#ungendering our language

[neurocophany-theyshe]

I like the idea of a gender neutral version of King/Queen being Xing (pronounced Zing).

Like someone would be the Xing of their country. The zest 🤌🏻 The effervescence, if you will. Their royal spiciness.

Although it may just look like it says “x-ing” like in road signs 😆

(this ofc is not to ignore the plethora of issues present in the typical monarchy set up which would not be solved by simply having a nonbinary ruler - but I love ungendering as much language as I can 🤩 alsoooo Prom Zing could be a thing 👀)

[transenbyconfessions]

I wanted to share an experience i had the other day:

TLDR: first date respects my pronouns and makes me feel confident and happy

I was talking to this guy on a (straight person) dating app, and right off the bat, he said that he noticed i put "non-binary" and asked what my pronouns are. *Important FYI: my native language genders everything, and doesn't have ungendered pronouns like they/them (which are my pronouns in English), so i use he/him and she/her - preferably changing between them frequently.* So i told him as much, and he did just that in our messages.

Meeting up with him, i was a bit nervous about how he will view me in person, afraid of coming off too feminine (as an afab person) and him being unable to respect my pronouns (which has happened to me before).

What actually happened is he switched back and forth between pronouns so fluently that it gave me confidence in using my pronouns for myself! He made it seem so easy, so normal, that it almost made me cry. I've always seen my pronouns as being a big deal and a burden to the people around me, and therefore often ignore misgenderings, but this random first date had me feeling so accepted and normal. So i just wanted to say: Yes, it is that easy. No, you're not an inconvenience. Yes, you are loved and appreciated.

I love you all and have a wonderful day!

Submitted March 14, 2023

[mostly-mundane-atla]

i recently watched two soft things, two hard things, and i was wondering if you had anything to share on inuit culture regarding being lgbt?

So. I'm going to write out a list of all the relevant things I know re: Inupiat (may be relevent to Canadian Inuit or may not be, i don't know, i'm not one of them, i specify Inupiaq for a reason) culture and our modern idea on falling outside cisnormative and heteronormative social expectations.

We didn't have a full written language until like around the 1940s and it wasn't standardized until like the 1980s. Things like laws, philosophies, histories, opinions, and correspondences had no contemporary written record.

There wasn't really any interest in preserving these things in writing until after we had already been pretty heavily Christianized.

The traditional culture was incredibly homosocial, men spent much of their time with other men and women with other women.

This included young unmarried men sometimes living in the qargi rather than their parents' homes; being brought food by their mothers and sleeping nearly or entirely nude in the same room with all the other young men living there at the time. No written language means no diary entries or letters detailing what happened if anything other than platonic socializing and cohabitation.

Establishing and maintaining sincere and intimate friendships with people of the same sex was expected of both women and men. The Inupiaq word for friend pretty directly translates to "inseparable other half" and some of the friendships in stories border on our modern understanding of flirtation. Again: no diary entries, no letters.

Plural marriage was also allowed for women and men. The aforementioned homosocial culture means the plural spouses were more likely to spend time with each other than their shared spouse. If the shared spouse died, the plural spouses may spend time living with each other with redistributed domestic duties before moving on to marry someone else. Like the other two examples; no diary entries, no letters.

Marriage was understood to mean a husband and wife (or husband and wives, or husbands and wife) living together, contributing to the same household, with the intention of having children. There was no deeper spiritual meaning, love was not a requirement, and it was not considered an unbreakable bond. Unhappy marriages could be divorced and not taking in one's own child after they divorced was consider a major dick move in the traditional culture.

Romantic love in general was not overly glamorized. The idea that being in love will always inspire you to be a better person was never part of our culture and many stories caution against the violently destructive nature of romantic jealousy

P in v intercourse had cultural significance outside of pleasure and reproduction. It was used to seal contracts of allegiance, typically through wife exchange, where two men would sleep with each other's wife and consider each other as prioritized as blood family.

Family planning was the default, two to three years between pregnancies was prefered, though I don't know whether this was through alternative sex acts, contraception, or some extremely reliable timing method.

Pronouns and names were ungendered.

The traditional belief is when you inherit a name from someone who died, as was the custom and continues in some capacity today, they live on as you. You didn't only inherit their name but allegedly their memories and skills. Their relatives would lovingly refer to you as that same dead relative. This would happen regardless of whether you were the same sex as your past life and namesake.

Crossdressing was not unheard of.

The Inupiaq language word that describe a woman as flirty and the one that describes a man as effeminate share a root.

It's not very definitive about what it was like to be gay in the traditional culture, but since even the equivalent of the cultural understanding and expectations of cisgender heterosexuals are so different, the idea of what it means to be queer in gender or sexuality and how anyone should feel about it might be different too. I think if you asked a pre-assimilation Inupiaq guy if he was gay he'd ask you why you're gossiping so loud and scaring away the fish.

[transgenderfivepebbles]

hi!! was curious about this, and thought you'd be the one to ask- what do you think about the gender of ancients'? they weren't humanoid, their language is different from many of ours (iirc?), and!! in one of the pearls someone refers to an ancient, or they refer to themselves as "mother and father"

you don't have to anwser this if you don't wanna!! just thought it's a cool topic

oho this is a very interesting topic! i don’t think any ancients are ever referred to with third-person pronouns, so there isn’t really any evidence other than the pearl you mentioned, but since the iterators have pronouns, i think that the ancients would’ve had them to some extent too. i don’t think their idea of physical sex is exactly adjacent to ours; the memory crypts pearl says “mother, father, and spouse”, suggesting that this person’s parental relationships were separated into general male and female roles, but not their marriage, so it’s possible that they had no gender but bore multiple children in different ways. hermaphroditism in vertebrates other than fish doesn’t exist in nature, but i don’t think it’s impossible either, so that could be the case.

general hc is that they’re all hermaphroditic; their society is ungendered and they get to choose how they prefer to be addressed as they grow up - this also includes picking a name if they’re born into a spiritually or politically important family! changing how one wishes to be seen over time is completely normal, and expected for most younger people. children are given a simple name by their parents, and commoners tend to keep it into adulthood, while those of higher social status get their own 4-5 word name, like those we see in the pearls and echoes. names aren’t gendered either, simply made according to symbols that are important to the bearer or their family.

thanks for the ask!! i love every opportunity to talk about my wildly specific ancient hcs

[hexenmond]

cups and mugs and binaries

Today was our first day in England (we’re visiting my dad and his wife C), and we spent it drinking tea and catching up and going into town, treasure hunting in charity shops. I am a bit of a language nerd and C used to teach English while they were living in Germany, and she learnt my mother tongue fairly well, so we share an interest in words and meanings and the evolution of languages, especially English, and over tea we ended up on the topic of pronouns and gender. She said it’s just always been kinda black and white to her and she just finds it hard to imagine a person in a story or whatever, without knowing their gender, and I said yeah, because neither English nor German let you do that, and told her about my very recent experience reading a first person view story in Turkish where the protagonist’s colleague is referred to by name (which I couldn’t pin down as a male or female name for sure because I’d never heard it before), and by “o”, which is blessedly ungendered. So for three chapters I got to think of this character as a person of unknown gender, and that was a very interesting and new experience for me! (Language really does shape the way we see the world, so much.)

Later, while making tea, I was looking at the mugs|cups, and decided to pop an old question to C. “What is the difference between a mug and a cup, to you?” She thought a bit and said, hm, it’s in the shape, and I said yeah, a friend of mine thinks along those lines as well and most things are mugs to her, but a ceramics maker I know sorts his drinking vessels into cups (Tassen) and mugs (Becher) by whether they have a handle or not (so most things are cups to him). Which I personally like because it’s pretty clear cut, and leaves room for odd shapes on both sides.

Anyways so I asked about some mugs from the cupboard that were cups to me and she said no, definitely mug shaped, and then I showed her the ceramic maker’s stuff online because he does some interesting organic shapes, and it was a fun and open discussion. And later still in the charity shops we were looking at drinking vessels again, had roped my dad in on it, and had progressed to calling some of them cugs or mups. And then I found a really weird set with odd shapes… and she said, oh I don’t know, they’re whatever. And I chuckled and said yeah, that’s what happens sooner or later when you try to fit so many things into one binary definition. But you see, in most cases it doesn’t matter all that much, as long as we all know what we’re talking about.

And then my son popped up with a cushion|pillow (in German they’re both „Kissen“, but we were all speaking English) clamped tightly in his arms and a gleeful face. “Look Mum I found a new pillow! It’s so fluffyyyy!” And C immediately said, oh, that’s a cushion, and he said NO it’s a pillow, and she said no, pillows are for sleeping on and cushions go on sofas, and he said, well I am totally going to sleep on it so it’s a pillow!

And I said, see, often it’s not a big deal, but sometimes somebody really cares. So this is a trans pillow and not a cushion, even if it’s a little smaller than you’d expect. Which made her laugh and say, okay, I really do get it now.

[omi-papus]

Like fam the ONLY time you should ever say that is if maybe a non binary person requested it. And even then, if you looked into it for so much as a minute youd know that a non binary hyspanic would normally go by LatinE.

Like guys. Look into the gender neutral language invented by actual spanish speakers in Latam because there are efforts to make it from the actual people here and in general. We use the same rules spanish usually has but we substitute the usual A or O for an E. And even then there is some level of gendering required in nouns. For example as weird as it might sound, the term Non Binary is in itself gendered. Since “Binario” is a masculine word, but that is not relating to the individual its just how words are.

Generally speaking if gender neutral pronouns and terms are present, they are with an E as that has been basically labeled the gender neutral letter and its only really required in peoples prefered pronouns. Since the masculine is 99% of the time perfectly fine to use as gender neutral, because remember its not about actual gender. Say, the word for Masculinity is femenine (LA Masculinidad). One can make the personal choice to replace it with an E but it is an E, not an X.

This is more complicated obviously, E can also be masculine, “trabajadorEs” for example. So its better to just learn the basic more standardized rules of gendered spanish in order to the UNgender it. Which is an important point. As well as knowing what words you can and cant ungender without breaking everything.

I for example, only use these pronouns upon request, meaning refering to specific people. “Elle” is the generally agreed upon gender neutral pronoun for people. I dont know many non binary people so I dont use them often. But I hear generalizations like “Todes” often enough.

There is a way to make changes in the spanish language for further inclusivity, but those are not and will never be up to americans or non spanish speakers. In Latam Non binary is much less a fluid non comformity and more of a “gender number three” and our language is made to work with that.

This post takes the E into account, so its got that. So I dont think this is nearly as big of an issue as when they just straight up get it compleatly wrong. But still, Latinx is used way more than Latine, so its still important to say.

Also on a separate point, why are they implying the gender neutral ones and then the gendered ones as well? Like tf is the point of using the gender neutral at all then?

Get owned you shit tier company

[genderqueermorphology]

Turkish

As a language without morphological or natural gender, one’s gender identity is not made explicit in many contexts in Turkish. There is no need to indicate a person’s gender when discussing them. Actually, contrary to what we see in other languages, in order to encode gender into a sentence about someone, you must add additional morphemes. Revealing gender is a clear choice, similar to the choice to use novel gender neutral morphemes in grammatical or natural gender languages. For example:

oyuncu actor.nb erkek oyuncu actor.m bayan oyuncu actor.f

(psst! those aren't strange new acronyms, it’s a gloss!)

Above we can see that the Turkish word for actor in is ungendered, however if you wanted to specify the actor’s gender an additional word is necessary. The pronoun system in Turkish is similarly genderless. The pronoun system is as follows:

Ben (I, me) Biz (we, us) Sen (you) Siz (you, plural) O (he, she, it) Onlar (they, those)

As you can see, none of these pronouns indicate gender in any way. Honourifics, like Mrs. or Mr. in English, are also usually not encoded with gender. While the feminine Hn. and the masculine Bey. forms exist, the most common form used when addressing someone you wish to respect is Sn. which is gender neutral.

"So, that's that! No need for novel morphology!" is what you may be thinking. But while a genderless system certainly allows nonbinary folk to converse without revealing their gender identity, what happens when they do want to? Without any references to gender, assumptions can be made based on presentation or physical appearance which may conflict with one's gender identity. In Turkish culture, queer identities are mostly only made explicit in dating contexts, within queer communities or on social media.

On dating apps, on social media or in comfortable in-person conversations, it is common to utilize borrowed terms from English. Words like queer and nonbinary turn into kuir or nanbaynari in Turkish. While this borrowed language can be used, there is a Turkish specific strategy called Lubunya or Lubunca.

Lubunya is a slang which was developed by trans and cis sex workers around the early 20th century. It has many many lexical items which are not a part of Turkish, however the sounds and morphological structure is similar to Turkish. This slang has been readapted and used by the queer community in Turkey. It provides new morphological items and vocabulary for folks to discuss sex, gender, relationships in a way that clearly expresses their queer identity to those who are a part of the queer community.

Turkish reveals how genderless languages still require additional morphology to validate gender queer identities. Their adaptation of slang to fit a growing need for queer language is an impressive method of development which needs more exploration by linguists and others alike.

A very special thank you to Şansal Gümüşpala who met with me to discuss their personal experience and work on nonbinary speakers of Turkish. Most of the data comes from our conversation and without them this entry would not have been possible. Thank you!

Resources

Göçtüa, R., Kir, M. (2014). Gender studies in English, Turkish and Georgian languages in terms of grammatical, semantic and pragmatic Levels. Procedia, 158, 282 – 287.

Gümüşpala, Ş. G. (2023). Understanding Nonbinary Individuals in Türkiye: A Focus on Language [PowerPoint slides]. University of Victoria. https://www.uvic.ca/mthf2023/assets/docs/sansal-gumuspala---mthf.pdf

Karabacak, G. (2022). A Metapragmatic Account of Madi̇li̇k, Madi̇koli̇ and Gullüm in Turkish Queer Communication [Master’s thesis, Middle East Technical University].

[tobyarcherlvl5]

EP//M Project Research

Once we came up with our idea, we separated to conduct individual research and create mood-boards. These would eventually be merged together to harmonise everyone's styles and preferences.

[b-splendens]

progress update/ramble mar 23

seriously/not seriously considering creating a french-leaning romanization system for my language that is totally not just Korean.

learned that Seoul is spelled that way...because of the frenchies

Some examples would be like: Jac To-rieng, On-tjo, Ri Kyeng, Kil Yen-sec, Ho Tè-ran, and so on and so forth. it makes me feel WEIRD but certainly contributes to a sense of diversion from our reality.

under the cut: the rest of the changelog

changed the plot again. and did some impromptu government/culture development that stopped me from doing my school work

government has a house of peers/lords vs representatives setup, like meiji japan and the UK. peerage was also a compromise that enabled a sort of democracy to exist, balancing the demands of the less-ennobled factions that supported geumjong's rise to power with the traditional elites. peerage was granted to a selection of old elites and trusted supporters of the royals, bringing many middle class and even lower classes into a new kind of yangban system. the king/authorities/etc can also choose to award more peerage to outstanding individuals. other ennobled people are involved with the royal family

the peerage elect from themselves the people who sit in the actual house for specific terms. certain royal individuals hold their posts for life. academics, professionals, and other special people are elected by their not necessarily noble peers and appointed by the king, sometimes for terms or for life.

they do...stuff.

peerage itself, for the initial group of ennobled people, is hereditary. it used to be passed down by ungendered primogeniture but eventually became delegated by the title holders themselves, via their wills or while they are alive. SOCIALLY, the families of titleholders are regarded as nobles/like yangban, but they receive no state benefits/are officially not.

this is important because now noljin's widow and heungjin and their children have a really good reason to fight now; it's not just wealth, but rather peerage and access to power in the upper legislative house.

thinking also that peerage in Yulguk is kind of funny because it combines the old yangban ethos. every hereditary titleholder's family MUST produce a state official/civil servant that serves x amount of years EACH or every three generations for their title to be able to be passed down. civil service is now usually barred by the general ed, Ordonnist-flavored exam and specialist exams; no longer do people just become general scholars and then get chucked into random jobs. but the traditional component is still there. so there. i made a fusion thing.

where was i? oh yeah. the head of the jak family also now has actual power as a peer/lord and is no longer background noise. they also have motivation to preserve their reputation and their family's because of the peer elections

i've settled on the terms "head" and "spouse" to denote marriage relations. Head is the househead, synonymous with name/linebearer. Spouse is the supporting, deferring component. Heungjin's spouse. X's head.

so it makes sense that the grandparents potentially had Doryeong (or Do-rieng)'s bae killed or removed. he was rumored to 1) maybe be betrothed/engaged WITHOUT the traditional parental involvement of the marriage process, and 2) maybe be engaged to a head, as his spouse, which is a no-no because neither branch of the Jak's had yet married and extended the family name, thus bringing shame and DISHONOR.

oh yeah. and the power relations between seniority of age and head/spouses is something I guess i'm running with. firstborns are almost always socially (in the past, maybe legally) consecrated as future househeads. their spouses are almost always not firstborns. and if they are, then it's considered a real power move against or a offense/deferral on the part of the spouse's family. other children are more nebulous. in the past marriages would happen earlier on, so head and spouse statuses would operate to preclude the spouse from making waves in broader society. but more and more future spouses won't know themselves as such and already have an active job or even secure employment before marrying. because of the legal abolishments of a lot of laws, these dynamics are more so social conventions. so it's less of a big deal for spouses to remain active outside of the home, but there are still expectations to.

one problem that i have with my system is that it's really hard to distinguish who is a head and who is a spouse. and it kind of clashes with the sort of binary gender system. men had topknots and wore baji and women had buns and wore chima. nonbinary individuals visually distinguished themselves by mixing these elements in a fixed, predictable manner. why does it matter that genders are differentiated when everything focuses on carrying on the family name? idk. househeads typically wore the "gat"-type hat and i imagine male spouses stopped wearing the hat when they married, if they got to that stage. still iffy on it though. the special marriage double-rings that married women had in Joseon probably get given to all spouses in Yulguk. as for unmarried people, I don't know. maybe no unmarried people wore hats????? i don't really want it to be like "househead means masc and spouse means femme" which is why I'm sticking to the convention of women only wearing buns in traditional culture, etc.

regardless, the divide between heads and spouses was more emphasized the higher in Yul society you are. the "ideal" arrangement was where the head provided everything, while the spouse took care of the children and home (although supported by a wider community). These distinctions broke down at the lower level, where both partners would share labor, wear more similar clothes (farmers need hats to stay in the shade, etc), were. i guess this is still kind the case in the 1870s-80. and for aspiring lower-class people, leaning into that ideal is seen as one way to behave more cultured. also, there are probably regional variants. in the more sedentary areas, a more uneven dynamic is preferred. while on the frontier/mountains/north, a more equitable arrangement is preferred. so: high society/civilization/farmland is associated with social division and STABILITY, while "lower" society/country bumpkins/rugged people are associated with social mingling and DYNAMISM (ex. actors and mudang, who routinely shirked conventions and were the roles where genderfluid individuals could thrive but weren't consistently looked favorably upon).

UHHH WAIT maybe gender is still visually important because it distinguishes/d what reproductive role individuals had, but also trans people are generally not distinguished from cis people so that explanation is bunk AHHHHH IT MAKES NO SENSE

ANYWAYS long story short i changed the plot again and also might've outlined the endgame/final case. the gil siblings murder either heungjin's defense attorney or a servant who helped with the forgery/perjury that saved heungjin but doomed yong-gi. they plant on the body or at the jak residence a last wish note that outlines the victim's guilt for having doomed gil. they choose to frame either doryeong or onjo. whoever's not framed becomes the prosecution. the defense is baram. the gil's aim is to dredge up the old case and then use the stand to tell the truth. even if they have no evidence for the framing (or maybe they do), they ruin the reputation of the whole family. up their sleeves is a kidnapping or evidence tracking embezzlement/corruption to force the family to confess themselves. before this, they hit one or two family members with a scam, scandal, or otherwise. yukyang or yeonseok may turn into a financial adviser. khanh's role is to introduce the family to them through doryeong. i MAY remove the politics surrounding the murder/frame drama for the sake of simplicity, but probably yukyang still goes around killing other people out of revenge leading up to the final case. i still don't know who killed jak heungjin. too many people could've done it. having doryeong be the one seems both too absurd and too obvious. the accepted narrative to the public is that the old regime used Yong-gi to smite jak heungjin because the latter was conducting a threatening investigation, and yong-gi exploited rumors of the jak brothers' conflicts to make it seem like a personal, apolitical thing. maybe it was the grandparents, because they feared that his investigation would throw them in hot water with the gov't and they didn't want that. heungjin will claim that he did it to save doryeong, but doryeong will spill the beans because he hates his grandparents and would still definitely be involved in the framing, if not the original murder.

i really need to stop. one final note is that i might make yukyang really unlikeable by making them sort of classist. a chunk of their hatred of doryeong would be that he is rumored to be from the ex-slave or butcher class, and they just can't stand the notion of someone like that weaseling their way into high society by pure chance. so this would be a very aristocratic, bourgeois spat, with onlookers like the gom's and khanh being like "wtf this shit is crazy!!!"

one more last note: i'm trying to maybe write a prequel concerning khanh and doryeong's friendship and the murder mystery that spawned it because it can be small and compact and feature a more more diverse cast in Bellia than in Yulguk AH.

[tibopansy]

everyone whose pronouns are it/its are extremely aware of their connotations in the english language, especially because people who don't want to use our pronouns bring it up constantly. that's the frustration OP was communicating: it's fucking exhausting to have to constantly justify your pronouns with what amounts to a stock powerpoint presentation on it, and so many people will hear our reasons and decide to misgender us anyways.

that said, i am hoping you won't do that last part, so i'm choosing to answer this in good faith.

reclaiming dehumanization is often part of the point. this is not exclusive to it/its users. taking words designed to hurt us and morphing them into a source of joy & rebellion is an old queer tradition that will continue ad infinitum.

languages besides english do not necessarily have the they/them it/its split. for example, the filipino language tagalog (the language a good chunk pf my elder relatives speak) does not differentiate between people and objects in third person singular pronouns. i go into this and my own personal reasons in [ this linked post ].

they/them pronouns are great and neutral on their own, but aren't necessarily correct gendering. calling someone by they/them when they do not use those pronouns is a common degendering (ie. intentionally not acknowledging someone's gender, ungendering them) and misgendering tactic used by transphobes, and is still functionally the same as calling someone by other wrong pronouns.

it is not the job of it/its users to be palatable to everyone else's ears. if someone is offended on our behalf, a simple "those are its pronouns" should be taken as enough. it should not be turned a federal issue every single time.

i can't emphasize enough that it/its users like me have thought about this a lot. this has been part of an intra-community discussion by it/its users for years. the arguments have not changed and we are so tired of them.

finally, tumblr is a social media website, and wellthatschaotic is not an educational blog—it's a collective that was expressing its frustrations around persistent misgendering. it's not going to give every single nuance of the situation in the same way a single twitter vent thread about a person's bad convenience store job won't usually jump straight into describing what constitutes labor violations in one's specific area.

don't call it/its users they/them unless those are a pronoun set it also already uses. it is always misgendering to call someone by unwanted pronouns.

non-it/its users need to get their shit together fr

[velvet-cupcake-games]

Very Gay Notes for Pride

I've posted a few times about gender and sexuality in my game world, as well as about character sexual orientations. Some stuff has changed a bit as I've gotten to know our characters better, though. So here's an updated list of characters whose stories touch on non-cisgender and non-heterosexual themes directly in-game. As Avalon operates on a pre-modern concept of sexuality, I do not use modern labels in the game. Heterosexuality and homosexuality just aren't concepts yet, so characters think more in terms of sexual preferences than having the idea that they were born with a particular orientation. I use labels here for ease of understanding for modern readers.

Marion is bi/pan, she romances characters regardless of gender, which just isn't particularly important to her in terms of who she's attracted to. In our prologue, you learn that she's had liaisons with both men and women in the past.

John is bi/pan, and it's officially part of the game's plot now as his previous relationship with a man during the Nibirian War is discussed. (Poor man got dumped. Why? Stay tuned! Don't worry, he's single and ready to mingle now, he's had time to get over it.)

Meissa is non-binary (not agender - they would describe themselves as full of gender) and bi/pan with a slight preference for femme-presenting lovers. Thanks to Nibirian shapeshifting magic, they are able to be in the body that works best for them. I neither know nor care what their original body looked like. Nibirians think of both gender and sexuality as fluid, and that fact is woven into their society.

Alanna was originally conceived as bi/pan, but I later decided that she's lesbian. She has no sexual interest in men, though she'll flirt with anybody - it's part of the job.

Geoffrey is demisexual and demi- or aromantic, and it's an identity that he's still discovering during the course of the game. His sprite is not in our photo because it's in flux right now, but he is a full and important part of our LGBT+ cast!

Theo is gay, monogamous, and married to another nobleman. He is sadly unkissable (unless you are his husband).

Roan is a major NPC that y'all haven't really met yet, but they are agender. They're a changeling - a former fae who decided to forego their near-immortality and become mortal - and are a scout for Robin's rebellion. Fae do not have genders as a natural state, but some greater fae develop gender preferences as they interact with humanity. Roan has not done so and seems uninterested in doing so.

Avalon doesn't have a concept of sex as sinful, though it is generally meant to be a part of the private sphere (something done "in shadow," which does not connotate evil, merely private). Commoners in Avalon freely choose life partners regardless of gender. The nobility has a bias toward heterosexual marriage because of an obsession with continuing noble bloodlines, but nobles having same-sex lovers on the side is common and considered unremarkable.

Regardless, some nobles like Marion and Theo struggle with the expectation that they'll marry heterosexually. Theo's marriage to another nobleman caused some ripples in both families, but he put his foot down about it.

Avalon is a society built on binary concepts, and unfortunately the gender binary is one of them. Transgender people who are part of that binary are quietly accepted, but being non-binary isn't a concept in society at large. The language does have an ungendered singular pronoun (useful when you're speaking of somebody whose gender is unknown), which I approximate with they/them. That's why Marion easily adapts to Meissa and Roan with they/them pronouns.

Other societies in the world are not like that. As I mention, Nibiru considers gender and sexuality to be fluid. They don't even have gender pronouns - they use the terms "bringer" and "bearer" to denote people of reproductive age who can sire or birth children, but those terms are purely mechanical and aren't necessarily connected to male or female gender.

Sunjata is a "third-gender" society. Their deity, Amun, was originally considered male (and is sometimes referred to with male pronouns), but took on other genders upon devouring all other gods and becoming the sole deity of the land. Trans and non-binary people occupy a third gender between male and female in their society. This third gender (I haven't named it yet, need to do more research) is considered sacred to Amun and worthy of respect. In general, gender is less important than skill and ability in Sunjati culture.

[moonfishlagoon]

Venetian language & gender-neutrality

Vèneto! Known colloquially as “dialect,” (e.g., “speaking dialect”) Venetian is nevertheless a distinct language still spoken in the Venetan region of Italy. My current writing project takes me to the centro storico of Venice in CE 2080. The centro storico is the historic center - where you think of when you think of Venice. Tourists, canals, etc.; the mainland being terreferma.

At this point in my worldbuilding, a third neutral gender is widely accepted across large swaths of the world. So, how to reconcile this with the distinctly gendered grammar of Vèneto while still being respectful of a language that is not my own?

The first question: are there resources discussing this online? No, of course not! That would be too easy! (if you have these resources, please send them to me posthaste.) A series of Reddit posts in my new favorite subreddits, r/linguistics, r/Veneto, and r/Venezia, have clued me in to the fact that:

Venetian speakers are largely conceptualized as elderly and rural, thus:

Presumably aren’t thinking about gender neutrality, and moreover:

Aren’t posting about it online if they are

This is clearly a biased and seemingly-ignorant point of view. Yet if there are Venetian-speakers out there talking about this, I’m probably largely out of the loop because, most significantly of all factors, I don’t speak Vèneto. Crushing.

Investigation in this direction thus stymied, I turned instead to Italian, which has in recent times been investigating that curious beast known as neutering your language.

Surprising no one, most of the English-language writing on this topic is horribly bigoted! Much bemoaning of the dissolution of the integrity of the Italian language. Sound familiar?

I gleaned enough from these rantings to understand that Italians are playing with a lot of gender-neutral options. I’ll use the word “tutti” (“all”) as an example. If you’re familiar with gender neutral efforts in Spanish, these will likely strike you as familiar. Our options, among others, are:

Just using the masculine - tutti

An asterix - tutt*

Leaving off the ending - tutt

A ‘u’ - tuttu

An at sign - tutt@

A schwa - tuttə

For even more, see Italian linguist Vera Gheno’s breakdown on Facebook. (And wow, I just found a bibliography about the schwa on her FB page, time for another deep dive ...)

Only one of the above options seems useable to me in a narrative context, and that’s the schwa. It’s easy on the eyes, it looks basically like a letter, and it makes a comprehensible and distinct noise. Furthermore, gendering in Vèneto and Italian seems to work in similar ways, so I feel fairly confident that I can apply the schwa to Venetian endings as I would Italian ones and not be making a mockery of myself. (Fairly confident, I said!)

Authorial side-bar - using the schwa will also signal to readers that I am doing something different with language; likely even those unfamiliar with Venetian and Italian.

Next question: what about singular nouns??? All the examples I’ve found with the schwa are for plural nouns, and googling (or duck-duck-go-ing) is getting me nowhere. After about half an hour of wishing I could just go to Venice, I found a Reddit thread that linked to a marvelous article:

Linguaggio inclusivo in italiano: guida pratica per chi scrive per lavoro (e non) by Ruben Vitiello

With some help from Firefox’s Simple Translate extension, I dove into this lovely, thorough, and most importantly not bigoted guide on the schwa. Not only does it talk about the schwa, but it has fantastic background on choosing ungendered language, speaking about trans people, and the history of gender neutral endings in Italian. This article is a goldmine.

It also contained one parenthetical that made all the research worth it: “sua forma semplificata (un solo simbolo sia per singolare che plurale)”.

“Its simplified form (only one symbol for both singular and plural)”.

That’s all I needed to know! The schwa is used for singular and plural endings. Ruben Vitiello, I owe you my life.

With hours of research under my belt, I now feel fairly confident in my choice to use the schwa for a hypothetical future Venetian that exists in a world which recognizes a third neutral gender.

If anyone reading this wants to share their thoughts, please feel free! If you speak Venetian, I’m actually begging you to chime in!

And now, on to the next research hole ... Adìo!

Further resources:

Lingua Veneta (dictionary)

Glosbe (dictionary)

Non-binary in Italian: Queering the Italian Language (article)

Gender neutral language (nonbinary wiki page)

Schwa (ə) and Inclusive Language, a Conversation Among Colleagues (article)

[shukruutsrb]

except that nowadays we are actually pushing for a gender neutral option in spanish, and this x business is no news??? remember when we also used the @ to de-gender some words???

don't advise 'latinos' as the gender neutral option bc there's already a whole movement trying to explain -even to latines- how using male-gendered words for plural is not working, and it's not a bad thing to want to change it

Absolutely love how every self-respecting latino despises with all their souls the word “Latinx”, to the point even our progressives do so too since it completely undermined their efforts for a true gender-neutral language in the form of the -e suffix, as everyone feels it’s something Americans forced upon us without never asking, which is actually what happened.

Seriously, fuck Latinx, all my panas and parceros hate Latinx, do not support that denomination rooted in racism and imperialism!

[indigenous-gender]

I just experienced racism from another person of color for defending my cultural identities and experience as a lesbian. when I said that I was engaging in good faith and asked them not to put words in my mouth they continued putting words in my mouth mocked me, said that my definition of lesbian (which is specific to my cultures and my races and ethnicities as a Brown and Indigenous triracial person) comes from yt people and then said I learned it off the LGBT wiki which I don’t even know what that fucking is. My definition of lesbian comes from lived experience as an indigenous 2spirit malalåhi mamflorita lesbian. my definition is me centering Black and Brown experiences. and then they had the fucking audacity as someone who is not two spirit to tell me in a condescending disrespectful way that other 2spirit people think that the definition of lesbian is “non-men loving non-men” when that very fucking definition EXCLUDES us for being two spirit. TWO SPIRIT IS NOT NON MEN. THAT ENGLISH COLONIAL TERM DOES NOT DEFINE US. just because SOME two spirit people do not identify as men doesn’t erase all of us who do identify as men . FORCING THE TERM NON MEN ONTO US IS MISGENDERING, DEGENDERING/UNGENDERING, AND RACIST AND ANTI-INDIGENOUS. it’s disgusting how people think that two spirit equals non-men when that is a colonial idea that erases our cultural identity. I am not the only 2spirit person who has repeatedly, publicly, proudly stated that our male identity is EQUALLY as important as our female identity or other identities. the fucking nerve for a non-indigenous person to “2spirit people to me when I’m explaining how that very specifically invalidates and erases my identity as a twospiritlesbian the fucking nerve y’all have. this is a reminder that just because you yourself are not white, does not mean that you are incapable of being anti-indigenous and racist to other Brown and Native people. not being white yourself is NOT an excuse or exemption from being anti-indigenous, holding anti-indigenous beliefs, and enacting anti-indigenous violence on an Indigenous person. “NON MEN” (LOVING NON MEN) IS A RACIST, COLONIAL, ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND USA-CENTRIC TERM AND CONSTRUCT. IT HAS FUCKALL TO DO WITH ME AND MY CULTURES AND I WILL NOT LET IT BE FORCED ON ME. FUCK OFF.

[flodaya]

if they pronouns aren't even a thing in germany how would they handle ismail being nb

no it is a thing, it’s just not as common in my experience. like two anons have informed me in germany a lot of nb ppl go by just their name as pronoun, and there are the options of dey/denen, deren, xier, and sier

druck possibly talking about this with ismail as main character is so important imo because it’s so uncommon in german “Alltagssprache” and our language is painfully gendered, so druck really has a chance to normalize or at least somewhat give awareness to ungendered pronouns (I wish they would promote their seasons bc I think this is a topic more teens should be educated about to really change something)

also, being non-binary doesn’t necessarily mean going by they/them pronouns. i guess I wouldn’t consider myself nb but I go by she/they, so pronouns isn’t necessarily the same as gender, you know?

[dyke-bars-never-last]

@Resonance Audio's "own introduction and explanation at the beginning of the recording" of Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig:

Ours is both in support of Wittig's goals and against some of her offensive missteps... We changed "the women" to "the people" but didn't stop there. We probably rendered far more pronouns and subjects gender-neutral than Wittig originally intended.

Sorry about the eunuch language, we would never talk this way. Reclamation of certain body parts seemed more central to the feminist struggle in the 1960s than it does now as some victories have been won and popular understandings of the gendering of bodies have expanded. Honestly, this would make the text irredeemable were it not for the portion of the text in which the people themselves have realized that making body parts into symbols is counterproductive.

We also wish there were open acknowledgments of trans women in this text. There are not. For a text which attempts to and at times succeeds in causing the reader to imagine what the world would be like if patriarchy were totally defeated, this is a major failing.

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I respect non-binary folks and transgender people's own choice of identity, but please do not alter lesbian feminists' text so carelessly. I understand that the female body may have different impression on different people, but whether "the expansion on the gendering of bodies" can be considered a "victory" through our collective goal of dismantling patriarchy is really not up to anyone to decide. It's just that we cannot cast way the efforts of "first wave" or "second wave" feminists or consider them to be"outdated" so easily, at least not before the inequality of the sexes become obsolete.

@fanofcolors commented below the audio:

I don't agree with the translation "They say" for "Elles disent" : it is not in the spirit of the french text and for what Monique Wittig spoke of her "[The] Tro[jan]'s horse". And in other hand, we listen "He", and never "She" ! ... I suggest to translate "They say" ("Elles disent") by "All she, say": which is more in the way of the idea of a women community.

In Monique Wittig's own words:

No woman can say 'I' without being for herself a total subject - that is, ungendered, universal, whole. Or, failing this, she is condemned to what I call parrot speech (slaves echoing their masters' talk).

Neutralizing "gender" (or I would rather use Wittig's own words: deconstructing "the category of sex", the social categorizing of people based on sex as a means of oppression) perhaps is something we should consider after "the female" becomes the universal. But it is only then do us biological females have the right to choose whether we wish to be neutralized or not. Before we reclaim subjectivity in literature, art, and sciences, any attempt at altering the pronouns or representation of bodies (that signify the sex of the subject) is not revisionist, it is straight-up erasure, erasure of history, of our collective memories.

As an Asian woman, I oftentimes feel underrepresented in mainstream western media, but I don't consider the efforts of white feminists "offensive". So I am a bit confused why "not openly acknowledging trans women" is named by @Resonance Audio to be one of Monique Wittig's "offensive missteps". (I do feel offended as some people claim the fictional character Hua Mulan to be transgender while the message of the tale within its original cultural context is remembered for thousands of years to be more of gender nonconformity than anything else.)

Now with the concept of "trans women" introduced to the conversation, though it is not included in the text, nor foreseen by the author, I thought they would probably have no problem living a life of equality in Monique Wittig's fantasy of "what the world would be like if patriarchy were totally defeated" (unless equality is not what they are content with). In Les Guérillères, there is no such banner indicating "people who identified as transgender are not allowed to be a member of this post-patriarchy world" written on top. How can something that doesn't exist be called a "major failing" (again, unless inclusion is not what they are content with).

I appreciate how @Resonance Audio keep their alternation transparent (they do not have the power to keep the original text from us anyway) and encourage critical thinking. So I will do anything but categorizing the channel into those who have been perpetrating the inequality of the sexes.

But really, sometimes there come the limits of alliance and I have to be more than aware of the text/image/audio/video I consume.