The longer I’ve been using all the pronouns, the more I love it. Because like yeah, sure, it’s easy for people that they can’t accidently misgender me but I’ve also taken away their power to misgender me and I think it’s doing a bit to spread the idea that it’s possible to have a multifacetted identity that spans the whole gender spectrum (or giddily skips across that spectrum giving a middle finger to the people who insist on clear boxes). Also language is a bitch and I hate the kind of classist ableist activism that holds language purity as the highest form of acceptance.
readysetnooo: Rolls eyes hard at the last sentence. Ugh.
This is a very real thing though and Tumblr, being a super language dense place by nature, totally overlooks it.
Language has power, language mattters, but so do actions, attitudes and mindsets.
Not every transgender person treats ‘always get my pronouns right and use the right terms to describe me’ as the ultimate bar for good allyship. For a lot of people, allies are people that drive you to your doctors appointment, that allow you to have a break down about spilled coffee after a particularily hard day, that see you for who you are, that attack transphobes on your behalf and whether those people always get the language right is a minor thing.
Memory issues are real.
Constantly learning and using new vocabulary isn’t easy for everyone and comes way more natural to people farmiliar with academia.
A lot of words are unnecessarily long and hard to spell because language purists prefer latin rooted words over far easier intuitive alternatives.
It’s very easy to intentionally or unintentionally cut lower class people and people with learning and memory difficulties out of conversations by making sure their voice only matters if they all use the right language.
Activist spaces online and offline are virtually always middle class dominated, higher education dominated, abled dominated spaces where a lot of people use language to score ‘good activist points’ and use it to bully people who are not like them out of the community.
