So, someone “got all over me” the other day for using the English neutral pronoun “he” — which is distressingly like the masculine pronoun(1) — and said (this person said), “I don’t do gender identification and I take it personally that you do.” Words to that effect…
So I said (having thought this out in detail long and long ago), “I don’t gender identify either. I never have. I’ve never been comfortable identifying myself with any subgroup. I’m barely comfortable calling myself a Human. Mostly I just say, ‘I’m from Earth'”
The person looked a bit blankly back at me, perhaps trying to figure out if I’d insulted him/her/it or not. So I continued: “Haven’t you ever noticed that words have no power but what you give them? What you give them? In fact, they don’t even have meaning until you use them. How you use them is what has meaning. What you are saying is what has meaning, not the words. In fact, when someone gets all tangled up in my words, I know he isn’t actually listening to me.”
Still looking a bit blank, but clearly trying to find a response to this, I stepped in one more time, “If you feel insulted when I use the actual rules of language, I’d say that’s your problem. If I actually meant an insult, believe me, you’d know it. If you feel insult or indignation, it’s coming from yourself, not from me. I don’t care how you identify yourself; that’s your thing. I see a Human Being, one of the most complex objects in the known Universe(2)! That’s all I see.”
This represents one of my basic issues with “minority groups” and our current culture. Identifying with a group diminishes the individual.
Actually, I’m a member of several minority groups, if I wished to so exploit, but I don’t identify with them, and my “membership” there is only socio-political(3). I identify as Me, and almost as nothing else what so ever. I am not Male. I am not Female. I am not Smart. I am not Stupid. I am not white(4); I am not black(5). I don’t do group identity, I never have, and to be honest I get a little impatient with those who do. Be yourself. The moment you join a group you have diminished the Glory that is Uniquely You.
Be yourself, and stop looking for evidence that others are putting you down. Any such evidence you see is most likely in your own self. Even if it coming from others, it only has the exact power you give it: no more, no less.
The moment you identify with a group you have diminished the Glory that is Uniquely You.
To be a bit brutal about it, these kinds of language and identity games are nothing but the disgruntlement and inexperience of the Youth (what ever one’s calendar age — I mean emotional maturity). To be a bit less brutal, it is also a matter of coming to terms with the fact that you are Ok, exactly as you are, and what others think is irrelevant, for that is more than likely their process, a statement about themselves. That can be tough to learn because it is not a lesson our current society teaches, or is even aware of. (Look at how much of marketing and economy are based on making you think you have problems and inadequacies that can only be fixed by buying lots of Brand X. Geez.)
You don’t want others to exploit you? Good. Excellent!
I totally approve!!
But if true, why are you exploiting yourself by giving this issue power?
Oh… P.S. By the way, despite what it seems I said above, English really would be much improved by adding a true gender/race neutral pronoun, full of respect and courtesy. When I suggest “he” and “he” are two different words, unfortunately spelled and pronounced the same, that’s fine for linguists or for masters of logic or … well, actually, such folks are already pretty aware of the issue and tend to rearrange their statements to be as gender neutral as possible. For the average person, who is not a master of language or meaning and who is subconsciously influenced by what he hears and sees, it isn’t sufficient. A truly new word (example below in footnote #6) would solve a lot of things.
We mustn’t forget that we’ve had several generations raised with television and other hypnosis-inducing media, and that words have deeper impact to a person even in mild hypnosis.
And P.P.S. I’d like to point out that some other languages are far, far worse than is English on gender bias. In Spanish, for instance, the word for parents literally means “fathers,” so… it could be worse, you know?
Finally, P.P.P.S: Then there’s the issue of the patronymic, or “family” name, bestowed by your father when 99% of your genetics comes from your mother, not your father(7). Many layers of social issue remain to be addressed.
But still, it’s up to you how you think about yourself. No one can legislate that.
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(1) I’ve been trying for years to get people to notice that the solution to the “problem” of English not having a neutral pronoun is to simply notice that it does have one. Reframe the rules. He and He: two different words, (in fact, it already has several meanings), one meaning a specific male, the other meaning a non-specific unknown person. We have a disturbingly high number of words that have many times many meanings already. What’s the Big Deal? But don’t yell at me yet: read on above…
(2) The human body is mind-bogglingly complex — literally. 150 trillion cells, may 250 trillion, working together as whole? Unbelievable. If you examine just one cell, it’s also a mind bogglingly complex piece of work, a biological entity of its own, of unbelievable complexity. 150 trillion of them? Wow. The Human body is therefore the most complex object we know of in the entire Universe (with the possible exception of Elephants and Whales) and — guess what??? — we each have one. Woof! Isn’t that enough? Do we also have to be “white?” “black?” “male?” “female?” “gender-neutral?” Really?
(3) “Socio-political:” meaning my membership in any such subgroups is assigned by others, not by myself. Government forms especially give me a problem. “Please check one: white, black, blue, green, orange, etc.” Nonsense. I leave it blank when ever I can, as even asking the question is a violation of individual dignity and should not be tolerated, especially from a government that claims to serve the people, all the people. You can’t represent all the people in just a hand-full of subgroupings. Impossible. Me personally, I’m a “more mauve shade of pinky russet” and you find that on any government form listing only primary colors!
(4) No one is actually “white” — a blank sheet of paper is white, any one that color is ill. Even albinos are not white, more pink.
(5) Again, no one is — examine the color black in detail — we are actually all the same color (save for albinos): the color of melanin. Everyone has his own shade of melanin, that’s all. You can put together a chart, pictures of real people ranging from very, very pale, to very, very dark and it’s a continuous shading, hundreds of grades of skin color from one end to the other. So what? It’s all the color of Melanin, and it’s what allows us to withstand the Sun. Even 93 million miles away it can kill you without proper protection. Like going from the palest, barely discernable shade of blue all the way through to a very dark navy blue (there are officially 500 shades of blue, computers can do 256 of them with 1000’s of variations by then mixing in various amounts of red and green). Color: so what?
(6) Back in the 70’s, during the “Woman’s movement” and such, many “new words” were proposed: ner, nis, ne, etc. But they didn’t catch on and I recall no one who was happy with these as they were too similar to the existing pronouns. So maybe something totally new, like Hume (but that isn’t new, and the short pieces start sounding like “he” and “his” — oddly enough), or Thrib:
a thrib meaning a person, any person, a human being
thyb use as one would use “he” or “her” (perhaps pronounced “threeb”)
a throob more formal than thrib, otherwise the same, maybe for a person of position. Use instead of that rediculous “chairperson” word, say.
I doubt these would be popular. I’m just saying it’s not hard to make up a totally new word. Let’s get a linguist and a sociologist on it and solve it this afternoon. Then publish it in the New York Times and the Metro tomorrow and call it done. (Wouldn’t that be nice?)
(7) Mom and Dad share only the principal 23 pairs of chromosomes between them. (By the way a potato has 24 pairs.) Then there’s all the other genetic data, in the mitochondria and other organelles in the cell, that Dad has nothing to say about. Just sayin’