, so I may make mistakes, although I think I have done enough research and listened to enough people to have a solid enough understanding to explain this, which is basically gender 101.

Also, have a cut because it’s a long post.

One: There are no “two genders”

The gender binary is also a social construct. There’s been plenty of explanations of that, and I don’t want to spend too long about this, because it’s not really the purpose of this blog (besides, biology is not my field of science). But the gist of the reasoning is this:

People who argue that there are only two genders tend to equate gender to sex.

Sex isn’t a binary itself, however. Sex is an ill-defined notion at best, too, but putting it on a binary is a bad idea whichever definition you go for, which tends to include:

Chromosomes. The good ol’ XX/XY is incomplete. Intersex people exist.

Gonads (sexual organs). Testicles and ovaries…but again, intersex people exist and some present organs that don’t fit neatly into one or the other, because both are grown from the same fetal tissue, so that tissue can go somewhere in-between.

Hormone levels, especially with testosterone, estrogen, and I think progesterone? Could be wrong about the latter. Regardless, this one doesn’t even work on anybody. There are cis perisex men with low testosterone/high estrogen, cis perisex women with the opposite, et cetera. Because hormones are complicated like that.

Ternary sexual characteristics (like pilosity, breasts, et cetera). That is actually the one we use to assume people’s sex and gender most often than not, since we can’t run a DNA sequencing, we can’t measure their hormone levels, and we can’t (usually) just ask to see their genitals. It’s also the most flawed of them. I mean, they’re controlled by hormones, so that’s a bad place to start for the reason I discussed above. Plus we can just work around them by altering gender presentation that I mentioned above. See also: binders, padding, make-up.

The sex binary was made by old scientists with incomplete data and a lot of confirmation bias. Any scientist worth their salt will tell you that if you have data that does not fit the current model, that model should be scrapped and replaced. I mean, without this (which is the very foundation of the scientific method), we wouldn’t have the theory of electromagnetism (which only all of the Internet relies on), or quantum mechanics, or relativistic physics. All of these replaced older models. Note that these old models, just like the sex binary, are still useful in specific situations! As long as you’re on Earth, Newtonian physics are fine and you can combine speeds additively instead of using the dreadful method of relativistic physics. As long as you’re talking about cis perisex people, the sex binary is useful to talk about a lot of their biological processes. But neither is useful outside of their hypotheses.

Back to gender. Gender is even more ill-defined than sex. I mean, without resorting to gender roles, it’s hard to even talk about what makes a man or a woman. So if it’s based on sex, and the sex binary, is outdated, why bother with a gender binary?

So…yeah. Gender today is understood to be on a multi-dimensional spectrum. As in, it’s not just “male, female, and stuff in between”. There are people who fall outside of the binary altogether, people with no gender, people wth multiple genders. Scientific observation tells us that, if this is their experience, our model that tells us there are only two genders is probably just plain wrong and we need a new one.

But back to that “it’s hard to define gender at all”. Put a pin on it. I’ll get back to it.

Two: The “born this way” narrative

That narrative. I understand how it came to be, and I understand its usefulness, but in the end, I loathe it.

See, the idea that you’re born this way (whether “this way” is referring to gender or sexuality) is mostly something to make the idea more palatable. And to make it less okay to, you know, oppress people based on it.

A lot of people relate to it. But ultimately, it is not a universal constant of the queer community, and if anything, it’s a little bit restrictive.

I mean, take sexuality. As a child, you may experience romantic attraction, but sexual attraction usually only occurs around or after puberty. So already it’s inaccurate to say that one is born gay/straight/bi/pan/poly/etc, because it’s something you only find out about yourself once you grow up and realize what those feelings are. And there may be external factors that delay that realization even further.

For instance, a lot of lesbians and queer women have reported that they only figured out their sexuality as adults, because before that, heteronormativity and misogyny made them assume that their lack of interest in boys was “normal”, that no girl really wanted sex or at the very least that they couldn’t like boys, because gender roles.

People who aren’t monosexual (whether because they’re attracted to multiple genders or somewhere on the asexual spectrum) similarly have a harder time realizing their sexuality because, usually, they’re not even taught that that exists. I was one of the lucky ones, knowing about bisexuality before I even had my own sexual awakening so I could place a name on it.

It’s the same thing with trans people. Some identify with their gender from as early as they’re able to, some take much longer, due to many reasons.

Plus, it speaks to a very weird societal mindset, to focus on being born a certain way as your “true” identity, as if people didn’t change and their identity was set in stone from the start. I think a much better narrative is that we’re born a genderless blob with no true identity of our own, and a combination of who we are and how our experiences influence us determines our identity, ergo our gender (as part of that identity). Then again, that’s just my philosophy of personal choice being at play here.

But really, the biggest issue I have with this idea is that it prevents people from questioning their gender and/or sexuality, when I think everyone, including cis and/or straight people, should do that. It is after all much more fulfilling to identify with anything because you’ve spent some time critically looking at the options and picking the one you like best rather than accepting what has been forced upon you.

Which leads us to…

Three: How do I know?

A.k.a. time to go back to that pin I told you to put on the idea that it’s hard to define gender.

While this isn’t a universally agreed-upon sentiment, I am of the school of thought that what defines one’s gender is what is referred to as gender euphoria. Now, I realize that “euphoria” might bring up the picture of some ecstatic feeling, but the term here is just used in opposition to dysphoria (the two being etymological opposites).

Gender dysphoria is one that people are usually more familiar with. It’s the idea that a person experiences discomfort with their assigned gender, and usually, with their body as per the expectations that gender places on your body. And “discomfort” is usually a euphemism, because it usually leads to disorders like depression or even to self-harm. It’s also what leads some trans people to need surgery or hormonal therapy, or just psychotherapy, as coping/healing mechanisms.

To some people, dysphoria is what defines transness, but as I said, I’m not of that school of thought, which goes back to my philosophy of choice. But also because it just seems odd to me to base a part of one’s identity around pain.

The theory around gender euphoria is that what defines one’s gender isn’t feeling bad about identifying with another gender, but feeling good about identifying with the “right” gender for you. Basically, if using the signifiers of one gender (such as, but not necessarily including all of, or limited to: pronouns, name, gender presentation and roles) feels better for you than whatever you’re using now, this is probably a better gender for you and you’re probably trans. 

This theory doesn’t remove the possibility for dysphoria for the wrong gender, but it explains it as a side-effect of not experience gender euphoria rather than the defining experience of transness. And, well, seeing as “you’re only trans if you have dysphoria” is usually used by people to exclude other people from trans communities, and I’ve already stated my views on exclusionism in general…you can probably guess why I take this stance.

Now you’ll note that I only helped explain how you can tell what a specific person’s gender is here, not how to define gender in the first place. This is where we get back to the basic idea that gender is a social construct. All we can effectively observe is the signifiers of gender, and how people interact with those (dysphoria, euphoria, or just nothing at all). So how do we define a gender? 

Well, that’s the social construct part—in other words, we can’t, not in a scientific way. Society (in other words, people) is what defines which pronouns or names are associated to what gender, or what we expect a person of a certain gender to be like.

Which is great! Because it means society is also open to more gender, or to redefine what those signifiers are. You’ve probably heard that the “pink is for girls, blue is for boys” idea is a fairly recent one and was in fact reversed less than a century ago, for instance. Or the fact that women couldn’t wear pants until fairly recently (in the scale of our society, anyway). That means we can introduce new signifiers for genders that are less represented (say, by making up new sets of pronouns), and we can also reject the signifiers that we feel are antiquated/oppressive (like…all of misogyny and toxic masculinity, basically). So we can have trans people while also not needing to cling to gender roles and sexism. It can be done!

I hope this admittedly long-winded explanation helps answer your question, anon.

[schyrsivochter]

RE: "I dislike silly made-up pronouns like xe, xir, hir, etc. (I don’t see the point, why is ‘they’ not good enough?)" lmao every word and pronoun that exists is made up. + those "silly" pronouns you just named have literally existed since the 1300s. plus, why do we need more NAMES, huh? arent ashley and noah enough? of course not. language is socially constructed. therefore we make new words all the time and we make new pronouns all the time to fit our needs and there nothing wrong with that.

You don’t understand.

Pronouns are nothing like names. Names have no primary meaning other than referring to a person, but every pronoun has a defined meaning (or multiple, see ‘they’—but that’s still well-defined). ‘he’ means a person or being of male gender, ‘she’ the same for female. Singular ‘they’ is for people you don’t know the gender of or for people who are neither male nor female, the percentage of which is, in my opinion, not big enough to warrant splitting into ten different groups with definitions such as ‘person who wants to be referred to with this word’—that’s essentially a name, and thus, it defies the purpose of pronouns, because the entire point of pronouns is grouping noun phrases (including proper nouns, which include names) into very few categories (for instance, person and number).

The reason why I’m fine with ‘they’ is that it has already been used to mean ‘unknown gender’. And seeing as it’s contrasting with ‘male’ and ‘female’ in this case, it’s only a small step from ‘unknown gender’ to ‘where “male” or “female” don’t apply’.

This also means that pronouns are a closed class. One does not simply invent a pronoun. Pronouns develop naturally. Just because language is a social construct does not mean everyone can expect everyone to play by their rules. Yes, every word that exists is made up in some way, but the important thing is that lots of people agree on the word and its meaning. I and most other people I know do not understand the meaning of these constructed pronouns.

I know gender is not a binary thing, nor just a ternary thing either, but for God’s sake, think of the people who don’t know that. ‘They’ is kind of intuitive. Someone noticing that a particular person is only ever ‘they’ will just use that, too. But how do you expect them to understand these other words? The first time I read something containing these pronouns, in a Tumblr post (mind you, Tumblr is almost the only place I have ever seen these words), I was confused as hell. Was that a typo? Were they misspelling ‘she’ and ‘her’? Were they just fucking with readers?

Besides, get a little perspective. In real life, I don’t know a single person which I know to be trans or nonbinary, and only two I know to be not straight; while on the Internet, I know loads of them. Also, one of them just told me she finds these pronouns ‘a tad unnecessary’, one said they’ll never enter mainstream usage, one said they’re ableist because of a mental disability that person has. (To be fair, one of them said it’s nb-phobic to not use a person’s preferred pronoun and that spawned a debate which ended in one person leaving—why do people always have to leave?)

That being said, I’m fine with people using these neo-pronouns. If you want. By all means, go ahead and use them in your everyday language and confuse everyone you meet. But don’t expect me to refer to any person with something other than ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘they’.

Also please give me evidence for your claim that these words have existed for almost seven hundred years, because I’m having serious trouble believing that.

[kaialone]

Yokai Watch Translations: Yagyō’s gender

(Yagyō can be alternatively spelled Yagyou, or even Yagyo, and some fans spell it as Yako or Yakyo and the like)

This is a bit different from what I usually do, in that I won’t really be translation and/or comparing something, but do a bit more explaining.

I´m making this because I have had multiple people ask me this question:

“Is Yagyō non-binary/agender?”

And I think it’s important that some confusion about this would be cleared up, so I will attempt to do that.

First let’s get the important thing out of the way, which is my answer to the question:

“I don’t know.”

This may seem a tad anti-climatic but yeah, I don’t actually know, BUT, the important part of this is gonna be my explanation of WHY I don’t know.

Because you see, the way things that may indicate gender work is slightly different in japanese than it is in english.

What I´m going to do here is, I will briefly go through what I believe is the two “primary” indicators of a character’s gender, explain a bit about them, and if they apply to Yagyō.

After that I will do the same with what I consider “secondary” indicators of a character’s gender.

And lastly I´ll give my final thoughts on the matter.

--

1. Direct Statement

Of course the main indicator of a character’s gender is the character themselves going “I´m *insert gender*”, or maybe even just “I´m *insert gendered word.*”.

Note that in the case of the latter, what is a gendered word in english may not be a gendered word in japanese, so always double check if youre going to use something like that as “canon” evidence.

But of course it’s usually up to luck wether a character actually says something like this or not, so things often aren’t that easy. I haven’t seen any instances of Yagyō using a gendered word like that to refer to themselves.

Enma technically says:

“ それでいて 「新たな王」 などと よく言えたものだな！ And calling yourself the “new king” despite all that! “

But it seems to be directed at all three of them, so I personally would say it’s not a definite indicator. Plus I am not certain if “王“ would exclusively refer to male monarchs in japanese.

--

2. Third Person Pronouns

This is the part where some of you may say:

“But kaialone, you use they/them pronouns to refer to Yagyō, both here and in your translations, clearly this settles it, right?”,

but let me explain why it doesn’t.

For starters, in the japanese language, you can often actually leave out the subject of a sentence, as long as the subject is known.

In english similar stuff can exist, for example giving a short reply like “Making toast!” to the question “What are you doing?”. In this case there is no definite need to go “I am making toast”, cause it is well understood that the subject of the sentece is “I”.

And basically in japanese this kinda stuff happens all the time, and as a result you can end up with characters never getting referred to with a third person pronoun at all, especially if their appearances are brief, like most yokai.

Adding to that, the relation of third person pronouns and genders work slightly different in japanese, too.

“Kare” and “Kanojo” meaning “he” and “she” respectively are used as gendered pronouns nowadays, but this is actually a rather recent thing in the language. I don’t know the exact time, but according to wikipedia usage of them as pronouns started to become common around the Meiji era (roughly 1868-1912).

And, from what I have heard and seen, they’re still not used as frequently as we use he or she in english. Depending on the context it can even seem rude or awkward to use them. (Rudeness and Politeness of certain words can vary greatly depending on the context, for example who you’re talking to, in japanese.) People are more likely to just use the names or titles of others when referring to them.

Because of that, you often end up with characters not being refered to with gendered third person pronouns either.

You may also see people getting referred to with gender neutral terms like “Aitsu/Koitsu/Soitsu”, or “Ano Hito”

“Aitsu/Koitsu/Soitsu” could literally be translated as like “this/that one”. (When not referring to a person you might translate them as “it”.) It’s considered rude to use to refer to someone, unless it’s someone you’re close to who is okay with you using it for them.

(Note though that in fiction characters tend to use rude language like that more casually, so you´ll probably still hear people use them rather frequently in anime and such.)

“Ano Hito” and variations of it just mean “That person”, and you might see it be used in a manner like a pronoun.

So, because of all this, a person may be refered to in a gender neutral manner regardless of their actual gender.

Thus, gendered pronouns like “kare” or “kanojo” could be used to confirm that a character is male or female, but the same tactic doesn't work to confirm a character’s lack of being female or male.

As for Yagyō, in all the texts I have seen they are never referred to with a third person pronoun. The closest thing I can find is Nekokiyo referring to them as “ あの者/Ano Mono“, which means “That person”.

For the reference, yes, Nekokiyo could have technically referred to Yagyō as kare or kanojo if they were a man or woman respectively. However the fact that he didn’t, by itself, is not certain evidence that Yagyō is neither of those.

So, going back to the very start of this section and my choice to refer Yagyō as “they/them” in my translations. It is just that, my own choice.

When translating a japanese text, you may end up with a character that is never referred to by gender directly, yet you will have to decide on what pronouns to use for them, because the english language can’t ommit pronouns completely like the japanese language can. So sometimes translators are just forced to just make a guess like that.

I chose “they/them” for Yagyō because to me this seems appropiate for a character whose gender I am uncertain about.

--

Now; these two are really the “main things” that can be used to indicate gender, I believe. But there is still some secondary indicators that people may use.

--

3. First Person Pronouns

In japanese there is more than one first person pronoun, i.e. more than one word for “I/me”.

Some of these first person pronouns are gendered, in that traditionally, only people of a certain gender (and/or sex) are expected to use certain ones, and using pronouns that aren’t associated with one’s gender (and/or sex) might be frowned upon in certain circles.

Yagyō uses the pronoun わたし/Watashi to refer to themselves.

Watashi is a formal, gender neutral pronoun. However, overall it is used more by women than it is by men. (See the statistics on the page I linked there.)

In fiction this seems to be basically the “standard” pronoun for women and girls, you’ll probably see them using that the most, but men use it too, more frequently than they seem to do in real life, even.

To give you an idea of how wide the spectrum of characters using this pronoun can be, here is some examples of Yokai Watch characters using it:

Katie, Inaho, Dr. Maddiman, McKraken, GoGoGo Godfather, Damona, Unkaind, Venoct...

Just to name a few that I can think of on top of my head.

--

4. General Speaking Style

If you wanna read a bit more about this, Wikipedia has an article on it, but to summarize:

There are different speaking styles in japanese, and some are considered “harsher” or “softer” than others, with the harsher styles being considered masculine and the softer ones being considered feminine. (Note that this a very simplified explanation.)

There is a lot more than that too, there is speaking styles that are associated with old people, children, old-fashioned people, and much more, though a lot of that mostly applies to fiction which tends to exaggerate these things even more.

As a result you can often learn a lot about what kinda character one is supposed to be just by reading a bit of their dialouge.

From what I can tell, during the Enma Note quest, Yagyō uses a more informal, harsh, masculine speaking style, but during more peaceful situations, like getting them in a trade or meeting them at the Streetpass buildings, they use a more formal, polite, neutral speaking style.

--

Final Thoughts:

First a little bit of warning:

Note that all these “indicators” of a character’s gender are still not 100% fool-proof, even the “primary” ones.

For example, technically even a character literally stating their own gender could be a result of them not telling the truth, for various reasons, and any instances of other characters referring to them as a certain gender can be a result of them not knowing any better, or even misgendering them.

So, if someone headcanons a character as a different gender than what you think they are based on evidence you’ve seen, this doesn’t mean the person in question is automatically “wrong” about this.

And when it comes to Yagyō, you may say:

“Well at every section of this you said that you don’t think anything is definite proof for their gender, but if nothing indicates that they are male or female, isn’t that like proof that they’re non-binary, presumably agender?”,

and well, it does make it more likely, but it doesn’t prove it.

I personally like to think that Yagyō is non-binary, and I´m happy to see that there doesn’t seem to be anything disproving it from what I can tell, but it’s still just a headcanon.

It is important to make the distinction, mainly because saying it’s confirmed is giving level5 credit for something they didn’t really do.

Maybe they specifically intended for Yagyō to be gender-neutral, maybe they didn’t. But for something that is this important, you shouldn’t say they did unless you know for sure that they did.

Be happy at the thought that they might have, if you want to, but don’t act like it’s a fact. They honestly don’t deserve the credit unless they are explicit about it.

Personally, I honestly believe they probably did not intent for them to be non-binary, if I had to guess I’d say they probably intended for them to be male... But hey, maybe that is just me being pessimistic.

Either way, I hope this cleared some confusion?

Feel free to send me your throughts, opinions and corrections.

[wylthefluffer]

Hello

7/26/2019 3amish

***TRIGGER WARNING*** ANXIETY, GENDER DYSPHORIA, DISABILITIES, ANXIETY, FURRY, CHRISTIAN, NON-BINARY, TALK OF TRANSITION, TRANSGENDER, MENTAL HEALTH TALK, DEMIROMANTIC, PANROMANTIC, ASEXUAL, MOGAI

Hi, I'd like to introduce myself.

My name is Wyl. Pronounced just like "Will". My birth name has a "y" in it which I have always been fond of, and I like the idea of being called Will, but would rather make it more androgynous I guess, so I'm adding that letter in to substitute. It just makes it feel more familiar.

I am non-binary. The way I'd describe my gender is kinda MOGAI-y (no hate towards them, you're fine), and j don't know if anyone wants hear it, but I guess I will see what happens? I am like... There's the female side, and the male side, and they're like, orbiting each other kinda like a moon and a planet. So feminine lunar energy and masculine Mars energy, right? So basically I feel like my gender is another planet in the solar system. Not super far away, but distant enough. Kind of like a small star orbiting a big star. I feel my gender, but I don't feel a big connection to make or female. I'm not a gender, because I still feel gender. But at times I'm so far away I can't even see the moon and Mars. I'm setting else out there. What, I haven't discerned yet, as most non-binary people describe (at least Frome the ones I've met) this middle feeling between the two binaries, but never used the word "bigender", which is what I thought that was. Or there are non-binary people who describe being so removed from gender themselves that they call themselves "agender" or "demigender". I just don't feel like I'm there. I feel like I'm on the opposite side of agender, and male, and female. I just have to find time to research more descriptions I guess? I've heard of the neutral gender thing, and that's great, but I don't feel neutral either. I feel very biased towards something, that isn't in any of those categories.

I do experience dysphoria. I experience it with my chest, my curves, my hair. I dissociate from my reflection in the mirror as not really me, or I hide from it. That and photos. I hate photos. I have pretended or tried being a guy before. When I was little I would play the guy in games. One time I thought I was supposed to be a guy. A few times I wanted to pee standing up or a different way from boys or girls. I would play outside with the hose and put it between my legs (I know, I know) and say "I'm peeing!" knowing that's what boys did (kinda). I even once tried to walk around without a shirt on, and got yelled at for it. But things associated with male genitalia and pretending I had it made me feel icky too. When I realized I was gonna grow a chest, I was confused, then nervous, and then mortified when it started happening and I had to wear bras. I wanted to hide so badly and couldn't until after I turned 13 and my mom let me choose baggy clothes. I still felt uncomfortable because I didn't know any clothes that would make me feel better. I became self conscious about my chest, and my voice, which I wanted to be mid-range. But I knew I didn't want to be hairy or a deep voice, so I wasn't a boy. I hated being called "lady", "ma'am" "miss" or "woman". "Girl" wasn't much better either. I just felt this fear and uncomfortableness towards gender. Female chests, male groins, naked people. Just ew. I've always disliked my groin area, but I found out quickly I didn't want a male groin. Atm I don't know of any other options. So yea, a lot of things. I knew males didn't have to be masculine and females didn't have to be feminine. I wanted to be called a tomboy because it was the best I had and my mom said I wasn't a tomboy, which angered me. I guess she rather thought me either just a girl or something else that only could be called girl as that's what I was born as. It was not good.

My pronouns are... Ze/Zir/Zis/Zimself - confusing, I know. Me too, but I am more confused by she/her, he/him, they/them. I guess if I'd have to choose one I'd go with he/him?

I am asexual. This was my introduction to the lgtbq community. I realize I might be when I was 13/14ish but really began to take it seriously around 15/16. I then began to officially go by it at 19/20 and my friend group accepted it pretty well.

I am demiromantic. This means, for me, I only understand romanticism when I'm in the mood for it, and it's usually an intensifier of platonic relationship stuff, with exclusive companionship. I am attracted to masculine leaning people, and non-binary people. I get along with them better on a relationship basis. I currently am single.

I am also panromantic. "But how does that work!" I heard you saying. Well, "demi" is something that refers to half, or partial association with something. The part of me that associated with romanticism is panromantic. Why? Because I am romantically attracted and can form crushes on non-binary people. And considering non-binary is a collection of multiple distinct alignments, I count this attraction I feel as towards multiple genders. I do not feel romantic attraction to females at this moment. Being around them sometimes intensifies my dysphoria so that doesn't help? Maybe if I get top surgery I'll feel better.

I am a Christian. I believe in God and that he made you and me, and he made people whose brains and bodies didn't match in gender sometimes. There are intersex people after all, which is where the body is mixed up, so why can't there be people whose brains are messed up? There are even trans-intersex people who were assigned one gender at birth and identify as something different. I don't think people born this way are mistakes, I think it's a chance God gives us to help each other and express love and understanding. It's more a challenge than a curse. And that's okay. This world can be terrible, but that's because of Satan's influence. It's not God's fault people don't accept you. It's people's fault for not accepting you, and Satan's fault for tempting them. God wants you to beloved and to give love. "Love thy neighbor as thyself". This means if you accept yourself, and overlook your own flaws, then be tolerant and do the same for your neighbor. And if you're not loving yourself, and you're treating people the same way you're treating yourself, that's not okay either. To the best of your power he needs you to spread that love. That's the only way we'll make it.

I'm a Furry! Yep! I like to make anthropomorphic animal characters and get art and merchandise of them. I also use them online as a persona, as it's more comfortable for me. My main Fursona is Ridley, who is just like me. I'm a fursuit maker too, a decently popular one in the sense that I have a lot of commissions. I'm still working on them as I am behind ;-;

So I'd like to explain why it took me so long to come out as asexual, trans, non-binary, demiromatic, and panromantic. I got sick when I was 15. What with? GERD (stomach thing), POTS (heart thing related to nervous system function), and what they think right now is fibromyalgia (like a nerve disorder causing pain and cognitive issues). I also finally got diagnosed with anxiety at 18, and went on medication which helped control it. My GERD was cured, it flared up twice. My POTS and fibromyalgia won't stop though, and I've developed PTSD from years of isolation from people (social anxiety), unhealthy relationships, and social hardships and emotional hardships suffered from being sick. POTS causes me low blood volume, tendency to dehydrate, high heart rate, low blood pressure, and spontaneous panic attacks which are caused by an adrenaline release in response to the heart doing funky things. I can't control it, and I have no medication for it right now. The only thing that I've found to help sometimes is sedative antianxiety medications (which they won't give me for risk of dependancy) and medical marijuana, which is legal in my state. I get high sometimes to control my anxiety, and this is only just this week that I started. It's helped a lot as we just moved again and I can barely cope with moves anymore.

I have a Service Dog for my disabilities. My doctor approved it last year after I asked if she thought it was okay I got a dog and trained it as one, and she agreed it would be best. So I did! I am working with a private trainer, and owner training. I actually have researched the topic of Service Dogs a lot and federal Service Animal laws, so youcna ask me questions. Ty, my SDiT (Service Dog in Training, because he is learning tasks) is 20 months old. He's medium sized, almost large, slightly smaller than the average golden retriever but bigger than a border collie. He developed a natural tendency to alert to panic attacks, light headedness, migraines, and to key in to my anxiety. He goes with me almost everywhere now and his tasks are medical alert and physically contact. Physical contact is a task in this instance because it helps my nerves calm down, helps overstimulation, helps anxiety, and keeps me from dissociating and I have him within reach to pet if I need to stim ("stimulate" an action that someone uses in order to focus, deal with stress, or manage attention). I am waiting to see a therapist for PTSD, gender dysphoria, and possibly autism. If I seem a bit disinterested, it's because I do develop special interests, which is one clue that may mean I am autistic. We'll see. One of my special interests is friendship.

So yea, that's me. This'll give you an idea on what you might see in this blog, if anyone actually wants to follow me. If I don't answer, I'm likely working, having anxiety, or sick. Don't feel bad.

[thecoroutfitters]

The thirteen Trickiest Syntax Hang-Ups

I trust which you all know the between exactly who and exactly who, and I have faith in that typos are the simply reason you employ the wrong they have. It happens towards best of individuals. For most practitioners, if you can basically maintain your focus (perhaps through caffeine in addition to frequent breaks), you’ll get details right. Down the page problems, yet , may have everyone scrambling for one refresher.

1 ) Half may be both single and multiple. Ordinarily, subjects and verbs agree: If the subject matter is unique, the action-word is extraordinario. If the issue is heterogeneo, the action-word is heterogeneo. Easy peasy. Nonetheless , sentences that start with 50 % of don’t follow this tip.

Half by yourself is singular: My half of the pizza can be pepperoni. Nevertheless although fifty percent is the area of interest in a term such as Half the pizzas usually are missing, people use a heterogeneo verb because of something described as notional understanding. It simply is the reason why although 1 / 2 is singular, half of the pizza has a belief of being multiple, so you start using a plural verb. Follow the rule anytime half will be the subject of a sentence: In cases where half can be followed by one noun, start using a singular verb. If one half is as well as a diverso noun, start using a plural action-word. Half of the pepperoni is defective, but half the tomatoes tend to be missing.

Mixture words this start with half are strange too. They usually are open, made or hyphenated (e. gary., half please note, halfhearted, half-baked). There’s no rule among bodybuilders that implements across the board, and so you’ll have to look at a book.

2 . Internet businesses are not exactly people today. Online businesses are entities, but they are run just by men and women, which means you could make an argument for discussing a company since who, especially since You. S. courts have reigned over that companies are people divorce lawyers atlanta legal is attracted to. Nevertheless, toughness style will be to refer to a service as an entity and utilize pronouns it all and that: You want to buy share in a provider that makes heated air balloons.

In order to highlight that men and women in the provider are right behind some move or choice, name these and make use of who: Floating Baskets was initially driven so that you can bankruptcy through its senior directors, just who took excessive expensive Alaskan joyrides.

several. American is actually a flawed period. U . s citizens is the exclusively single message we have to in relation to citizens of the United States of The united states (U. Beds. -icans? ), but formally, an American will be anyone who all lives in United states, Central The us or Asia.

In the United. S. many of us, the people, are already calling our-self Americans seeing that before some of our country was even created (as have got our detractors). Although everybody of the National continents have been completely Americans, the majority of readers in the U. Ring. and European countries assume that a united states is a Ough. S. homeowner, since that is definitely how the word of mouth is most very popular.

Despite it has the failings, implement American to touch on to a citizen of the United States for America. Absolutely no better term exists. Please feel blameful.

4. The saying dilemma will be, well, any dilemma. The di- prefix on dilemma would mean “two” or maybe “double, ” which deepens support for the idea that concern should be put to use only to identify a choice somewhere between two procedures. The Linked Press Stylebook and Garner’s Modern U . s citizens Usage besides support that limitation, yet go further more, saying that dilemma ought to be used simply for a choice among two worrisome options.

Nevertheless, Garner likewise notes which will other purposes are “ubiquitous. ” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary involving English Consumption and The Columbia Guide to Traditional American British say it’s actual fine make use of dilemma to go into detail any serious predicament, and also American Heirloom Guide to Fashionable Usage and Style takes an intermediate place. What’s a new writer for you to do? (Is it all a main issue? )

Except when you’re composing for a publication that requires anyone to follow a pattern guide which will limits dilemma to a selection between couple of bad possible choices, it’s not certainly wrong to apply dilemma to indicate a difficult issue, even when types aren’t anxious, or to usage dilemma to spell out a difficult alternative between nice options. Even now, you’ll appear to be most innovative when you use question to describe a decision between only two bad selections. In various instances, just before using issue, ask yourself if a different word, like problem, would work better.

Likewise, a cursory search on the Internet exposes that lots of consumers are confounded via the spelling of dilemma. Countless were taught to tap out it drastically wrong. In fact , I got taught so that you can spell it again dilemna at school, and when Manged to get older along with checked some dictionary, Being shocked to look for that the word is spelled dilemma. Additional, the only appropriate spelling is actually dilemma. Decades as if dilemna is a second-rate variant and also regional transliteration. Dictionaries quite often note unique spellings and occasionally non-standard spellings, but dilemna doesn’t possibly show up that way. As far as I can tell, nobody is aware why numerous teachers started using it wrong. Probably a textbook typo is always to blame.

some. Earth just isn’t treated such as the names involving other planets. With English, the overall rule is the fact we make profit the official names with things together with places (e. g., Gold Gate Association, San Francisco), so we take advantage the names about other exoplanets: Jupiter, Mars and so on. For quite a few unknown cause, however , we tend to treat the earth differently. Occasionally it’s capitalized and sometimes is actually lowercase, along with there isn’t going to seem to be a good hard-and-fast law.

Typically, anytime earth is preceded with the, it’s lowercase, and when our planet is listed along with the names on the other planets, it’s capitalized— but you can locate exceptions for you to even such patterns. (Of course, while we’re simply using earth an additional word regarding dirt, it is best to lowercase. )

If you’re a writer, check your publication’s design and style guide to discover what it advises. If you’re posting for yourself, the most important thing is to be consistent— so only pick a capital style together with stay with it.

4. Gone lack of might be troublesome, but it just isn’t wrong. Gone absent is a Briticism that has made its way to the United. S., wheresoever reporters do it mostly to describe missing people. Although journalists and newscasters seem to appreciate gone absent, it’s easy to get vocal readers and viewers who detest it.

Haters argue that a man or woman must look at location, along with missing isn’t a place, knowning that an inanimate object are unable to go passing up on because it are unable to take action alone— but English has never been recently so preciso. In a small labor industry, jobs can go begging (be unfilled), for example , even though begging is not the place and tasks can’t do something. Other peevers suggest that eliminated missing necessitates an action for the person as well as item with which has vanished. Just as before, we have parallels that challenge the question: Milk runs bad, for example , without using any measures on its own.

Went missing is not really wrong. The exact Oxford French Dictionary areas it within the same grouping as the sentence go originaire, as in, There was high hopes for our fresh senator, yet after having been in Buenos aires a few months, this individual went indigenous (i. vitamin e., adopted a similar habits in addition to attitudes simply because people who definitely have been there a lengthy time).

In case you hate gone missing, on the phone to legitimately criticize it as grammatically incorrect. But on the flip side, if you are a fan of the main phrase, remember that it annoys enough customers that you should hesitate before taking your in your writing.

7. Types is always plural.

You have 1 kind of peanut butter nonetheless three different kinds of jelly. Use the singular (kind) when you have an example of something, and also plural (kinds) when you have a lot more. Since these and those reveal multiple points, you have to try a plural: kinds. These kinds of circumstances always perplex me. (These kind will be wrong. )

Watch out for the trouble. Even though it looks straightforward, very good writers are often it drastically wrong.

8. Up to the point is confusable. For those who have until Goal 4 to submit an admittance in the Countrywide Grammar Moment video match, does which means that you can however turn it in on Strut 4, or possibly is Next month 3 one more acceptable moment? Unfortunately, the term until isn’t going to make the meaning clear. Men and women can think of it various methods.

One of the most stress-inducing deadlines certainly is the annual income tax filing cutoff for the Internal Revenue Service, which makes a time to collection that the September 15 filling up deadline consists of April eighteen. It also looks at April 15 as a due date, not a deadline day.

If you’re next instructions, do assume till means by. Turn in your individual item per day early or simply get logic. And if you writing guidance, make them sharp by using a message such as thru or declaring a specific moment and precious time. The IRS doesn’t make use of an ambiguous word that include until, in addition to neither is it safe to.

9. Future is also doubting. Similar to until, following is ambiguous: Some people think next Mondy means the next Wednesday that will occur, and other people believe that next Friday means the Wednesday over the following week, no matter what day it is currently. The sitcom Seinfeld perhaps did the scene during which Jerry as well as Sid put forward the proposition about the that means of after that Wednesday compared to this Sunday.

There is no defined meaning regarding next Mondy, so you should not use next to modify a day from the week. Become more specific in your writing.

eight. The plurals of abbreviations aren’t always logical. Acronyms happen to be abbreviations that can be pronounced simply because words (NASA), and initialisms are abbreviations for which you declare each standard (FBI).

Community . doesn’t help make perfect sense, is made initialisms together with acronyms heterogeneo by adding some sort of s to end no matter what part will be plural https://essaywriter24.com if you ever wrote out the whole element. Therefore , despite the fact that would come up with runs batted in, typically the plural is actually RBIs.

Prior to now, some books used apostrophes to make shortened forms and initialisms plural, thus until a few years ago, that it was common to view something like RBI’s or Compact disks in The Idaho Times. Require days, the important style courses recommend omitting the apostrophe.

11. Some people and their may possibly soon be acceptable unique pronouns. English features a big, gaping hole: There is pronoun to spell out a person when you don’t know the main sex. (I’ve tried it with babies, and it has not gone over very well! ) On days gone by, having been acceptable as being a generic pronoun, but today it’s not. All major style guides endorse against it all.

To stuff the distance, many people knowingly or unconsciously use these, as in, Say to the next customer they be successful a car. To do so is helped by various current fashion guides and in actual fact has a longer history rather than most people get the point that. Even Jane Austen did it. For example , here is a quotation right from Mansfield Park your car in which Austen pairs some plural pronoun (their) having a singular predecessor (each):

Nearly everybody around your girlfriend was homosexual and hectic, prosperous as well as important; any had all their object appealing, their aspect, their costume, their much-loved scene, their valuable friends together with confederates: Many were discovering employment on consultations together with comparisons, or maybe diversion on the playful conceits they advisable.

Although many people today consider using these as a caracteristico pronoun unsuitable, I suppose many of those identical people utilize it that way around casual chat without even knowing it, and the singular these become totally acceptable next 50 years.

Today, using people as a singular pronoun sides on acceptable. You can choose to do it if you not necessarily bound to keep to style direct that opposes it, but be prepared to protect yourself. Often the safer way (when weight loss just spin the word to make the subject matter plural) is to try using he or she, or even switch involving he in addition to she (which you may have found is the pattern followed by this specific very magazine).

When switching between he or she and the girl, however , be sure to separate the particular examples a sufficient amount of so that you have a tendency confuse your readers. (Weren’t we tend to just preaching about a woman? ) Also, Herbal legal smoking buds recently begun getting claims from males who’ve noticed that writers switching between he / she and this girl tend to usage he for your bad guys and even she for any heroes. In case you are going to swap back and forth, provide us with some vixen ax murderers and hunky human-rights activists every every so often.

12. Possessives of etroite can get jumbled. When you have to make a possessive name possessive, you’re from a commercial perspective supposed to add another etroite marker towards the end:

Kohl’s’s earnings happen to be up final quarter. (The Chicago Guide of Style possessive style)

Kohl’s’ earnings was up survive quarter. (The Associated Squeeze Stylebook possessive style)

Refrain from these kinds of penalties, though. They may be technically appropriate, but they glimpse horrible. You may usually engross the heading to make it greater:

Kohl’s said higher sales last fraction.

13. Apostrophes can occasionally symbolize plurals. We all recoil when we sent straight to a greengrocer’s apostrophe (banana’s $0. 99), nevertheless did you know that in some uncommon circumstances, we do use apostrophes to help make things dual? In most cases, the particular apostrophe can help avoid dilemma; single correspondence are one example. The first apostrophe in Appear in your i’s and combination your t’s helps subscribers distinguish amongst multiple duplicates of the standard i and also the word is normally. A significantly less logical example of this is the key phrase do’s and don’ts. Varied style instructions recommend various spellings (dos and don’ts, do’s plus don’ts, together with do’s and don’t’s). Any time writers how to use apostrophe in making do multiple but not to produce don’t heterogeneo, the only reason behind the apostrophe is to supply visual steadiness. Yet, is actually allowed.

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However more interesting and perhaps more pressing subjects present themselves as deserving of a more detailed discussion (the likes of which this blog purports to host), this fanatical obsession some have in regards to ‘pronouns’ and their supposed ideal usage in so-called progressive and politically correct circles bothers me to such an extent that I am forced to dwell on it a while.

Those of us begrudgingly associated with the ‘LGBTQIA+’ disaster of a monolith are well acquainted with the trend of seeing people who are not, in fact, gay or lesbian intrude upon our spaces, our debates, our lives, and co-opt our cause in their favour – that is how, indeed, a simple, already much too ambitious acronym transfigured itself into the aforementioned mess of ‘LGBTQIA+’ and its varieties, like the equally preposterous ‘MOGAI’ or ‘QUILTBAG’ denominations one sometimes stumbles upon while browsing Tumblr. It is a mystery that some will still refer themselves to ‘the gay community’ when it has been completely overrun by self-proclaimed ‘queers’, whose interests have no common points with those of actual homosexual people. Already when the ‘community’ was only about gay men and lesbian women there were issues of principles and priorities – and the deference was always to homosexual men’s needs, as one would expect in a misogynist society, for the link of oppression on the basis of sexuality (or any other, in that case) is evidently not enough to unite men and women under the same flag. Our sex is a barrier that, it seems, cannot be overcome. So if there was already a divide between homosexual men and women in the same movement, it is no wonder that the addition of ‘other sexualities’ and ‘genders’ as well as completely unrelated groups such as polyamorous straight people would only serve to fragment and confuse the movement and its objectives even further.

Compared to the larger implications of this entire process of decay, the pronoun mania seems relatively harmless, but the insistence upon modifying and bending language to the sole benefit of all these non-homosexuals over that of actual homosexuals has quite the impact on our lives. It is detrimental to homosexuals, women, and, most markedly, the intersection of these two groups: homosexual women.

It is also a problem that walks hand-in-hand with a whole bunch of other matters. The very denomination ‘queer’ serves as hindrance to female and gay needs and interests, as it erases the differences between sets of people who have very little in common to create the idea of homogeneity where there is none. A collectivity defined by non-definition is perhaps functional and cute in purely abstract debate to those who take pleasure in speaking of what does not exist for the purpose of pseudo-intellectual mental masturbation, but it serves for nothing in the real world. Rather, it serves to weaken the cohesion and limit the scope of political action the group in question could propose itself to pursue. The discussion of the emergence of ‘queer’ as an ‘umbrella term’ encompassing homosexuals, bisexuals, transgenders and all other groups deeming themselves ‘gay enough’ (or, worse, ‘gayer than’!) to belong as well as the effects it has merits an essay of its own. For now, suffice it to say that the manipulation of language done within a self-identified ‘LGBT’ community by those who are neither gay or lesbian – and with the naive support of gays and lesbians – is destructive and antagonistic to the very ideals that inspired the creation of a ‘community’ in the first place. It is destructive and it is divisive. How many hours have been spent in argument about the ‘validity’ of asexuals or demisexuals or straights who are ‘queering sex’, how much anonymous hatred spewed, how many women threatened for their views when we could have been focusing on securing better lives for gays and lesbians?

For something that sells itself off as extremely homogeneous to the point of believing a single word can translate the experiences of a fuckload of different people, the ‘queer community’ is also extremely invested in promulgating an infinity of micro-identities to those who fashion themselves its members. It presents the paradox of one word meant to represent gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and the never-ending list of made-up sexualities as well as a plethora of imagined words allotted to each, both as an identifier of sexuality as well as of ‘gender’. Basically, a collection of (as has already been pointed out in some posts circulating the Tumblr-verse) socially-stunted narcissists with self-esteem issues wanting to belong to something that will make them look ‘cool’ and important when they themselves have no characteristics of their own to stick out from the bunch. Even negative attention counts as attention, of course, so the sheer absurdity of their project isn’t a problem – rather, even if people mock them, they’ll get the attention they so crave.

It takes a very sad and bland or very disillusioned and confused person to actually believe that being called ‘xe/xir’ is an inalienable human right or related to radical revolutionary praxis in any way.

Let us suppose, for a second, that a microcosm of, say, forty students in a higher education classroom decides to state their ‘preferred pronouns’ so that their teacher and colleagues can refer to them as they would like – in third person, meaning, when these students aren’t even a part of a given conversation since it’s uncommon to refer to someone in the third person if they are standing right in front of you. Suppose a nice portion of them goes by fantasy pronouns, these ugly products of fancy that have no foundation on any kind of grammar. Suppose the same teacher has another seven classes to teach, containing around forty other students each and the same percentage of individuals who go by completely unique, fabricated pronouns. Do people deem themselves really this important to want to hang a teacher who might slip up and call the tall and bearded, deep-voiced and nut-scratching queer aplatonic pansexual wolf-kin student a ‘he’ instead of ‘furself’, or – and I recoil just to imagine it –, ‘she’?

Our brains do not, unfortunately, possess unlimited storing space. Memorising the ‘preferred pronouns’ of a handful of people who want to be seen as freakish (as if gay people haven’t been insulted with ‘queer’ precisely because considered ‘freakish’ by society at large…) simply isn’t as important as, well, anything else one might think of, really.

But this very appellation proves absurd from the start: preferred pronouns? Will we start ‘preferring’ verbs and definite articles next?

Grammar isn’t fashion, it is not a style one chooses or ‘un-chooses’ according to one’s mood on a given day. As much as we can and must debate normative grammar, there are certain structures that must be there and used in certain ways to render someone’s speech intelligible to others. Pronouns, as other classes of words, serve a specific function within sentences. Personal (I, she, he...), possessive (mine, hers, his…), and reflexive pronouns (myself, herself, himself…) have a purpose in avoiding repetition and clarifying one’s speech. They work and we understand one another because language is a code, a system we share, whose elements and knowledge we have in common as a community of speakers – of English, in this particular case; I will touch upon some other languages soon. Even if separated by social class or levels of formal education, we can still understand one another because the language we share is the same. We are free to choose the vocabulary we like and express ourselves as we like, for language is an extremely productive tool as can be seen by the variety of ways one can say roughly the same thing using different words and constructions, ranging from the most banal, day-to-day kind of discourse to the most extraordinary, surprising poetic one. That much we choose.

But pronouns? Will a trend of relative pronouns arise as well? The running ‘whom’st’ve’-type jokes are amusing, but just because some kids on the internet are fooling around with them doesn’t mean they can change the structure of the language at will, nor do they intend to. No one takes this seriously, apart, perhaps, from curious linguists investigating the creativity and possibility of this kind of construction, but no one will advocate for this to be included in a grammar book, for instance. Maybe in some good many years, if the meme catches on and becomes a part of popular vernacular, sure, though perhaps unlikely seeing as language tends to simplify itself for the sake of practicality rather than the other way around. We could talk about language change (I will avoid the term ‘evolution’ so as to not provide further fuel to the fire of linguistic debate…) throughout the years, but let us do so returning to the topic at hand.

The word ‘preferred’ already indicates that this is a very conscious imposition on the part of those who claim ‘their’ pronouns (as if someone could own a particular set of words...). It marks a desire for forced linguistic change and, while languages do change constantly, they also do remain, charmingly, constant. These aren’t concepts I’ll be able to explain to the uninitiated in the associated theories in one paragraph, but one is invited to consult the work of Ferdinand de Saussure for an introduction to linguistic problems and study, specifically his Cours de Linguistique Générale.

Nevertheless, let us resume some aspects thus: language is a system exterior to the individual but one which encompasses them; it is social and it exists in a specific linguistic community as a human creation. Its conception is ‘random’ inasmuch as there is nothing in a given object’s ‘essence’ that determines it must be called this or that. If that were not the case, we wouldn’t even have multiple languages to begin with, for all of them would call a house ‘house’ instead of ‘casa’, ‘maison’, ‘ дом ’ and so on. So, to those who say that language is all made-up and that fantasy pronouns should be acceptable on these grounds, I raise you this:  yes, language is made-up, but not by you or I. Try speaking to someone using only words you have invented, paying no mind to the syntactic and semantic structures of your native language. You won’t get far.

An individual or a group of individuals do not have what it takes to transform with willpower alone what has been crystallised in centuries of a language’s existence – linguistic changes cannot be imposed by someone, they happen as the speakers of a language develop their communication. There is a dislocation in the relationship between the signifier and its signified, but that dislocation cannot be forced; language adapts as needed by its users, not as desired by a cluster of them.

(Side-notes: 1. language mutability is a much more complex phenomenon than this essay can hope to convey in a few lines and linguistic science is still taking its turns with it. I would suggest the interested reader seek out Saussure to get an initial grip on linguistics and to follow up her research by trying to access articles on the matter being published today, if the academic language does not prove too daunting; 2. the inclusion of feminine forms in grammars that do not supposedly accept them is another debate entirely that warrants another discussion altogether. The case with French, lately, is an interesting case for study, if one can keep from trying to comprehend the French situation with Anglo-Saxon eyes and sensibilities.)

Besides, to fashion oneself a creator of words to be adopted by a large number of people, one must truly regard oneself as brilliant as, say, the likes of William Shakespeare, as he gave his particular contributions to what we understand as the English language today. I am sorry to say so, but a fifteen year-old furry on Tumblr is probably as far from Shakespearian genius as religion from spirituality – or Pluto from the Sun, if I must make myself clear and unambiguous to those with religious tendencies.

Not to mention the fact that, for something as powerful as the proponents of ‘identity’ as something sacred claim it to be, it stands on very shaky ground if the mere use of a pronoun unequal to their expectations poses any sort of challenge to this certain ‘identity’. Maybe these ‘inherent’ and ‘essential’ gender identities aren’t as sturdy as they are being called after all, if they are incapable of withstanding such harmless and easy contest. If your ‘identity’ starts with words rather than apprehensible reality, then it is clearly not as stable or natural as you would like it to be.

Since we’ve touched on the question of signifier and signified and how linguistic change implies a change in the relation between the two, what this pronoun craze (and the inextricably attached to it gender-mania) does is not that; the idea of creating pronouns as well as genders to go along with them does not shift the relation, but implode it. It ruptures significance as it completely disfigures whatever lines are set – lines which have a purpose, for delimitation begets identification, which, in turn, allows for action. If that sounds cryptic, allow me to break it down: delimitation and proper description of a given phenomenon (say, of the oppression of women, for instance) permits the identification of its root causes and, most importantly, its agents (therefore, the oppression of women is classified as a by-product of a heterosexist, misogynistic patriarchy which is enacted and supported by men, for it is males who benefit from the suffering and subjugation of females), so that those who take the brunt of it can organise and fight back with appropriate targets in mind instead of hazy, abstract enemies. A movement must have a target for its actions if it desires to succeed. Remove the necessary lingo that allows for analysis, criticism and discussion in search of a viable course of action/solution and you may well neutralize the group’s impetus for justice and their probabilities of success. Pretend men are women and all of a sudden the patriarchy is created by women and they are their own enemies -- the rhetoric possibilities of perversion are endless.

If the explanation still isn’t clear enough, one can imagine a chessboard in which the pieces retain their original values but are all disguised as pawns. One may go around wasting time and take all of them down one by one, in hopes of taking the king, if one is so inclined to the effort, of course. But a serious chess player knows that the end goal of chess isn’t to take all pieces, but to checkmate the king. The former might even come about as a consequence in trying to secure the latter, but, usually, one attempts to minimise effort and save time.

Speaking of effort, apart from demanding superhuman amounts of it on the part of those willing to indulge and use heaven knows how many different sets of nonsensical ‘pronouns’ for each person of their acquaintance, this little game of creating genders and pronouns and throwing fits if they are misused does make pawns out of all pieces, but in appearance only. It enshrouds information; it hides people responsible for certain things they should be held accountable for but are not – ‘queer’ serves to disappear the lines between actual homosexuals (gays and lesbians) as well as ‘quirky’ bisexuals or straight people, establishing a false equivalence of individuals within the group. This serves as an instrument to guilt those in disagreement as if they were ‘working against their own interests’, as if they were ‘traitors’ to the group. This is how lesbians have been denounced as the bogeyman of the ‘queer community’ – firstly, lumped in together with these ‘queers’ against our will, then shunned for daring not to agree with them, considered traitors of a cause that wasn’t ours to begin with and which actively antagonises us.

The mechanism behind pronouns and gender identity, however, has overarching consequences: it gives criminal men the perfect excuse to enter female restrooms where they can assault women; it gives them the perfect excuse to beg to be sent to women’s prisons, where they will be closest to the very portion of the population they terrorise. It skewers statistical data, which ceases to be a reliable source for analysis because, all of a sudden, female-committed crime starts to spike in areas that have always been the dominion of male perpetrators. Anyone paying attention will know that women aren’t magically acting as violent as men, they aren’t raping and murdering people in male rates or with the same amount of male cruelty; these numbers are a reflection of men masquerading as women, since this sham of personal, ethereal, holy identities – the motor for pronoun-fixation – has been warmly embraced by the mainstream without a single instance of questioning and in record amounts of time.

Television shows are still afraid to say the word LESBIAN out loud, but will showcase their ‘queer’ and/or ‘trans’ characters without fear of censoring, if not in earnest hopes of being labelled progressive and awarded for it.

Yes, of course words are very much tied to how we perceive reality, but messing them up in the cause of something as stupidly and unsatisfactorily defined as ‘gender’ is in the mouths of its own champions serves no purpose other than to soothe megalomaniacal cretins and antisocial, manipulative teenagers; to further confuse young gay girls and boys already devoid of proper guidance; and to terminate all useful terminology and, consequently, praxis relating to female and homosexual struggles. Meddling with one’s discourse does not induce some sort of alchemical miracle that transforms material reality into whatever someone wishes it could be – my repeating over and over that I am rich (or that I ‘identify as rich’, to use the preferred construction) does not, in fact, have the slightest effect of increasing the value of my withering bank account in so much as a dime.

It’s hot air.

The problem lies with the consequences, as mentioned, on us all, since these linguistic atrocities and resulting social practices are being officially accepted and implemented by mass media and governments alike.

Moreover, cohesive groups exist prior to the language used to describe them. Women are biologically female and form a cohesive unit because of it despite the push for reducing women to lipstick and stilettos; gays are gays and form a cohesive unit by means of their exclusive attraction to individuals of the same sex, despite the push to redefine sexuality in terms of nebulous and volatile ‘gender’. Even if the words we use and need do end up swallowed and wholly co-opted by the trans/queer crowd and their allies, the concreteness of these groups will not cease to be, nor will their oppression, but it will be a lot harder to talk about it and for us to find one another to build actual community so we can fight back. Our best interests, as lesbians especially, are obviously not at the heart of those peddling trans/queer politics.

Politics which, ironically, claim themselves progressive – anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic (or ‘LGBTphobic’ as I’ve been elsewhere forced to read), the list goes on (to include, many times, a comical idea of being anti-capitalism when queer/trans ideology is intimately linked with consumerism – performativity demands products to showcase it; it demands reification of the self and that comes with buying these or those items to heighten the image of one’s self as a consumable good – but that is another essay entirely). Those who ‘identify with’ this world-view go so far as to say that women and lesbians (their being actual feminists or radical ones at that completely disregarded for the ‘TERF’ acronym to be freely tossed around) who so much as question them, let alone fight back, are colonialist, racist, Eurocentric, yada yada yada bigots. Because, apparently, the categories of female/male are western creations imposed on native peoples to control them… For some reason, whereas categories of masculine/feminine are essential, spiritual and totally-not-artificially-constructed or socially imposed so as to create a hierarchy of the sexes… Or, another ‘argument’ found between the defenders of ‘gender identity’, everything is deemed as socially constructed, but delusions are somehow considered more real than flesh and bones just because they say so.

The flaws in logic and in their overall rhetoric would be hilarious, if they didn’t bring about such negative consequences along with giving any sensible and thinking human being a headache.

For here’s the clincher: all this talk of ‘inclusivity’ and progress spewing from trans/queer activists is done in English. Yes, the very language that has infiltrated most corners of the known world given the colonising efforts of the British throughout history and, more recently and perhaps successfully, due to the grip on mainstream media and consciousness exercised by the United States of America. We are made to witness English speakers (native and not so!) throw tantrums when someone does not recognize the ‘validity’ of or fails to utilise something like ‘ey/eirs’ pronouns. So the discourse is constructed in a way that uses certain cultures as props (‘In X culture, there is a third gender!!!’) but at the same time derides all these non-English speaking peoples for their incapability of using a broken, and, let’s face it, horrendous English. It isn’t even a Eurocentric view (something these ‘activists’ say themselves vehemently against, to the point of blindly embracing and defending, say, the tenets of certain non-Western religious ideologies only to spite so-called Western sensibilities…), it’s a decidedly Anglo-Saxon view they espouse. ‘Queer theory’ is born in English-speaking academia and these vulgar branches of it spread amongst English-speakers who think it viable and useful to change the entire structure of the English language to amuse them when they can’t even differentiate ‘your’ from ‘you’re’ in written media a lot of the time.

See, there are, to mention but one kind, Romance languages in Europe and outside of it and these languages (the likes of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian…) are gendered. They use grammatical genders because this is how they developed throughout the ages from their Latin roots. It’s an essential part of their mechanisms; not because Romance languages are somehow bigoted and want all trans people to die terribly in a fire, but because these languages have existed for much longer than the ideology and social practices that the trans/queer crowd defend.

In these languages, one cannot do what some of these individuals do in English, using a third person plural to signify a single, individual person (the idea that ‘they’ is a neutral pronoun). It is utterly impossible to make any sense of it in a Romance language, added to the fact that these tongues separate third person plurals into feminine and masculine forms (elles/ils in French; elas/eles in Portuguese, etc.). To attempt something of the sort would be to incur in an egregious error in using these languages and native speakers of them do not and shall not recognize these strategies as proper or practical in any way.

English is not a parameter to which other languages compare or should strive to emulate at all. ‘They’ is impossible to carry on as a ‘neutral’ pronoun in translation, so one can only imagine how obtuse it would be to try and find equivalents to ‘ze’, ‘xe’, ‘ey’ in Spanish or Italian, to speak of only two… Those writers today who include ‘nonbinary’ characters who are referred to in the story by these unorthodox pronouns, in the name of ‘inclusion’, are automatically excluding the rest of the non-English speaking world from reading it, unless they consent to having these anomalies translated into proper pronouns that reflect the target language of a possible translation of their story.

There has been pressure from self-proclaimed leftist circles to write certain words in the vein of ‘Latinx’, ‘elx’, ‘el@’ in some countries as a way to approach this concept of ‘gender neutrality’ in human language, but none of these hideous little chimeras are pronounceable. Of course, as is to be expected, those of us who recognize this difficulty in the popularisation of these forms and who refuse to partake in the collective illusion that new genders and pronouns can effectively better the world are shouted down, ostracised, and likened to right-wing sympathisers. In refusing to let our speech be contaminated by ludicrous ideas originated in other countries and languages, in other social configurations (for, needless to say, the social and material reality of an American academic making a living out of ‘queering’ literature at Berkeley is far different than that of a low class Brazilian selling fruits on the street – in fact, that American academic is already very much removed from the reality of an average American of lower income as well), we are accused of being intolerant.

So, by refusing to let ourselves be colonised by American theories, we’re being intolerant… Of whom? Sexual minorities? How can a lesbian, of all people, be charged with the crime of effacing the existence of a trans/queer person? What power does a single lesbian hold in the midst of society, what influence does she have when she is forced to express her discontent with the path both feminist and gay movements have followed by means of an anonymous blog on the internet for fear of violent reprisal? What power does she wield when all of mainstream media supports and sells trans/queer ideology hourly? How does she, in not bending to the whim of some narcissist who calls himself her equal or even more oppressed than she is, cause any violence to this person just by calling him ‘he’? How can she be accused of racism by not acknowledging a concept born and bred within the halls of North American institutions of higher education she, most of the time, can’t even dream of entering?

Identity politics are invariably tied to the language and culture that birthed them. Transplanting this train-wreck to other countries isn’t educating prejudiced whites or liberating the poor, uneducated little third-world citizens of their ignorance, it’s imposing a foreign and quite nonsensical world-view on us all. That seems much more akin to imperialism than the fact of not accepting this same ideology being forced upon us.

This world-view they want us all to adopt (in whose benefit, again?) is rooted on a very simplistic and mistaken understanding of the systems that govern society as we know it, a world-view founded upon the columns of misogyny, homophobia, neo-liberal lies and jargon meant to obfuscate its true meaning and intentions.

How naive must one be to believe that changing some pronouns around and creating a whole slew of ‘genders’ based on aesthetics and stereotypical behaviour can change the world in any way?

Or rather, how can one allow oneself to be seduced by the idea and think that whatever changes it does cause can ever be for the better? Activism is reduced to a joke, a game of scrabble, feeble discussions on the internet which are soon forgotten. Worse still, activism is done in the name of those who need it the least: men. What benefit does this zealous concern with pronouns create for actual marginalised people? What can women, homosexuals, people of colour, the poor all gain from this?

It certainly is not liberation. That does not come in the form of new shackles, as colourful and covered in glitter as they may be.