The Problem with Ze

[underthered]

Yay, insomnia. Haven't slept a wink all night. Here, have some of my brain-spillage from lying around trying to sleep. I don't know where this comes from except perhaps to say that between following the trainwreck that is Unfunny Business and all the copious race/gender/sexuality wank on FandomSecret, I've been thinking a lot about issues of

Comments

[phoenixblaze]

Ignorance of gender acceptance and gender neutrality bugs me so much, but I was really active in my LGTB group when I was in high school. Although it's kind of funny because I've never seen words like ze and hir, but I have to agree, it does seem like a whole different level of fail.

But maybe it's also just because when someone realizes what they're really meant to be I'm ecstatic for them because they're always SO happy.

[underthered]

Yeah. Ze and hir are among those terms that I only really see amongst Fandom-Activists, who take the usual levels of fandumb and then sadly apply them to real world issues, making rational, actual activists look kind of bad in the process. Another of those terms they love to use is "person of color" which is supposed to be the ultimate in politically correct, but a. reminds me way too much of "colored person" to be considered a respectable term, b. divides humanity into this stupid binary of "white" and "non-white", which is just as ignorant.

Besides the fact that it's kind of over-compensating for a problem that is mostly American in a medium that's way more multicultural than that. I mean, my girlfriend tells me that in Canada they don't even have an equivalent term to African American.

But... I digress.

Yeah, gender-neutrality is one of those tricky social issues that is unfortunately going to take a lot longer to reach the mainstream than homosexuality or even transgender, I think.

[noonish]

pretty sure african-american has become a damaging term too because not all black people are african and some people use it to refer to all black people, even non-americans, so fail. sigh.

[underthered]

Yeah, there's that problem too.

My philosophy professor says that the only reason we have terms like African American is because of institutional racism, and the pervasive feeling that something is somehow inherently wrong with blackness.

[underthered]

Well, I figure it's always going to be frustrating trying to use terms that only a tiny fraction of people understand.

[underthered]

Yeah. But again, we already have a word. "They". Which is perfectly serviceable and people will know what you mean by it in context.

There was a quote on the wiki article about gender-neutral pronouns...
"Like most efforts at language reform, these well-intended suggestions have been largely ignored by the general English-speaking public, and the project to supplement the English pronoun system has proved to be an ongoing exercise in futility. Pronouns are one of the most basic components of a language, and most speakers appear to have little interest in adopting invented ones. This may be because in most situations people can get by using the plural pronoun they or using other constructions that combine existing pronouns, such as he/she or 'he or she'."