The insistence of using gender neutral language by TRAs

submitted by INeedSomeTime from self.GenderCritical

I feel inspired to write this as I've been observing a friend liking Tweets supporting dropping gendered language in my native language. My native language basically relies on grammatical gender unlike English and it looks like a desire to actively deconstruct a natural language by trans ideology. Trans and so called non-binary people make up less than 1% of general population. So why do these activists want to entirely deconstruct a language used even towards so called "cis" people. To me it feels like a promotion of dehumanising language, a hollow, empty language and not to mention a desctruction of naturally evolved language. It's ridiculous to consider gendering is violence. Aside from trans people no one bat's an eye at this. Interesting enough it's something what I find very odd. Don't trans people want validation from using their prefered pronouns? So why the promotion of deconstructing this language to make it gender neutral? What's the next grammatical aspect of our language, which will be "literally killing" a today's non-existeny minority? The fact we use "I, you, we, they"? The fact that we can express there is one object or two objects? The fact we can express something happening in the past, present or future? Thoughts?

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[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman 19 insightful - 1 fun19 insightful - 0 fun20 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

It's a mechanism of control, pure and simple. Comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four are a tired old cliché now, but the appendix Principles of Newspeak at the back of the novel is a good insight into how totalitarian regimes can control language. There isn't much debate in linguistic circles any more about language being able to control thought (cf Linguistic relativity), but the concept simpliciter is quite interesting, I find.

My question to you, OP, is in what way are the trans people gender-neutering your language? I've read of attempts in some languages like German to genter-neuter the language in terms of things like collective nouns. In French, for instance, a group of 1000 women and 1 man will be referred to with the masculine pronoun 'ils' rather than the feminine pronoun 'elles' - but my question is who really cares about these things?

I get very irate and old fashioned when people try to tamper with language.

[–]INeedSomeTime[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

I'd like to provide open examples but I want to avoid doxxing really. Not many people are GC (I don't even identify as GC entirely but I agree with many GC ideas) in my country. I don't want to be identified. I can say that these activists try to put "x" in words, which can indicate gender - adjectives or verbs. It makes me scratch my head how they want to apply that in the actual speech. The thing is they want to neuter it even if we just try to refer to objects, not people. It's awful.

[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

I see well being the only gender critical person in the whole country must be tough.

[–]IridescentAnaconda 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Ah, you must be Latinx.

The fact that they are using "x" instead of "e" shows you how retarded the whole thing is (not that I advocate even using "e").

[–]INeedSomeTime[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Actually no but it's so silly activists like the letter "x" so much even if it's not a vowel.

[–]MurkyMilk 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

X is the edgiest letter by far!

[–]buttbuttinator 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

"Folx" really takes the cake for me. While "womyn", "latinx", and "people of color" all grate, I can at least sort of understand why people are looking for an alternative term. Folks is already a completely gender neutral term with no real baggage attached to it.

And even compared to other wacky PC linguistic trends like people-first language, it is especially pointless because at least with people-first language the claim that "putting 'person' at the start of a label humanizes the subject" makes some surface level logic (if you ignore the fact that English typically puts the most important part last). They haven't even come up with a serious justification for why it's necessary.

[–]INeedSomeTime[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Well the best I can picture what TRAs do with our language can be shown like this: In English verbs in past tense don't have an indicator of gender like my language does so in English you say something like:

I wanted to swim.

The gender neutral fix would be like this:

I wantxd to swim.

Impossible to pronounce and just plain stupid. When I saw it for the first time I thought someone's keyboard was broken, lol.

[–]zephyranthes 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Oh, so Russian or another Slavic language.

Doubly stupid because the plurals / mixed groups are already gender neutral. The only time it does matter is the colloquial second person singular used in ads and such where the speaker implies the sex of audience members, which should be buried six feet two meters under.

[–]tea4two 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A lot of people (including myself) care about that "le masculin l'emporte" rule (literally "the masculine prevails/ takes precedence") because both the rule and the way it's named are really sexist and mirror a very patriarchal society that we want to move away from.

But the solution isn't shoehorning gender neutral pronouns in the language or making things unreadable by double-purposing pronouns*, it's just saying "use ils or elles, if it's a mixed group, it doesn't really matter because there are both men and women in it".

That being said, like most of my compatriots, I fought back against that stupid spelling reform law because we like our language and some of its beautiful idiosyncrasies. It's not that hard to learn how to spell "oignon"!

But it would be nice to stop telling little girls that men 'always prevail' and are so much more important than them that it's enshrined in the language.

** Double-purposing pronouns like what English is doing with singular 'they'. It makes texts ambiguous and hard to follow. There's a reason why so many Americans use "y'all", 'you' being singular and plural was confusing enough!