Do you know what the plural of “platypus” is? Many people don’t! The assumption is often “platypi”, but this is incorrect, as this is a Latin pluralization and the word “platypus” is derived from the Greek. The correct grammatical term would be “platypodes”, but most scientists simply go with the word “platypuses”.
And speaking of pronouns, flat-out my favorite part of the LOTR Appendices is when it’s revealed that the Gondorian dialect of the Common Speech differentiates between formal and informal second-person pronouns but the distinction’s been lost in the Hobbit’s dialect, so Pippin’s blithely been using familiar terms of address with the Lord of the City, and thus helps to explain both why the Gondorians are so ready to assume he’s a prince and why Denethor finds him so amusing to have around.
As you may know, the word ‘Sioux’ is considered to be a slur amongst members of the Oceti Sakowin. It is not our word for ourselves, but rather a name given to us by another nation and perpetuated by the Europeans / Euro-Americans.
You also may have noticed that our official tribe names often contain the word ‘Sioux’ (‘Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe’ for example.) The reason for this is entirely legal. When our treaties were drafted, they were written as an agreement between the US Government and the ‘Sioux Nation.’ For this reason, we cannot fully abandon the name. However, when we’ve had opportunities, we’ve dropped the name in places we can (’Oglala Lakota County,’ for example, a name chosen by the rezidents.)
Simply put, members of the Oceti Sakowin generally don’t refer to themselves as ‘Sioux’ and, if we can’t change it legally, at least we can continue to assert our identity on our terms. So, if you choose to respect that, here’s a quick Oceti Sakowin education guide:
Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires)
Oceti Sakowin (encompasses all language dialects) is the simplest and broadest replacement for ‘Sioux.’ You can use this term if you aren’t aware of the specific language group to which ‘Sioux’ refers. Within the Oceti Sakowin are three main groups, which are further divided into seven subgroups:
(Mnikiwoju/Mniconjou) – Swamp Plant (Cheyenne River Reservation)
Itazipcola
(Itazipco) – No Bow (Cheyenne River Reservation)
Owohe Nunpa
(Oohenunpa)
– Two Paunch Boiler (Cheyenne River Reservation)
Sihasapa – Black Feet (Cheyenne River Reservation, Standing Rock Reservation)
Hunkpapa – End of Horn (Standing Rock Reservation)
*modern terminology
*In the past, the term Nakota has been applied to the Yankton, but this is a mistake. The Yankton speak Dakota. Nakota speakers are Assiniboine / Hohe and Stoney, who broke off from the Yankton at a time so long ago their language is now nearly unrecognizable to Lakota and Dakota speakers.
This is really good to know! Question though: is there an alternative word to Siouan for when referring to the larger language class?
As far as I know there isn’t outside of referring to the group, and my guess behind this is there was never a need for an all-encompassing language-specific term before anthropology categorizations (but if someone is aware of one, feel free to jump in.) To my knowledge, the best one can do is either refer to the Oceti Sakowin as a whole, or name the specific language dialects: Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. So, L-D-N academics, take note of that absence.
I know you didn’t ask this, but I noticed this question in someone’s tag so I’m going to use this reblog to address it. The pronunciations are:
Oceti Sakowin – Oh-CHE-Di SHA-ko-weeŋ (the ending ‘n’ is said at the back of the throat and not fully enunciated, much like the ‘n’ in the word ‘sing.’
‘T’ is pronounced as a halfway between a ‘d’ and ‘t’.
)
Lakota – La-KȞO-da (’ȟ’ indicates a slight guttural noise, again like the ‘k’ is being said at the back of the throat but loudly. Somewhat like the ending ‘k’ in the word ‘lock,’ but more pronounced. Again, ‘T’ is pronounced as a halfway between a ‘d’ and ‘t’.)
Dakota – Da-KȞO-da (see Lakota)
Nakota – Na-KȞO-da (see Lakota)
Bonus: The most prominent difference between the language dialects is the switching of the ‘L,’ ‘D,’ and ‘N.’ So the Lakota word for grandfather–’tunkasila’–would in Dakota be ‘tunkasida’
Hope that info helps you, Tumblr (or Tumbdr for the Dakota in the audience)
g**psy is a slur. it’s a slur. it’s a slur, and on top of that it’s consistently attached to incredibly negative, straight up racist depictions of romani people. like, how is it 2016 and you’re still writing/drawing romani people exclusively as fortune tellers, pickpockets, witches, etc.? you’re doing tangible harm.
things english speakers know, but don’t know we know.
WOAH WHAT?
Interestingly, that last example isn’t quite correct. If “great dragon” was a particular species of dragon whose colorations included green, then green great dragons can exist.
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.
Drabble: A fic that is EXACTLY 100 words. Often used as a creative exercise in telling a story in a very small constraint.
Ficlet: Fic that clocks in somewhere between 100 to 2.5K words.
Crossover: A piece of media in which two or more source materials are treated as the same universe. Characters from Fandom A can meet characters from Fandom B. (The Doctor Goes To Hogwarts And Meet Harry Potter!)
Fusion: A fusion takes the characters of one source material and *surplants* them into another universe entirely. Characters from Fandom A cannot meet characters from Fandom B. (Dave Strider is part of an Inception team!)
TPTB: The Powers That Be. Almost always redundantly referred to as “the TPTB.” A collective term for showrunners, actors, producers, writers, et al, anyone who is part of the team that creates the source material.
YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary. A shorthand way of saying “this is how I see it/have experienced it though I realize others might have a different perspective.”
Tinhatting: Often used in RPF fandoms, the situation where some fans are convinced two celebrities are in a relationship but its being kept a secret.
Many thanks for including drabble and ficlet!
Also, it is worth to note the distinct difference between a squick and a trigger. A trigger hurts you. A squick makes you disgusted, but that is not hurt.
Also
Songfic: a fic that is written inspired by a song; the lyrics are always quoted amongst the prose, whether they are actually part of the plot (a character singing/listening to it), or merely serve narrative purposes.
PWP: ‘Plot, What Plot?’ OR ‘Porn With Plot’. The somewhat confusing acronym in the first case refers to fics that contain little plot (most often they’re just sex scenes), while the latter denotes a sex-heavy plot.
Concrit: constructive criticism; a comment that contains information and pointers for the author on how to fix mistakes or get better in something.
Shipwar: violet clashing between the supporters of different ships; both side thinking their own ship to be the ultimate OTP.
Well of course “queer” has been used as a slur. If you’d actually read my comment, you’d notice I said “it wasn’t treated like one until this decade,” not that it, well, wasn’t ever used as one.
Really? So are you saying when I, a bi person, refer to myself queer, I’m oppressing myself?
Honestly, I’ve read enough of oudeteron and @wetwareproblem’s posts to get an inkling of what the word queer used to really mean.
Sadly, you’re one of the kinder identity policers I’ve crossed paths with. At least you keep it real; you didn’t accuse me of using the word with the intention of making people who don’t like it uncomfortable.
That would’ve been a grave mistake on your part, as I can give you ten reasons why “same-gender attracted” should be considered a worse slur than “queer,” and half of them have to do with this community forcing the label on us.
Anon, you might want to look up reappropriation sometime. That’s exactly what’s happening here. Or, well, has happened – “queer” is the most complete and successful case of reappropriation I can think of, and it’s been happening for 30 years.
Have you ever heard of people chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”? Would it surprise you to know that this chant originates with a militant antiassimilationist organization that proudly called itself Queer Nation in 1990? And that they were building on earlier work in reclaiming the word? No really, here’s one of their early fliers.
It is not “recently” that it has been used as an umbrella term – unless by “recently” you mean “for about half the life of the modern rights movement.” It is not “by people who don’t know better” – it is by people who have deliberately chosen to identify as queer because of its connotations and implications.
Actual lived experience: I have never in my life heard Queer used as a slur.
Words I have experienced used as a slur, either directed at me or others, in my actual presence:
Gay
Dyke
Tranny
Sissy
Fag
Faggot
Nancy boy
Why does this lived experience matter? I am 45 and I have lived in 9 states.
Does it mean Queer was never a slur? Of course not. Does it mean it hasn’t been used to hurt people in the last 30 years? Of course not.
But I think we can say that, over the last 30-40 years, it’s mostly not at the top of anybody’s angry ranting. It’s far from the first (or most widely used) negative term you grab for when you want to mock or shame or discriminate. And it’s not widely used as a negative slur anymore because it’s been reclaimed. By us. By the active work of our community. To use as an umbrella term for that community.
Wow, that’s so disgusting of you, honestly.
Just because the people YOU come into contact with don’t use it, doesn’t mean people elsewhere don’t.
In the UK, it’s most definitely used as a negative slur. Much more than “sissy” or “nancy boy” is. Christ, I hear it as much as I hear the f slur. Once again, America isn’t the entire world.
The point of reclaiming a slur is that you get to reclaim it to use for yourself, on yourself. Not to assign to everyone else.
I’m well aware that the US isn’t the entire world. My mother is from Norway. I have family in Canada.
But, as a citizen of the US who has travelled only very lightly internationally, I have a US-centric perspective. I do not know what slurs are in common usage in the UK or in Australia or indeed in most of the English speaking world, let alone the world as a whole.
There are a lot of differences in terms of slang and slurs between the UK and the US, some of which I’m aware of, some of which I’m not.
The fact that to most folks in the US a ‘rubber’ is a condom, and therefore slightly naughty, doesn’t mean that nobody in the UK is allowed to use that term to refer to an eraser.
If you don’t want to reclaim ‘queer’ for yourself, then don’t. If you want to make it known that ‘queer’ is a slur to you or to you and your community, then you should absolutely do so.
But you need to know that this opinion, this usage, isn’t universal. And because it isn’t universal, you can’t expect it to be honored everywhere by everybody.
In the approximately 1/5th of the US I’ve lived in over the roughly half-century I’ve been alive, ‘Queer’ was not an active slur in active use by bigots. Quite the contrary, it was most commonly used in my experience as an umbrella term for the MOGAI community by the MOGAI community, as well as being used in such terms as ‘Queer Studies’ and ‘Queer Literature’.
I’m sorry if those facts, and my personal decision (as well as the decision of a large number of my peers) to use the term ‘queer’ to describe the US communities I’m a member of in a non-stigmatizing way, is disgusting to you.
I’m not going to stop, however, and your disgust at that fact is going to make exactly zero difference.
It seems to be that this seems to be a generational thing, now. Most of the older (over 35) members of the MOGAI group have long used Queer for self-identification. There’s a lot of history behind it, and it’s reclamation, and right now the only people who are using it as a slur are the younger MOGAI generation, and frankly, this baffles me. I don’t really have the time or energy to get into it but if you search @vaspider‘s blog, she has a lot of information of the history of it.
It baffles me too, and it absolutely seems generational. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s related to the fact that – at least in the US – an entire generation+ was decimated by the AIDS crisis, which has lead to a certain amount of history loss and loss of continuity in the community.
And it’s not like I don’t care at all – I am absolutely curious how, in the US, we seem to be seeing a return to the idea of queer being a slur, without an uptick in usage of it as a slur by bigots. Where is that coming from, and why is it happening?
Because all the justifications for not using it seem to boil down to “it’s a slur and always has been, case closed.” And that’s just not true here in the US. Like at all.
And you know what other word is used as a slur that the community has zero desire to reject or stop using? Gay. I hear ‘gay’ weaponized all the damn time, and I have never once heard a community member tell me that it’s always been a slur and we should stop using it.
Also also – @vaspider is always worth listening to, in my experience. They do an amazing amount of fact checking and is an awesome person on top of that.
Here’s the thing. I’ve been carefully watching the recent upswing in ‘queer is a violent slur!’ rhetoric among young activits and I’ve noticed a few things in regard to it.
It’s recent (we’re talking just a few years old here – around twelve-thirteen years ago, when I first started exploring my Not-Straightness online and began figuring myself out, people in the large, popular LGBTQIAP+ Internet groups I’d frequent would overwhelmingly use ‘queer’ as an umbrella term / self-identify as queer and it was uncontroversial and accepted).
It started its propagation on Tumblr. How deeply it’s penetrated into real-life communities, I can’t really say, but the place where it began to spread online like a wildfire among young activists is Tumblr. This will be relevant shortly.
It’s heavily based on a lack of knowledge and refusal to accept community history, with detractors often denying the widespread reclamation of the term/denying the lived experiences of the people who reclaimed the term.
Yes, there is a generational gap and there’s something very interesting about it. Many detractors are LGBTQIAP+ teenagers, starting at thirteen (the minimum cutoff age for being a Tumblr user, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there are even younger people involved in this who are lying about their age). This is in direct opposition to every instance of controversy around the term over the last thirty years or so, when it was much older members of the community who had understandable issues with it / didn’t wish to reclaim it because of how it had been weaponized against them so often.
Among both the teenagers and the older people who engage in this rhetoric I’ve also noted blogs whose owners describe themselves as ‘radical feminists’, enough of them for the overlap to be noticeable. Again, keep this in mind for relevancy.
There are other overlaps to take note of. There’s an enormous overlap between the ‘queer is a violent slur!’ crowd and the ‘cishet aces aren’t LGBT’ lot. Controlling access to the community via gatekeeping goes hand-in-hand with policing the community’s language. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a deep wellspring of biphobia, panphobia and transphobia underneath the blatant aphobia that many of the people so vehemently against ‘queer’ also engage in.
Something that’s been repeatedly discussed by @vaspider and @wetwareproblem is the fact that the attack on‘queer’ as an umbrella term means specifically that a term predominantly used by bi/pan/non-binary/genderqueer/intersex people is targeted, as opposed to any other. This ties in to the fact that far too many of the most vocal attackers identity as cis gays or lesbians. The fact that a term most often used by marginalized sections of the community is being targeted for elimination by people who have been repeatedly centered in everything from discussions and official history to activism and resources should set some massive warning flags waving.
Looking at all of this, I have a very dark suspicion. What conclusion can you draw when you see a very recent social phenomenon, popping up in a very specific place, with its rank-and-file made up of young, nominally well-meaning but generally inexperienced and uneducated activists, who have shown that they are ready to believe any claims if they come from a source they consider trustworthy? Add in the involvement of radical feminists, among whom panphobia, transphobia, hostility toward nonbinary people and the term ‘queer’ have been noted time and time again and the picture is a horrifying one.
Here it is: I suspect the backlash against ‘queer’ as an umbrella term and even a self-identifier was engineered and is currently spearheaded by a small and very specific group of people, who took advantage of the fact that Tumblr gave them everything they could have ever needed.
unfettered access to very young, inexperienced LGBTQIAP+ people
the ability to build high levels of trust among these people and influence everything from their opinions to their activism
Tumblr’s very design, where based on who you follow, you can end up seeing only what confirms everything you believe
What kept nagging at me was the complete switch of who was most vehemently against ‘queer’ as self-identifier and/or umbrella term. You don’t have decades where the pattern is one way (reservations or rejection among older activists, generalized popularity among younger ones) only for it to completely reverse within the span of a few years, in one particular place. The whole thing feels artificial. Add in everything above and it absolutely reeks.
Are there young people whose rejection of ‘queer’ comes from the fact that they’ve been personally and directly victimized by it? No doubt. But what I’m talking about here aren’t individual cases, but rather a concerted, well-orchestrated campaign to control the language of marginalized sections of the LGBTQIAP+ community and to expunge ‘queer’, both as self-identifier and as an umbrella term. There are many other words which have been constantly used and are still used as bludgeons against us, ‘gay’ chief among them, yet there is no similar campaign to expunge ‘gay’ as umbrella term, regardless of how many people have been victimized by its usage as a slur.
So what you end up with is a group of people, radfems/cis gays & lesbians among them – also heavily involved in the aphobic backlash now – with an ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’, who figured quickly enough that turning young adult activists against it wasn’t going to work, not when we’d spent a decade or more using it, not when the people before us were instrumental in reclaiming it. So instead they focused on Tumblr and on the youths they could influence here. Inexperience combined with too much uncritical trust led us to where we are and it was a simple thing: if the blogger Person A trusts to Be Right says something, then it must Be Right. All you need then is a sufficient number of people convinced that they’re In The Right passing this on to others with a similar lack of experience and knowledge. Picture an out-of-control forest fire, with the instigators fanning the flames / setting new fires when needed.
This is why I am DONE with concessions on this whole thing. I refused to bow my head and fired right back at the transphobic, biphobic/panphobic and aphobic backlashes both in the physical world and on this goddamn website. This thing is no different, with largely the same people behind it and a better smokescreen. To anyone genuinely hurt by my usage of ‘queer’: I also use LGBTQIAP+ as umbrella term, when needed. Also, I have no problems if you need to unfollow/block me. Prioritizing your well-being is important and I don’t begrudge that,
However, what I DO begrudge is the existence of a concerted campaign meant to completely deny the history and usage of the term most often used by me/people like me and as an identifier for our community, aiming for its demonization and elimination.
all of this. I grew up in America, born in 1963, aware that I was some flavor of not-het since I was 11, and I’ve only rarely heard “queer” used as a disparaging term. I’ve heard “gay” used as a slur for decades and no one’s demanding we stop using that word. The same with “butch”. Suspicious, that the word singled out for re-determination as a slur no one must use ever is the one umbrella term that covers everyone who isn’t cishet.
Also, telling someone they’re disgusting for claiming for themselves a word you’ve been told is bad is a pretty nasty thing to do.
Lots to unpack here
Seductively lays on my side and offers this post to you all.
(backlash against queer is absolutely exclusionary esp to trans/panbi/acearo people and i fucking hate it~~~)
(This post is going around. Since I pretty much like the post, I’m making my own post rather than introducing this in the responses there, but I do want to link to it for context.)
A really cool and classy trans lady I corresponded with for a while on a different social site used words like “transsexual” and “transgendered.” She spoke of herself as being born in the wrong body, and she spoke of herself as being biologically male, MTF.
She was in her late 60s.
I did not correct her. I would not in a hundred years have dared.
Given the social climate and hostility she had endured, I was fortunate to be speaking to her at all.
I have occasionally seen younger people criticizing older people quite harshly for that sort of thing. That hurts.
The use of language changes, my friends.
It is so, so very important to help people outside the community understand what language is most appropriate, and it’s important to discuss this stuff within the community so that we can reach some kind of consensus (however messy) moving forward.
It is also very, very important to respect the elders among us, and to understand that their experiences and the wisdom they have to share with us are of tremendous importance and incalculable value. And the language they use? Is part of their history, and our history, and respecting that fact in all its complexity is part of respecting them . . . and respecting ourselves as a community.
Language is so important, but in thirty years I guarantee you some of the language we defend so vigorously now will be woefully outdated, and many of us will still be clinging to it, much to the consternation of the younger generation.
I’m not saying it isn’t important to strive to create the most respectful, helpful language possible, and educate others when it is right to do so. It is vitally necessary that we do so. But we have to remember that this is a process that, thank heavens, never, ever ends.
Language cannot, and should not, stop evolving. Look at us. Look at all of us. So beautiful, so many. We are a dynamic community, a vivid community, full of art and history and passion and pathos and great, great power. Something so lively is always surrounded by change. That is so beautiful, and should be welcomed going forward … and it should be respected looking back.
There are words not yet invented that will apply to those not yet born. Those people should be respected when they join us. And the words we use now, they are good for now, and we should be respected. And our elders should be respected. Letting language take that from us is a horrifying prospect.
So. Let us not forget that language is primarily meant to be what helps bind us together. Let us remember not to let it set us apart, to squeeze us like a fist.
Please remember your history when discussing language. You will eventually be part of our history. You already are. Please. Go with open hands.
Yes. This.
This goes for other marginalized communities as well. I have a teacher who (in his words) “suffers from” depression. I am a strong proponent of the idea that everyone should have the right to define their own existence in their own words. So while I personally favor the neurodiversity model and I much prefer the neutral “has [x condition]” over “suffers from [x condition]”, I am not going to correct my teacher’s language because it’s his choice to define his depression for himself.
Thank you for bringing mental illness into this, because it didn’t occur to me, but there are many parallels, and as I myself am mentally ill and disabled because of it, I feel like I can actually talk about this with some authority.
Speaking as someone with an anxiety disorder and depression-dominant bipolar, I heavily identify with the “suffers from” narrative. Not everyone does. But if I said “I suffer from depression” and someone tried to “correct” my language to be more in line with what genuinely should be the default when you don’t know how the other person relates to their issue, they would get a gentle earful.
When someone tells you how they relate to some part of their core being, you believe them. If they use the “trapped in the wrong body” framework for themselves, respect it, don’t correct it. If they describe themselves as “suffering from X”, respect it, don’t correct it.
Some conditions do not inherently cause much suffering and while some people may indeed be miserable with these conditions, for the most part it’s society’s lack of accommodation that makes those conditions painful to live with. (From my understanding, autism, many forms of physical disability, blindness, Deafness, etc., would all reliably fall into this category.) (This is the social model of disability in a nutshell. The idea that if people were afforded necessary accommodations, these issues wouldn’t be too much of a problem.)
Some conditions absolutely tend to cause inherent suffering simply because that is what they do. What I have is, IMO, one of those things. While I personally know people who have the same exact illness I have and actively enjoy it (mania is apparently enjoyable for a friend of mine), most people who are bipolar, in my experience, do not. That is simply the nature of what bipolar is. Likewise, my anxiety disorder: if it did not cause suffering, it would not exist. That’s what it is. It causes discomfort, sometimes so acute I cry or feel like I’m going to throw up. You can’t accommodate me out of it, though you can damn sure make it worse by not allowing me to take care of it.
It’s a fact that if we accommodated these things better, the suffering would be less. For instance, if I were afforded enough money to live on each month, adequate medical care by competent professionals willing to treat me as the authority in my illness, and appropriate medication, I would be a lot happier. I do not have those things. I am absolutely made more miserable because of it. But no level of accommodation will stop my neurotransmitters – or lack thereof – from making me miserable from time to time.
The language that it is appropriate to apply to someone else may very well differ from what they use to describe themselves. There are some things it is not okay to impose on other people, even as it is perfectly okay to be those things.
Language develops and grows, and we are always seeking good terms to use that describe people without assigning them characteristics or narratives with which they may not identify. That’s a good thing. I get very frustrated when I see people complain about changing language, or “made-up terms”. That attitude is an active resistance to positive change.
I also get very frustrated when I see people trying to stamp out words without knowing their history, or respecting people who use those word, and have used them for decades (e.g.: “queer”, which you will pry from my cold dead fingers).
We need a better understanding of the necessary divide between personal experience and group descriptors.
This is a big thing in the autistic community. Older folks (I’m talking the >35 set by and large) lean more towards person-first language. Younger folks (like me I admit) lean more towards identity-first.
And there’s a good reason for that in both cases. Folks who grew up in the 70s and earlier were around for the early disability rights movements – they remember the time when identity-first was used to dehumanize and other. Person-first is their way of fighting back: I am a person, you will not forget that.
Younger folks were around for Autism Speaks and its co-opting of person-first language for its own bigoted ends. For the era of forced normalization, of passing, of “I Am Autism” and “Autism Every Day,” of being portrayed as demon-children while your abusers and the killers of people like you get fawning attention because it’s ever-so-difficult to be around people like you, and of personhood and autism being considered mutually exclusive and personhood being conditional on passing – so if you pass, you’re not autistic and don’t have a right to an opinion because you’re not severe enough, and if you don’t pass, you’re too severely affected to really understand how wretched you are, and therefore you don’t have the right to an opinion. For us, identity-first is a way of claiming our voice – it’s an extension of nothing about us without us. I am autistic, and I am a person, and you don’t get to choose which of those you respect. You will listen to me, because of both, not in spite of one.
What I’m pointing out here is that sometimes generations can have mutually-exclusive language preferences for what amounts to the same underlying reason, owing to differences in culture at the time of the generation’s coming-of-age. Person-first and identity-first are in fact mutually exclusive – someone cannot simultaneously respect my wish to be called autistic and another person’s wish to not hear autistic people referred to as autistic. But they’re both rooted in a demand for respect, a demand to be recognized as a full person.
The autistic community has mostly settled this issue by saying you have the final call in how you are referred to, but you don’t have the right to push others into identifying differently. The wishes that get respected in an instance are the wishes of the person being referred to. So you would refer to me as autistic, and you might refer to someone else as a person with autism, and both are okay as long as you’re respecting the identity of the person in question.
I think the QUILTBAG community could really benefit from taking that sort of attitude, too. Case in point: For me, I would never refer to myself as dyke and would get really fucking angry with anyone who did refer to me as dyke- I lived in a very old-fashioned community. Dyke was a tool of dehumanization and a threat. I hear someone call me a dyke and I’m 8 on the playground having my face smashed open on a chunk of ice to the tune of “Dyke bitch! Dyke bitch!” again. No amount of reclamation is going to lessen that association for me. But other people want to reclaim it as a sense of defiance – I’m a dyke, what of it? I respect their defiance, and I respect their right to choose the language with which they identify.
This is such a cool addition to my post. Thank you.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 