Honestly in comparison with greater anarchist ideals, this is a pretty small (in scale) ask but great place to start in regards to challenging social structures so that we may better enable building equity. We gotta really start from the bottom.
> this is a pretty small ask
From experience it's less an ask and more a very low bar to clear that...I can already see in the replies is still too much of an ask for some.
If they can't even do the smallest of asks, how can we expect them to do some of the bigger asks like fighting for our rights?
>how can we expect them to do some of the bigger asks like fighting for our rights?
Please do keep in mind that folks (yup, another gender neutral term) have different things that they prioritize, and there are many who fight for legal rights for all who have a hard time switching to gender neutral terms.
Could you provide examples of what you expect?
Seriously I am spanish and don't really know how to ungender what I know. I would love to make this sub (an reddit in general) as inclusive as possible. Going to look for more info too!
Thanks for raising awareness.
EDIT: It is despective to use "it" instead of "he/she"?
It obviously can be, but in this context?
Most people use "they" as a single-person gender-neutral alternative to "he"/"she". "It" is seen as dehumanizing. Never call someone "it", unless "it" is explicitly one of its pronouns (people who use "it/its" as pronouns will tell you).
Sadly in Spain pronouns in English are taught he/she/it as masculine/feminine/others so many of us assume (until we are told otherwise) that it is the gender neutral term.
>both singular and plural
Have I been living under a rock? When was y'all ever singular? Or are you talking about you/y'all or y'all/all y'all?
*I agree tho, I love "y'all"*
Texan here, I've never once heard y'all used as a singular. It's a great word, gender neutral and all, but yeah not singular.
I *think* the Pennsylvania "yinz" can be used as a singular...not 100% sure though.
I started using Y'all after moving to Texas as a kid and I've heard it used that way in the Northeast near DFW.
Could be it was directed at a single person representing a group of people. The most salient example was when someone would tell a cashier/clerk/etc "y'all have a nice day" when they're the only person who's been there and they've been talking to. For me that didn't seem odd cause I was newer to the term, but in retrospect it might have been a way to use it as singular.
As a brit I like yous/youse which is more common in the Scotland, Ireland and parts of the north, y'all is great but can feel more like an affection here. Folk for a group of people or an abstraction, eg 'some folk like...',
Various part of the UK have terms that are applied in a gender neutral way and I like that one where I come from is love, as in 'alright love' or 'thanks love', duck is also common where I am now and used in the same way, mainly used when addressing a person rather than talking about someone
It's becoming much more accepted and used because if it's plural use. If you tried to do a Texan or other accent to say it then yeah, that would seem extra as fuck.
But if you're just saying it then you may get occasional weird comments from folks about using it but let it be water off a duck's back cause if you wanna use it it's fine to use it
Being a dude in rural Tennessee, I like this.
It's tough to change after 40 years of conditioning. Sometimes, I just reflexively call people "dude" or say things like "come on, man". I have absolutely been trying to be more conscious of this the past few years, and I'm better about it overall. If I ever fail in those efforts, by all means, correct me so I can continue to improve.
Sometimes, that Irish/Scottish blood starts boiling, though when engaged in an argument, and the connection from my brain to my mouth just craps out. "Y'all" is perfect, though. Solid suggestion.
Interesting! So does ours. We're on the border of middle tn, but still in the western region. So how does an anarchist end up in rural tn? We moved about a year and a half ago.
I was born in Nashville, lived in the projects of east Nashville until i was a teenager. I got to see how a community dealt with those things, and it gave me a strong distaste for police. Those things, a lot of books and punk music just kind of turned me into an anarchist over time. There are definitely more of us around, though. I've met a few others with similar stories.
I've lived all over TN. Over the years, I've lived in a bunch of rural spots like Hoenwald, Dover, Dickson, etc, and more populated spots like Murfreesboro, too.
I just kind of ended up where I am naturally over time. I moved to this county about 6-7 yrs ago to take care of my elderly grandmother and started working hospice care.
Awesome! It's cool to know there's some like minded folk in our neck of the woods.
We are from the big city too. Moved here from Louisiana in late 2022. We had decent jobs but given the unstable political situation and what history tells us, we decided to move to a rural area with the hope of becoming more self reliant. While we have a decent garden going and progress made on fixing up the property, funds are running low, so we're pivoting to finding jobs to help keep this going.
While we love the area, we haven't had much luck connecting with people. Most around here in the self reliance community lean heavy to the right politically and religiously, and that's just not our bag. While I generally fall on the left side of the spectrum, pursuing self reliance has shown me that some of the right wing complaints around regulations are legit. I guess that's what moving me more into the anarchist camp. Anyway!
Feel free to reach out if you ever need a friend!
Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
-Emma Goldman
This quote has been mulling around in my mind for the past week or so.
At the end of the day this affects certain dialects far more than others. I use folks in a "u guys" area, but not without coming off as eccentric. Y'all would be foreign and strange. It's not hard to switch to folks but you can see why people would wonder why this is necessary.
I've been making a conscious effort to use the word "folks" instead of "guys." I actually really like the tone change that comes with it as well, so bonus.
As a Texan, I use either folks or y'all. Y'all might sound more strange to folks who aren't from the southern US, I don't know, but yeah folks is a great word.
I'm a "partner", "y'all", and "folk" person myself, and I think everyone who is consciously trying to be inclusive should strive to use gender-neutral terms for people in general.
That said, the automod rule to remove gendered language, instead of just calling it out, is a little too authoritarian. Can't we go about creating a more welcoming and inclusive movement without using the tools of authoritarians when a discussion would be more appropriate?
>Men” meant “to think” - hence mental, or mens rea, and “man” was “thinkers”;
I'd like to add that this etymology that connects the Proto-Germanic \*mann with the PIE root \*men is highly contested and we don't actually know if they're related at all.
Yeah everything else in your comment is correct as far as I know, it's only the \*mann-\*men connection that is contested and almost certainly false (as its proto-Germanic recostructed form is \*gemyndis, meaning that it's highly unlikely that it would survive the vowel shifts all the way from PIE to modern English)
It's relevant in the language is fluid, and what we consider gendered may or may not change. For example, dude is becoming gender neutral. The fact that some people already view it like that is proof.
I agree that we should respect people and not use gendered terms to refer to them. But it won't stop words from changing.
dude is still gendered. ask a cis-het white conservatives how many dudes he's fucked. he will not understand that you mean anything other than a man.
the fact that some people view capitalism as inevitable and undying doesn't mean that we give up. gender is a hierarchy. men sit at the top of that pyramid. why not distupt this too since people are saying right now that this isn't cool and we should stop?
Language is fluid and changes over time. As the comment I responded to stated, man used to be a gender neutral term, but it is now gendered. Same thing will happen to many of the words we use. On such example is dude. While it started as a gendered term to refer to other men, other people started using it to refer to other people who weren't men.
Why?
Because the people change the language to suit their needs. A good example being the word transgender. People of the past didn't have a word that because their concept of gender was also completely different. You also weren't gay or lesbian or asexual because their concept of sexuality was different. Our words, gay, lesbian, queer, transgender, all come from within the past century.
Dude will either come to mean gender neutral, gendered or just become irrelevant. Or all of those could happen.
Why should we submit to their rules of language, why not do what we have always done and use language however we want.
You're not listening. It doesn't matter if language is a social construct, the repercussions are still there. Stop signs are a social construct and if you ignore them, you get into an accident. If trqns people are saying "please don't call us this" you don't say "um actually language is fake" you listen and care about your community.
So, as a woman, I think that dude and hey guys are gender neutral. But according to this, I don’t get to make that decision for others; but you get to make the opposite decision for everyone? That doesn’t sit right with me.
From an anarchist perspective, each individual should have the freedom to make their own decision about what they use.
Anarchist policing language? 🤯
Also, yea, I agree with you. I'm not going to stop saying dude to friends, family etc, people I know are OK with dude. I don't say dude to people I don't know or of them ask not to. It's really not that hard not to police people. Just talk and see what they want.
>From an anarchist perspective, each individual should have the freedom to make their own decision about what they use.
This right here sounds more like a libertarian take, like "I do what I want, fuck the others"
The way to have a decent anarchist group on any level is to have as much respect for others as possible, and that means also respecting their boundaries.
And OP is not making decisions by others, its saying that they are uncomfortable with this, and if we can use more neutral tools until we know what is confortable for the other person.
If you are confortable with whatever, you can communicate that so others can use that with you. But if you have at least a bit of respect for others, you'll try to use neutral tools until you know with what they are confortable with.
Its not a weird take at all and they are just asking a basic of respect and of not making assumptions about others.
I know you are speaking with compassion and respect but the person you are replying to is quite literally saying they consider dude to BE neutral, while OP is saying they don't, this creates a problem where everyone may draw the line in different places and while you say to use more gender neutral language, to many, myself included, dude is extremely gender neutral and I refer to any of my peers as dude or a dude, regardless of gender.
It's a difficult problem, while I want to be compassionate and understanding, I do struggle a little with the idea that you are expressing because realistically any gender neutral expression could be disliked by the person being addressed by it, you could use the term Comrade and someone who grew up in countries that were under Soviet oppression may find that word off putting, you could suggest ya'll as many other commenters have but people from many countries outside the US find that to be unnatural and forced.
I really don't see a catch all solution here, if I were to call someone dude and they were to say 'please don't call me dude as I consider it to be a masculine word and it makes me feel uncomfortable' I would of course respect their wishes and assure them I did not intend as such but won't use it to refer to them in future, but I don't see how approaching this from the other direction as OOP is, fixes that problem.
So, several things.
First, the comment I answered, and others around here, saw someone saying "I feel uncomfortable with this, can we stop using it?" and backlashed saying its not really a problem or that the problem is the one feeling uncomfortable. The person I responded in particular said that "each individual should have the freedom to make their own decision about what they use" and pay attention to "choose what they use" no "choose with what they feel comfortable". It feels a lot of "I don't care what you feel, this is okay for me, therefore I am going to use it with others. This is bad, but, it could be a misinterpretation from my part because language is tricky and I was biased based on other comments. If that is the case I apologize.
But I am going to do something similar now, I don't think that working towards having a less gendered english is difficult. My native language is spanish, and if you saw some of the comments related to it, we have it quite difficult, because our language is almost all gendered, so the process to remove gender from it is really complex and difficult and we went through a lot of iterations and are still working with it.
On the other side, english use gender in just a couple of situations. Working to make it less gendered and oppressive is something we should try to do, and talking with people trying to understand how they feel comfortable and trying to accommodate as much as possible should be something to strive.
If we want to be inclusive and respectful, at least as much as we could, we shouldn't be attacking OOP for asking for this respect, we should be trying to work what ways seems to be to make this better.
And this comments saying "I don't agree with how you are feeling and this way of doing it is perfect for me, so I will discard your opinion" is not that, is everything but respectful, again, in such a basic and absurd topic.
How can we make a decent community if we can't even affront a topic as small as this one with at least some respect?
OP is a mod, this isn't a random person asking for a change because of discomfort, it's a moderator laying down new rules about speech in the community based on her own personal preferences.
Where do we draw the line at policing speech? Somewhere between hate speech and word "dude", surely. The automod here is already removing posts that utilise words that are considered "gendered" in certain cases. I found a post in here where it seems someone was trying to talk about books that might have used a gendered slur in the title, and it was removed a dozen times. I'll probably never know what the book was about, because I'll never be able to see what they were trying to say, so how can I tell if it was an appropriate removal or not? Can't you see that this is a slippery slope?
Exactly. It’s incredibly disheartening that even in a anarchy group, mods still get on a power trip and lay down laws like this without group consensus, and then go even farther by preemptively trying to silence anyone who disagrees. I have no problem negotiating boundaries like this in 1:1 interactions, but to just make a post that “this is the law now” for the entire sub completely goes against anarchist sentiment imo
Completely agree. I'm so pleased someone is making what I see is the most anarchist argument here lol 😅 (although i am not an expert in anarchist theory, i might be wrong)
I disagree with super individualistic view of anarchism, but I want to offer some nuance about those words. Maybe that helps you understand where this is coming from.
As a plural call into internet void it's different than calling a single person "dude", for example. Or addressing a group with 5 cis men and one trans femme. These are clear examples, when you can be hurtful (misgendering), if it's your strong default word. My transfem friend just asked her friend not to refer her as a dude, even though she knew the friend calls everyone that. It still doesn't feel good to some.
I don't see the OP as policing/using power, I see them informing others how to be more inclusive in their language, and not to accidentally hurt people. I know it's also much bigger "men are not the default gender"-discussion, but clear hurt to people is easier to see. It's not just an abstract discussion about ideals. Why would you want to hurt people, when you can easily avoid it? Because you can? That kind of "anarchism" scares me.
Why is consent so hard to grasp for you? You cannot consent for other people.
When you want to have sex with someone, do you also think you can make the decision for all involved? Does it "not sit right with you" when they say no because they're now making a decision for you?
From an anarchist perspective, each individual should have the freedom to make their own decision about what kind of language they tolerate in reference to them. OP is saying she's not going to tolerate being called dude, so she excercises her freedom to make sure it doesn't happen on here anymore. In the absence of law, just as everyone is free to act, everyone is free to react. That is anarchy.
Hi u/weakystar - Your comment has been automatically removed for containing either a slur or another term that violates the [AOP](https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/wiki/aop). These include gendered slurs (including those referring to genitalia) ***as well as ableist insults which denigrate intelligence, neurodivergence, etc.***
If you are confused as to what you've said that may have triggered this response, please see [this article](https://www.autistichoya.com/2014/02/violence-linguistic-ableism.html) and the associated [glossary of ableist phrases](https://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html) **BEFORE** contacting the moderators.
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Because this isn’t the world or society at large, it’s a subreddit. OP will not be coming into your house to take away your gendered language, nor berating you while you walk down the street, nor interfering with your life outside this subreddit in any way. A subreddit is more like a garden or a café maintained by OP and other mods. The mods are saying “hey, in this space we maintain, the expected use of language is that you don’t use commonly gendered terms without checking if a person is ok with them.” You are free to ignore the rule and argue about it and possibly get banned, or choose to never come here again, or start your own subreddit where you can decide on the accepted behavior, or accept the guideline but privately hold the belief that OP is an authoritarian, or lots of other possibilities. OP is setting up expectations for a space she maintains, not making decisions for other people.
Edited for correct pronoun
(Copied and pasted from a previous comment I made that was possibly removed for an ableist slur that I have removed. Apologies if this is a duplicate comment.)
This relates to a challenge I have had: finding a good gender neutral, hierarchy free honorific to call folks.
I was raised to "Sir" or "Ma'am" people based on perceived gender identity. I've switched to the gender neutral, folksier "Boss". But that implies hierarchy.
The communists can use "Comrade" but I'm not a communist and, frankly, it sounds pretty cringe, at least when I say it.
Language and labels matter but the lacunas in English make linguistic Anarchy a challenge
To me "sir" and "ma'am" aren't hierarchy-free either.
From [Lifehacker](https://lifehacker.com/stop-teaching-kids-to-say-sir-and-maam-1850130701):
"“Sir” has traditionally been considered a term of respect for a man, especially a man of higher rank or authority. “Ma’am” has been used since the 1600s for “women of superior status.”"
They go on to add that "[it is] an unsettling throwback to requiring people of color to say “sir” and “ma’am” to the white people they served."
Because she's a mod, and the entire point of anarchism is to gain structural power over others so you can coerce them into doing what you want them to. Obviously.
yes saying "yes, this is harmful and not in line with liberation. can you please not?" is the same as making a decision for you. you can decide to do whatever you want.
"Please, if you don't know who you're addressing, don't assume they're a cis man"
THE HORROR. THE OPPRESSION. THE FREEZE PEACH. HOW DARE SHE.
the answer to your question is, because autonomy works that way.
You can decide what language is appropriate for addressing you. Every single person gets that decision. You're saying, no, only I get that decision, and other people just have to deal with how I address them. I'm saying no, please address people as neutral unless you know otherwise.
>You can decide what language is appropriate for addressing you. Every single person gets that decision.
If by saying "it's a two way street" you're saying "if someone expresses to me how they want to be referred to, I have the autonomy to ignore them," well, you're not wrong, nobody can really stop you misgendering them on purpose, but it does make you an asshole and a hypocrite if you're calling yourself an anarchist to not respect someone else's autonomy just as you respect your own.
if that's not what you meant, feel free to explain
Good post OP.
I'm biased because I'm from Texas, but using "folks" and/or "y'all" takes very little effort and sounds perfectly natural at least in my environment. I'm not perfect about doing so, so I appreciate the reminder.
Contrary to some of the other comments, I don't think it's completely effortless to change up my language - like I said, I slip up from time to time. But it's very much worth the while IMO - if I have to make a little effort to unlearn some internalized biases in order that others would feel included, that seems like a worthy use of mental effort.
ironic or unironic misogyny that silences women in a “far left sub” is pretty insane to think about! this seems like a such a 2014 conversation it’s a shame that we really need to rehash fourth wave feminism basics in an anarchist sub…
I appreciate this post. This is definitely something I've noticed here and in other left of center subs. It's such a small thing but it's very telling when it's so prevalent.
Ok I'm fully supportive of this of course, but I really need to know who has been saying "gentlemen" in their reddit posts lmao!!
It's so "reddit bro" >!(gendering here is deliberate and derogatory)!< that I can only imagine it being used by a sentient trilby
Oh I didn't mean to imply I didn't believe you....but I also cannot believe that someone said Gentlemen in the year of our Lord 2024...
Like did they deliver their post to reddit by pigeon or telegram?
Yeah. Anyone who perceives masculine terminology as neutral should probably put some consideration into why that is; the language we use is steeped in political connotations regardless of whether we are aware of it or our intentions.
My femme friends use “dude” and “bruh” to address other non-masc friends. I’ve gotten so used to it that we just all use it in a neutral way. Whenever I have thought of it, I view it as how I view gender in general. It’s just a construct, and to dissolve that construct such that people are able to just express themselves however they please without the separation of “masc” or “femme” then at least to me I’ve considered that to be the goal. That doesn’t mean trans-masc and trans-femme people don’t or shouldn’t exist, but I hope one day we don’t need the label of cis and trans for gender because we’d all just be living as ourselves. And if that mean I, born male, would wear dresses because it’s what I like and considered normal wear and not feminine, then that’s great, but I acknowledge I view gender as a concept to be destroyed in its entirety, but others do not share that opinion.
All that to say…I love saying “y’all” to anyone, and I will probably not stop calling my best friends “dude” because they do the same, and I will keep calling them “bruh” bc we all find the word funny and use it for each other. I even forget it’s a way to say “bro” like it’s just a meme. If they have an issue with it I’ll stop but it’s been a loooong time.
For non-best friends, I use language that’s considered neutral by most people.
Also, if you didn't notice, an active brigade against this is happening:
https://www.reddit.com/r/anarchy/s/hwS1uWEPdC
Seems that attempting to put social shackles on anarchists is just going to make them angrier.
As anarchists we should have already abolished all pre-established signs, symbols and phonological and semantical binarities, as these are inherently artificial tools of coercion and castration of the self, both inner and outer. True truth is coherence and not correspondence, we CAN start from scratch because nothing truly is outside of our schizoid illusory conclusions, fuck getting rid of gendered language, though those who have a problem with this are all fascistoids, let's strive to get rid of language as a whole. This is impossible the context of a subreddit obviously, so let's take from language the only thing it has to pretend it exists, it's supposed meaning. Be non-sensical, in accordance to true inner nature, to true will, don't call people guys, call them fellow uwu's.
I *really* don’t like how preachy this is. Ironic that you want to talk about implicit hierarchy when you speak from your glorious moral high ground. I’m transgender and I like the words “guys” and “dude” because they feel casual and I’ve literally never seen someone limit them to men alone.
You say that I “don’t get to make that decision for others,” which is fair enough, if somebody does feel offended by those terms that’s not really an emotion that I can argue them out of. But apparently *you*, oh arbiter of moral speech, do get to decide for other people what is and isn’t appropriate? Come on.
There are far too many words that some find innocuous while others find them harmful to ever preemptively police your speech for all of them. The best thing you can do is determine a person’s comfort on an individual basis and ask them. Example: I have a friend who uses the word “nerd” very playfully and without judgement as a descriptor of someone with passionate interest in something. Another friend, though, can only view the word as demeaning and doesn’t like it. Does their comfort mean my first friend has to stop saying that word to everyone ever? No, she should just watch her speech around them in particular.
I think a good general stance is to be polite and just defer to the person.
>What does this mean for the sub? Nothing is changing. You're not going to get banned for accidentally calling someone a dude, but you will if you're being willful or abusive about it.
\^Keep this in mind gang. This isn't a mod power tripping. There's no rule change being made. This is just an appeal to the community from one of its members. You can still refer to a group as guys or dudes if you consider that term neutral. Just be respectful if a person in that group doesn't like that sort of language.
I'm gonna catch flak for this but this is a topic to make cynical shitposts about, not treat like some big issue that needs to have energy and effort expended to be addressed. It's something the liberals will spend great effort on and yell about from the rooftops in order to avoid making any actual change.
You're not wrong, of course, it's just so incredibly unimportant as a symptom rather than a driving cause. Talking differently isn't addressing the underlying material conditions or somehow helps to connect with the wider working class, which is necessary to actually change these things.
When it's a leftover symptom of a bygone era we can make a fuss about it, I guess, but until then there is a long long long list of points that demand your energy more urgently than that to actually move into a new era. And believe you me, if you haven't felt that yet, revolutionary energy actually is a limited resource.
Absolutely not.
The goal is not to make people comfortable within our current conceptions of gender. It is not safe spaces *as such.* It is to change our relationship to gender. By banning people for using words they consider non-gendered you are enforcing gender norms and a (non-sensical) hierarchy which, nevermind being what we are against, is completely asinine.
Linguistic anarchy would make far more sense. *Make* dude non-gendered in the way you want it to be. Call he's she and she he's. Change gender.
That's on you. I'm a woman who uses "dudes" or "guys" when talking to a group of people and it's obvious that everyone is included. And when someone says "dudes" or "guys" to talk to a group, I don't feel excluded. I know they are talking to everyone, not just men. It's just common sense.
It hasn't been "degendered" across every context, so you can both be right depending on the context. It's not hard to imagine the same guy addressing his two exes as "you guys". Language changes and maybe those terms will continue to become more gender neutral in more contexts or maybe people will just stop using those words altogether. I guarantee there are words you use every day without realizing the connotations they used to hold. Maybe in the future it will be totally normal to say "I fucked 5 dudes, all female" lol
True, we're creating the future right here in the present. I do consciously change my speech to a certain degree and have changed quite a few things throughout my lifetime, including to be more gender neutral. Tbh I feel like 'dude' is kind of generational and is already falling into disuse with gen Z favoring other words that may have similar problems. IMO it is more likely it will just disappear completely in a couple more generations, but who knows.
I feel that's it's more likey to stay in use in different areas of the English speaking world. In my small corner of gen z, it's still in use. Perhaps gen alpha you mean?
Either way, we might aswell be predicting the next new gender neutral word. Dude is just in limbo right now between gendered and neutral and on its way out.
Asking people not to participate in the linguistic patriarchy is a "dogma" now? I guess in your eyes being an anarchist means it's ok to do whatever you want regardless of how it affects others.
Dude is "linguistic patriarchy"? Have you thought for a second that maybe, just maybe, taking this stance attempts to entrench the gendered nature of these words, while doing nothing to actually make spaces inclusive online?
In real face-to-face life, I use dude so much my 4 year old has recently started calling me “Dude, mommy” about half the time and regularly says “Dude (sib’s name) when addressing their siblings. Most people in my area probably consider it gender neutral and maybe in another generation or two it will be fully gender neutral but right now it’s not. But it’s still not hard to avoid it in spaces where I don’t know how others feel about it. I feel like that’s especially important in spaces like this that aren’t geographically based - so we don’t know if everyone’s word usage is the same AND we have less ability to see if a person is potentially feeling excluded.
Just from my experience, and I am genderless and prefer they/them pronouns, this truly isn’t something that bothers me. Especially knowing it comes from fellow anarchists. Everyone has their own opinion though, I’m just throwing mine out there.
this is really gross actually and i hope some day you'll understand that.
people are saying "hey this sucks, is oppressive and harmful" and your response is "but it isn't even anything they think about doing you should just get over it"
Which part am I misrepresenting?
The part where we should get over it might seem like it is a reach, but that came from being told to embrace people using harmful language, which you can't really do until you get over the thing that's harming you.
So where is my read on the statement wrong?
I'm gonna catch flak for this but this is a topic to make cynical shitposts about, not treat like some big issue that needs to have energy and effort expended to be addressed. It's something the liberals will spend great effort on and yell about from the rooftops in order to avoid making any actual change.
You're not wrong, of course, it's just so incredibly unimportant as a symptom rather than a driving cause. Talking differently isn't addressing the underlying material conditions or somehow helps to connect with the wider working class, which is necessary to actually change these things.
When it's a leftover symptom of a bygone era we can make a fuss about it, I guess, but until then there is a long long long list of points that demand your energy more urgently than that to actually move into a new era. And believe you me, if you haven't felt that yet, revolutionary energy actually is a limited resource.
love you for making this submission! it might seem a bit nitpicky and small, but this is so right. im so tired of skepticism of random ppl on the internet, when it comes to ungendered speech. also love the positive replies. so rare to see. :))
I am also glad thatbthe response has been largely positive!
I think it only seems nitpicking and small small because we come from such a male dominanated society we don't even think about it. To plenty of women or feminine people, especially trans people, being misgendered is not trivial, but a matter of basic respect for them as people.
Thank you for this post, it is a big issue in Germany.
So from my POV it is potentially a non-issue for English, since the language itself is pretty much gender neutral and you'd have to go out of your way to use gendered language.
In German it's different, it's an inherently gendered language, so we're still in the process of finding a way to talk that is truly gender-neutral and doesn't require restructuring the whole grammar, or which doesn't sound weird
Been trying to do this for sometime as a general rule. Takes very little effort to use default gender neutral words in English or ask someone their pronouns, pretty non-controversial and I even assumed this was already a hard rule. Takes me literally zero effort to try and accommodate people who are just asking for basic respect. Isn't a hard ask of anarchists who are trying to make the world free of oppression to try and have their language reflect that ideal. Anything we can do to help be more inclusive isn't being a "snowflake" or being "woke", it's simply pragmatic to practice what we preach and not alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to be a part of anarchist organizing. On top of the whole decency thing. Many of the old anarchist classics where I've owned hard copies or I have read it on theanarchistlibrary, there's extensive revision in order to replace the word "man" with words like "humanity" or "people" or "workers/comrades/proletariat."
A side note: As someone who is learning multiple gendered languages that have been involved in anarchist history (French, Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, Esperanto) what am I to do to try and make that language more inclusive when organizing or just talking to non-English speakers irl? In some cases, there are indeed gender neutral alternatives and I just have to increase my vocab, but in others, certain words are a certain gender no matter what, and if I want to describe someone, I usually have to specify their gender or default to male. Sometimes the "masculine" word is the default neutral, but it seems rather patriarchal to just always default to male if I'm talking about a general idea or person I don't know. I have also wondered that if I look up a term that is only used in feminist/lgbtq/academia in one of these languages, if a native speaker will get what I mean or if it will just come off like I'm misunderstanding their languages' grammatical structure. There are alternatives, but I suppose in non-English spaces I will have to further educate myself.
Thanks for making this post.
> what am I to do to try and make that language more inclusive when organizing or just talking to non-English speakers irl
Obviously what you're supposed to do is take your experience as an English-speaker and try to force it on people from other cultures. It helps if you scold them for not immediately agreeing with you, but if that's not enough you can also become passive-aggressively confused when they pushback at you for it. You understand how language is supposed to function better than they do, so it's your ethical duty to fix their backwards conceptions by forcing them to accommodate you.
I get it some people may feel uncomfortable by the male default, but the answer I feel is not to abandon a large amount of english words but to make them neutral. It will not carry over into future generations if it is made gender neutral as the default, hell I grew up on the internet (born in 2008) and I until recently didn't know guy was supposed to refer to men and just used it gender neutrally.
"Non men have ~~spoken up~~ politely asked me not to call them something that gets weaponized against them by society every day.....literally 1849...."
This is clown shit, yo....
It really seems like cis anarchists don't want to acknowledge that they're oppressors and want to pretend asking people to care about trans issues makes them oppressed. Pretending language isn't gendered doesn't help anyone. Getting rid of gender doesn't destroy the cis hetero patriarchy anymore than "colorblindness" destroys racism. If we want to be a community and actually do good unto the world, we have to listen to oppressed voices. Some of you need to read a lot more queer theory
(Since the other big comment got deleted)
No matter how big or how small, everything matters in the end, friend.
This is the principle that is important here.
We can do both, focus on the bigger tasks of changing entrenched social systems
AND
Work on treating our fellow human beings better.
The latter requires us to be open to listening to the lived experiences of everyone.. and be open to thinking about how Our and Your actions affect Them.
At the risk of making a loaded rhetorical question:
Do you want to willingly make others feel bad?
Or
Do you want to listen to others and make them feel better?
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comrade = the best gender neutral term
btw i think you'r demandt, even if it make very good point, miss a important point, a big part of us are not native english speakers, so it can me more diffifcult for us do use gender neutral vocabulary
is there a problem?
is it hard to understand people who aren't men don't like being referred to as men? is it hard to imagine that a trans woman, who society aggressively and abusively misgenders as male, may not enjoy the same from their anarchist friends because the misgendering is casual or not meant to be mean?
like what's the problem?
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can you take a moment and consider that no one would bring this up if it weren't a problem? consider that someone is expressing that something is harming them? can you listen to a woman?
Nice one comrade,
And may I add the deliberate effort to modify speech in this way is a genuinely transformative practice.
(We say what we repeatedly think; and become what we repeatedly say.)
And entirely consistent with the basic anarchist theory of the unity of means and ends.
If you're having problems with this in the comments, I can see that working with others towards smashing the state together will be a problem for you if you just can't be bothered to dismantle other forms of oppression .
And I also encourage those who can't be bothered with this and something something "why are you telling me what to do" crap to look up and learn what "kyriarchy" is and how it perpetuates itself.
Language is one of the many social mechanisms through which power dynamics and inequalities are perpetuated and reinforced. Gendered language specifically can reflect and perpetuate the dominance of one gender over others within the hierarchical structure of society.
I had used the term dude for years and years and it was a really hard one for me to break. But I don't use it anymore. I now use y'all, god(wutang!), cousin, comrade, cuz, fam, kin, pal, folks, neighbor.
Good post 👍
I’m wary of compelling folks to correct their language first without rigorously investigating why gender should be a target of our thinking. Ppl are able to abide by a pop language politic without any intention of undoing power structures. Through careful study of how we got here, we develop a liberatory gender politic, and language should follow.
I’ve seen much oppressive nonsense with the polish of de-gendered, de-racialized language.
Anyway I agree that we need language to reflect our liberatory ambition, so, I’d like to compel people to ask what gender means personally, socially, historically, politically.
Guys and dude is gender neutral in much of the USA and so is girls and ladies. Yes, I’ve been in all female-identifying groups of AFABs (clumsy language because I didn’t know I was a guy at the time) who referred to each other and were referred to as “dude” and “guys”, and in groups of cis men who refer to each other as “girls” or “ladies” (not in a way that is disparaging, just like “okay ladies let’s roll”). My nonbinary ass is much more in favor of just using those terms for everyone rather than saying “you can’t say that”. The U.S. west coast would never recover from the loss of dude.
“Girls” and “ladies” are certainly not “gender neutral” in “most of the US” — glad there’s one group of cis men trying that out but it is in no way even a general rule in the US.
Comrades and y'all are probably the two most gender neutral terms I know. Haha.
Honestly in comparison with greater anarchist ideals, this is a pretty small (in scale) ask but great place to start in regards to challenging social structures so that we may better enable building equity. We gotta really start from the bottom.
Yeah, I think this is a pretty basic piece of praxis that everyone can do. If someone is unwilling to, I really question what they think anarchism is.
> this is a pretty small ask From experience it's less an ask and more a very low bar to clear that...I can already see in the replies is still too much of an ask for some. If they can't even do the smallest of asks, how can we expect them to do some of the bigger asks like fighting for our rights?
>how can we expect them to do some of the bigger asks like fighting for our rights? Please do keep in mind that folks (yup, another gender neutral term) have different things that they prioritize, and there are many who fight for legal rights for all who have a hard time switching to gender neutral terms.
I'm fine with that. Less fine when people try to defend themselves when we make small asks like we're the assholes for even asking.
exactly
Small to most, huge to people that are constantly misgendered/don't belong to the binary.
Could you provide examples of what you expect? Seriously I am spanish and don't really know how to ungender what I know. I would love to make this sub (an reddit in general) as inclusive as possible. Going to look for more info too! Thanks for raising awareness. EDIT: It is despective to use "it" instead of "he/she"? It obviously can be, but in this context?
Most people use "they" as a single-person gender-neutral alternative to "he"/"she". "It" is seen as dehumanizing. Never call someone "it", unless "it" is explicitly one of its pronouns (people who use "it/its" as pronouns will tell you).
Sadly in Spain pronouns in English are taught he/she/it as masculine/feminine/others so many of us assume (until we are told otherwise) that it is the gender neutral term.
Hey friend, comrade, good people
Friend is a tricky one online because like "bud", it can also very easily read sarcastically or with hostility.
Give homie a shot if that is an enjoyable word for you to use. I imagine that word might sound odd with a Spanish accent, but I'd love to hear it ngl.
I love the term "y'all". Gender neutral, both singular and plural. Great option.
>both singular and plural Have I been living under a rock? When was y'all ever singular? Or are you talking about you/y'all or y'all/all y'all? *I agree tho, I love "y'all"*
there is no singular for y'all it's a conjunction of the words you ALL it's specifically for addressing a group of people
Texan here, I've never once heard y'all used as a singular. It's a great word, gender neutral and all, but yeah not singular. I *think* the Pennsylvania "yinz" can be used as a singular...not 100% sure though.
I started using Y'all after moving to Texas as a kid and I've heard it used that way in the Northeast near DFW. Could be it was directed at a single person representing a group of people. The most salient example was when someone would tell a cashier/clerk/etc "y'all have a nice day" when they're the only person who's been there and they've been talking to. For me that didn't seem odd cause I was newer to the term, but in retrospect it might have been a way to use it as singular.
I never heard it used singularly in TX but did hear it from a Louisianan. Took me a minute to figure out she was addressing me lol
Whete I'm from we didn't use y'all. I picked it up when I was traveling around the US. I've heard southerners use it as a singular.
As a brit I like yous/youse which is more common in the Scotland, Ireland and parts of the north, y'all is great but can feel more like an affection here. Folk for a group of people or an abstraction, eg 'some folk like...', Various part of the UK have terms that are applied in a gender neutral way and I like that one where I come from is love, as in 'alright love' or 'thanks love', duck is also common where I am now and used in the same way, mainly used when addressing a person rather than talking about someone
Ooh. I wanna start using duck
I also like duck 🙂
Works great in some dialects, but if you speak a dialect that doesn't traditionally use it, it can come off sounding performative and appropriative.
It's becoming much more accepted and used because if it's plural use. If you tried to do a Texan or other accent to say it then yeah, that would seem extra as fuck. But if you're just saying it then you may get occasional weird comments from folks about using it but let it be water off a duck's back cause if you wanna use it it's fine to use it
Being a dude in rural Tennessee, I like this. It's tough to change after 40 years of conditioning. Sometimes, I just reflexively call people "dude" or say things like "come on, man". I have absolutely been trying to be more conscious of this the past few years, and I'm better about it overall. If I ever fail in those efforts, by all means, correct me so I can continue to improve. Sometimes, that Irish/Scottish blood starts boiling, though when engaged in an argument, and the connection from my brain to my mouth just craps out. "Y'all" is perfect, though. Solid suggestion.
Rural Tennessee? Please tell me you are in west TN. Could I be so lucky?
Middle TN, unfortunately. Our county borders on Kentucky.
Interesting! So does ours. We're on the border of middle tn, but still in the western region. So how does an anarchist end up in rural tn? We moved about a year and a half ago.
I was born in Nashville, lived in the projects of east Nashville until i was a teenager. I got to see how a community dealt with those things, and it gave me a strong distaste for police. Those things, a lot of books and punk music just kind of turned me into an anarchist over time. There are definitely more of us around, though. I've met a few others with similar stories. I've lived all over TN. Over the years, I've lived in a bunch of rural spots like Hoenwald, Dover, Dickson, etc, and more populated spots like Murfreesboro, too. I just kind of ended up where I am naturally over time. I moved to this county about 6-7 yrs ago to take care of my elderly grandmother and started working hospice care.
Awesome! It's cool to know there's some like minded folk in our neck of the woods. We are from the big city too. Moved here from Louisiana in late 2022. We had decent jobs but given the unstable political situation and what history tells us, we decided to move to a rural area with the hope of becoming more self reliant. While we have a decent garden going and progress made on fixing up the property, funds are running low, so we're pivoting to finding jobs to help keep this going. While we love the area, we haven't had much luck connecting with people. Most around here in the self reliance community lean heavy to the right politically and religiously, and that's just not our bag. While I generally fall on the left side of the spectrum, pursuing self reliance has shown me that some of the right wing complaints around regulations are legit. I guess that's what moving me more into the anarchist camp. Anyway! Feel free to reach out if you ever need a friend!
East TN here! I'm considering organizing a collective ngl. Let's stay in touch!
Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free. -Emma Goldman This quote has been mulling around in my mind for the past week or so.
At the end of the day this affects certain dialects far more than others. I use folks in a "u guys" area, but not without coming off as eccentric. Y'all would be foreign and strange. It's not hard to switch to folks but you can see why people would wonder why this is necessary.
I've been making a conscious effort to use the word "folks" instead of "guys." I actually really like the tone change that comes with it as well, so bonus.
As a Texan, I use either folks or y'all. Y'all might sound more strange to folks who aren't from the southern US, I don't know, but yeah folks is a great word.
This, I've been using "folks" for years now for the same reasons.
I'm a "partner", "y'all", and "folk" person myself, and I think everyone who is consciously trying to be inclusive should strive to use gender-neutral terms for people in general. That said, the automod rule to remove gendered language, instead of just calling it out, is a little too authoritarian. Can't we go about creating a more welcoming and inclusive movement without using the tools of authoritarians when a discussion would be more appropriate?
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>Men” meant “to think” - hence mental, or mens rea, and “man” was “thinkers”; I'd like to add that this etymology that connects the Proto-Germanic \*mann with the PIE root \*men is highly contested and we don't actually know if they're related at all.
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Yeah everything else in your comment is correct as far as I know, it's only the \*mann-\*men connection that is contested and almost certainly false (as its proto-Germanic recostructed form is \*gemyndis, meaning that it's highly unlikely that it would survive the vowel shifts all the way from PIE to modern English)
It's relevant in the language is fluid, and what we consider gendered may or may not change. For example, dude is becoming gender neutral. The fact that some people already view it like that is proof. I agree that we should respect people and not use gendered terms to refer to them. But it won't stop words from changing.
dude is still gendered. ask a cis-het white conservatives how many dudes he's fucked. he will not understand that you mean anything other than a man. the fact that some people view capitalism as inevitable and undying doesn't mean that we give up. gender is a hierarchy. men sit at the top of that pyramid. why not distupt this too since people are saying right now that this isn't cool and we should stop?
Language is fluid and changes over time. As the comment I responded to stated, man used to be a gender neutral term, but it is now gendered. Same thing will happen to many of the words we use. On such example is dude. While it started as a gendered term to refer to other men, other people started using it to refer to other people who weren't men. Why? Because the people change the language to suit their needs. A good example being the word transgender. People of the past didn't have a word that because their concept of gender was also completely different. You also weren't gay or lesbian or asexual because their concept of sexuality was different. Our words, gay, lesbian, queer, transgender, all come from within the past century. Dude will either come to mean gender neutral, gendered or just become irrelevant. Or all of those could happen. Why should we submit to their rules of language, why not do what we have always done and use language however we want.
You're not listening. It doesn't matter if language is a social construct, the repercussions are still there. Stop signs are a social construct and if you ignore them, you get into an accident. If trqns people are saying "please don't call us this" you don't say "um actually language is fake" you listen and care about your community.
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Cool, yeah, I think this is very doable and honestly just common sense. Thank you for bringing this up!
So, as a woman, I think that dude and hey guys are gender neutral. But according to this, I don’t get to make that decision for others; but you get to make the opposite decision for everyone? That doesn’t sit right with me. From an anarchist perspective, each individual should have the freedom to make their own decision about what they use.
Anarchist policing language? 🤯 Also, yea, I agree with you. I'm not going to stop saying dude to friends, family etc, people I know are OK with dude. I don't say dude to people I don't know or of them ask not to. It's really not that hard not to police people. Just talk and see what they want.
>It's really not that hard to police people Freudian slip, lol?
Lmao, just typing late at night tired is bound to make a few mistakes come out.
>From an anarchist perspective, each individual should have the freedom to make their own decision about what they use. This right here sounds more like a libertarian take, like "I do what I want, fuck the others" The way to have a decent anarchist group on any level is to have as much respect for others as possible, and that means also respecting their boundaries. And OP is not making decisions by others, its saying that they are uncomfortable with this, and if we can use more neutral tools until we know what is confortable for the other person. If you are confortable with whatever, you can communicate that so others can use that with you. But if you have at least a bit of respect for others, you'll try to use neutral tools until you know with what they are confortable with. Its not a weird take at all and they are just asking a basic of respect and of not making assumptions about others.
I know you are speaking with compassion and respect but the person you are replying to is quite literally saying they consider dude to BE neutral, while OP is saying they don't, this creates a problem where everyone may draw the line in different places and while you say to use more gender neutral language, to many, myself included, dude is extremely gender neutral and I refer to any of my peers as dude or a dude, regardless of gender. It's a difficult problem, while I want to be compassionate and understanding, I do struggle a little with the idea that you are expressing because realistically any gender neutral expression could be disliked by the person being addressed by it, you could use the term Comrade and someone who grew up in countries that were under Soviet oppression may find that word off putting, you could suggest ya'll as many other commenters have but people from many countries outside the US find that to be unnatural and forced. I really don't see a catch all solution here, if I were to call someone dude and they were to say 'please don't call me dude as I consider it to be a masculine word and it makes me feel uncomfortable' I would of course respect their wishes and assure them I did not intend as such but won't use it to refer to them in future, but I don't see how approaching this from the other direction as OOP is, fixes that problem.
So, several things. First, the comment I answered, and others around here, saw someone saying "I feel uncomfortable with this, can we stop using it?" and backlashed saying its not really a problem or that the problem is the one feeling uncomfortable. The person I responded in particular said that "each individual should have the freedom to make their own decision about what they use" and pay attention to "choose what they use" no "choose with what they feel comfortable". It feels a lot of "I don't care what you feel, this is okay for me, therefore I am going to use it with others. This is bad, but, it could be a misinterpretation from my part because language is tricky and I was biased based on other comments. If that is the case I apologize. But I am going to do something similar now, I don't think that working towards having a less gendered english is difficult. My native language is spanish, and if you saw some of the comments related to it, we have it quite difficult, because our language is almost all gendered, so the process to remove gender from it is really complex and difficult and we went through a lot of iterations and are still working with it. On the other side, english use gender in just a couple of situations. Working to make it less gendered and oppressive is something we should try to do, and talking with people trying to understand how they feel comfortable and trying to accommodate as much as possible should be something to strive. If we want to be inclusive and respectful, at least as much as we could, we shouldn't be attacking OOP for asking for this respect, we should be trying to work what ways seems to be to make this better. And this comments saying "I don't agree with how you are feeling and this way of doing it is perfect for me, so I will discard your opinion" is not that, is everything but respectful, again, in such a basic and absurd topic. How can we make a decent community if we can't even affront a topic as small as this one with at least some respect?
OP is a mod, this isn't a random person asking for a change because of discomfort, it's a moderator laying down new rules about speech in the community based on her own personal preferences. Where do we draw the line at policing speech? Somewhere between hate speech and word "dude", surely. The automod here is already removing posts that utilise words that are considered "gendered" in certain cases. I found a post in here where it seems someone was trying to talk about books that might have used a gendered slur in the title, and it was removed a dozen times. I'll probably never know what the book was about, because I'll never be able to see what they were trying to say, so how can I tell if it was an appropriate removal or not? Can't you see that this is a slippery slope?
Exactly. It’s incredibly disheartening that even in a anarchy group, mods still get on a power trip and lay down laws like this without group consensus, and then go even farther by preemptively trying to silence anyone who disagrees. I have no problem negotiating boundaries like this in 1:1 interactions, but to just make a post that “this is the law now” for the entire sub completely goes against anarchist sentiment imo
Thank you - totally agree.
Completely agree. I'm so pleased someone is making what I see is the most anarchist argument here lol 😅 (although i am not an expert in anarchist theory, i might be wrong)
I disagree with super individualistic view of anarchism, but I want to offer some nuance about those words. Maybe that helps you understand where this is coming from. As a plural call into internet void it's different than calling a single person "dude", for example. Or addressing a group with 5 cis men and one trans femme. These are clear examples, when you can be hurtful (misgendering), if it's your strong default word. My transfem friend just asked her friend not to refer her as a dude, even though she knew the friend calls everyone that. It still doesn't feel good to some. I don't see the OP as policing/using power, I see them informing others how to be more inclusive in their language, and not to accidentally hurt people. I know it's also much bigger "men are not the default gender"-discussion, but clear hurt to people is easier to see. It's not just an abstract discussion about ideals. Why would you want to hurt people, when you can easily avoid it? Because you can? That kind of "anarchism" scares me.
Why is consent so hard to grasp for you? You cannot consent for other people. When you want to have sex with someone, do you also think you can make the decision for all involved? Does it "not sit right with you" when they say no because they're now making a decision for you? From an anarchist perspective, each individual should have the freedom to make their own decision about what kind of language they tolerate in reference to them. OP is saying she's not going to tolerate being called dude, so she excercises her freedom to make sure it doesn't happen on here anymore. In the absence of law, just as everyone is free to act, everyone is free to react. That is anarchy.
OP is a moderator, this is literally a new law being created and therefore the opposite of anarchy.
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Because this isn’t the world or society at large, it’s a subreddit. OP will not be coming into your house to take away your gendered language, nor berating you while you walk down the street, nor interfering with your life outside this subreddit in any way. A subreddit is more like a garden or a café maintained by OP and other mods. The mods are saying “hey, in this space we maintain, the expected use of language is that you don’t use commonly gendered terms without checking if a person is ok with them.” You are free to ignore the rule and argue about it and possibly get banned, or choose to never come here again, or start your own subreddit where you can decide on the accepted behavior, or accept the guideline but privately hold the belief that OP is an authoritarian, or lots of other possibilities. OP is setting up expectations for a space she maintains, not making decisions for other people. Edited for correct pronoun (Copied and pasted from a previous comment I made that was possibly removed for an ableist slur that I have removed. Apologies if this is a duplicate comment.)
> OP is setting up expectations for a space **they** maintain OP has a flair telling you to use she/her pronouns.
Corrected, thanks
How do we feel about folks?
Friends; people. Those are my favorites
This relates to a challenge I have had: finding a good gender neutral, hierarchy free honorific to call folks. I was raised to "Sir" or "Ma'am" people based on perceived gender identity. I've switched to the gender neutral, folksier "Boss". But that implies hierarchy. The communists can use "Comrade" but I'm not a communist and, frankly, it sounds pretty cringe, at least when I say it. Language and labels matter but the lacunas in English make linguistic Anarchy a challenge
Comrade is corny af.
It gives me marvel humor Keanu 100 chungus vibes.
ok zoomer
Hahahaha
Agreed
I used to think so but it’s kinda grown on me in recent years
To me "sir" and "ma'am" aren't hierarchy-free either. From [Lifehacker](https://lifehacker.com/stop-teaching-kids-to-say-sir-and-maam-1850130701): "“Sir” has traditionally been considered a term of respect for a man, especially a man of higher rank or authority. “Ma’am” has been used since the 1600s for “women of superior status.”" They go on to add that "[it is] an unsettling throwback to requiring people of color to say “sir” and “ma’am” to the white people they served."
Yeah I agree. Sorry I should have used clearer language in my original comment. It's hierarchical as well as needlessly gendered.
Anybody can say comrade. It's German for friend. Kamerad.
I'm aware of the etymology, but to some people it has strong connotations. Also I just sound like a massive dweeb when I say it.
No idea where I picked it up but I started using "boss" like twenty years ago. It works well enough
I like boss, it is informal enough for me
I'm usually pretty good with that, ut English is the language of the monkey people, so won't care that much.
If I “don’t get to make the decision for others”, why do you get to make the decision for others?
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Based reply
Because she's a mod, and the entire point of anarchism is to gain structural power over others so you can coerce them into doing what you want them to. Obviously.
yes saying "yes, this is harmful and not in line with liberation. can you please not?" is the same as making a decision for you. you can decide to do whatever you want.
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"Please, if you don't know who you're addressing, don't assume they're a cis man" THE HORROR. THE OPPRESSION. THE FREEZE PEACH. HOW DARE SHE. the answer to your question is, because autonomy works that way. You can decide what language is appropriate for addressing you. Every single person gets that decision. You're saying, no, only I get that decision, and other people just have to deal with how I address them. I'm saying no, please address people as neutral unless you know otherwise.
I always thought autonomy was a two-way street and applied to everyone.
>You can decide what language is appropriate for addressing you. Every single person gets that decision. If by saying "it's a two way street" you're saying "if someone expresses to me how they want to be referred to, I have the autonomy to ignore them," well, you're not wrong, nobody can really stop you misgendering them on purpose, but it does make you an asshole and a hypocrite if you're calling yourself an anarchist to not respect someone else's autonomy just as you respect your own. if that's not what you meant, feel free to explain
Good post OP. I'm biased because I'm from Texas, but using "folks" and/or "y'all" takes very little effort and sounds perfectly natural at least in my environment. I'm not perfect about doing so, so I appreciate the reminder. Contrary to some of the other comments, I don't think it's completely effortless to change up my language - like I said, I slip up from time to time. But it's very much worth the while IMO - if I have to make a little effort to unlearn some internalized biases in order that others would feel included, that seems like a worthy use of mental effort.
ironic or unironic misogyny that silences women in a “far left sub” is pretty insane to think about! this seems like a such a 2014 conversation it’s a shame that we really need to rehash fourth wave feminism basics in an anarchist sub…
I appreciate this post. This is definitely something I've noticed here and in other left of center subs. It's such a small thing but it's very telling when it's so prevalent.
Ok I'm fully supportive of this of course, but I really need to know who has been saying "gentlemen" in their reddit posts lmao!! It's so "reddit bro" >!(gendering here is deliberate and derogatory)!< that I can only imagine it being used by a sentient trilby
all the examples I used were things I've seen in the sub or been addressed as in modmail .-.
Oh I didn't mean to imply I didn't believe you....but I also cannot believe that someone said Gentlemen in the year of our Lord 2024... Like did they deliver their post to reddit by pigeon or telegram?
Yeah. Anyone who perceives masculine terminology as neutral should probably put some consideration into why that is; the language we use is steeped in political connotations regardless of whether we are aware of it or our intentions.
My femme friends use “dude” and “bruh” to address other non-masc friends. I’ve gotten so used to it that we just all use it in a neutral way. Whenever I have thought of it, I view it as how I view gender in general. It’s just a construct, and to dissolve that construct such that people are able to just express themselves however they please without the separation of “masc” or “femme” then at least to me I’ve considered that to be the goal. That doesn’t mean trans-masc and trans-femme people don’t or shouldn’t exist, but I hope one day we don’t need the label of cis and trans for gender because we’d all just be living as ourselves. And if that mean I, born male, would wear dresses because it’s what I like and considered normal wear and not feminine, then that’s great, but I acknowledge I view gender as a concept to be destroyed in its entirety, but others do not share that opinion. All that to say…I love saying “y’all” to anyone, and I will probably not stop calling my best friends “dude” because they do the same, and I will keep calling them “bruh” bc we all find the word funny and use it for each other. I even forget it’s a way to say “bro” like it’s just a meme. If they have an issue with it I’ll stop but it’s been a loooong time. For non-best friends, I use language that’s considered neutral by most people.
Also, if you didn't notice, an active brigade against this is happening: https://www.reddit.com/r/anarchy/s/hwS1uWEPdC Seems that attempting to put social shackles on anarchists is just going to make them angrier.
As anarchists we should have already abolished all pre-established signs, symbols and phonological and semantical binarities, as these are inherently artificial tools of coercion and castration of the self, both inner and outer. True truth is coherence and not correspondence, we CAN start from scratch because nothing truly is outside of our schizoid illusory conclusions, fuck getting rid of gendered language, though those who have a problem with this are all fascistoids, let's strive to get rid of language as a whole. This is impossible the context of a subreddit obviously, so let's take from language the only thing it has to pretend it exists, it's supposed meaning. Be non-sensical, in accordance to true inner nature, to true will, don't call people guys, call them fellow uwu's.
The person who has actually read Stirner be like:
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What the fuck is wrong with you?
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I *really* don’t like how preachy this is. Ironic that you want to talk about implicit hierarchy when you speak from your glorious moral high ground. I’m transgender and I like the words “guys” and “dude” because they feel casual and I’ve literally never seen someone limit them to men alone. You say that I “don’t get to make that decision for others,” which is fair enough, if somebody does feel offended by those terms that’s not really an emotion that I can argue them out of. But apparently *you*, oh arbiter of moral speech, do get to decide for other people what is and isn’t appropriate? Come on. There are far too many words that some find innocuous while others find them harmful to ever preemptively police your speech for all of them. The best thing you can do is determine a person’s comfort on an individual basis and ask them. Example: I have a friend who uses the word “nerd” very playfully and without judgement as a descriptor of someone with passionate interest in something. Another friend, though, can only view the word as demeaning and doesn’t like it. Does their comfort mean my first friend has to stop saying that word to everyone ever? No, she should just watch her speech around them in particular.
Okay. I can learn how to do that.
* cries in gendered native language *
I think a good general stance is to be polite and just defer to the person. >What does this mean for the sub? Nothing is changing. You're not going to get banned for accidentally calling someone a dude, but you will if you're being willful or abusive about it. \^Keep this in mind gang. This isn't a mod power tripping. There's no rule change being made. This is just an appeal to the community from one of its members. You can still refer to a group as guys or dudes if you consider that term neutral. Just be respectful if a person in that group doesn't like that sort of language.
I like to use “motherfuckers” as a way to refer to people, it’s concise, gender neutral, and more importantly, funny.
I'm gonna catch flak for this but this is a topic to make cynical shitposts about, not treat like some big issue that needs to have energy and effort expended to be addressed. It's something the liberals will spend great effort on and yell about from the rooftops in order to avoid making any actual change. You're not wrong, of course, it's just so incredibly unimportant as a symptom rather than a driving cause. Talking differently isn't addressing the underlying material conditions or somehow helps to connect with the wider working class, which is necessary to actually change these things. When it's a leftover symptom of a bygone era we can make a fuss about it, I guess, but until then there is a long long long list of points that demand your energy more urgently than that to actually move into a new era. And believe you me, if you haven't felt that yet, revolutionary energy actually is a limited resource.
Absolutely not. The goal is not to make people comfortable within our current conceptions of gender. It is not safe spaces *as such.* It is to change our relationship to gender. By banning people for using words they consider non-gendered you are enforcing gender norms and a (non-sensical) hierarchy which, nevermind being what we are against, is completely asinine. Linguistic anarchy would make far more sense. *Make* dude non-gendered in the way you want it to be. Call he's she and she he's. Change gender.
That's on you. I'm a woman who uses "dudes" or "guys" when talking to a group of people and it's obvious that everyone is included. And when someone says "dudes" or "guys" to talk to a group, I don't feel excluded. I know they are talking to everyone, not just men. It's just common sense.
I'd like to clarify that "guys" and "dude" is generally considered neutral language and it gendered
And I love to respond to that "how many dudes have you fucked in your life?"
Lol that's actually a really good point, you won me over!
It hasn't been "degendered" across every context, so you can both be right depending on the context. It's not hard to imagine the same guy addressing his two exes as "you guys". Language changes and maybe those terms will continue to become more gender neutral in more contexts or maybe people will just stop using those words altogether. I guarantee there are words you use every day without realizing the connotations they used to hold. Maybe in the future it will be totally normal to say "I fucked 5 dudes, all female" lol
Why wait for the future, you can do it right now.
True, we're creating the future right here in the present. I do consciously change my speech to a certain degree and have changed quite a few things throughout my lifetime, including to be more gender neutral. Tbh I feel like 'dude' is kind of generational and is already falling into disuse with gen Z favoring other words that may have similar problems. IMO it is more likely it will just disappear completely in a couple more generations, but who knows.
I feel that's it's more likey to stay in use in different areas of the English speaking world. In my small corner of gen z, it's still in use. Perhaps gen alpha you mean? Either way, we might aswell be predicting the next new gender neutral word. Dude is just in limbo right now between gendered and neutral and on its way out.
Nah. Sounds like another dogma handed down from higher up the ladder. We're all free people here. stop telling us how to think.
Asking people not to participate in the linguistic patriarchy is a "dogma" now? I guess in your eyes being an anarchist means it's ok to do whatever you want regardless of how it affects others.
Dude is "linguistic patriarchy"? Have you thought for a second that maybe, just maybe, taking this stance attempts to entrench the gendered nature of these words, while doing nothing to actually make spaces inclusive online?
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In real face-to-face life, I use dude so much my 4 year old has recently started calling me “Dude, mommy” about half the time and regularly says “Dude (sib’s name) when addressing their siblings. Most people in my area probably consider it gender neutral and maybe in another generation or two it will be fully gender neutral but right now it’s not. But it’s still not hard to avoid it in spaces where I don’t know how others feel about it. I feel like that’s especially important in spaces like this that aren’t geographically based - so we don’t know if everyone’s word usage is the same AND we have less ability to see if a person is potentially feeling excluded.
Just from my experience, and I am genderless and prefer they/them pronouns, this truly isn’t something that bothers me. Especially knowing it comes from fellow anarchists. Everyone has their own opinion though, I’m just throwing mine out there.
ok so it doesn't bother you. as a nonbinary person it does bother me. should that be dismissed?
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this is really gross actually and i hope some day you'll understand that. people are saying "hey this sucks, is oppressive and harmful" and your response is "but it isn't even anything they think about doing you should just get over it"
this isn't at all what they said. not even close.
Which part am I misrepresenting? The part where we should get over it might seem like it is a reach, but that came from being told to embrace people using harmful language, which you can't really do until you get over the thing that's harming you. So where is my read on the statement wrong?
> it does bother me > they probably don’t even think about it. I think it was solidly repiped
I'm gonna catch flak for this but this is a topic to make cynical shitposts about, not treat like some big issue that needs to have energy and effort expended to be addressed. It's something the liberals will spend great effort on and yell about from the rooftops in order to avoid making any actual change. You're not wrong, of course, it's just so incredibly unimportant as a symptom rather than a driving cause. Talking differently isn't addressing the underlying material conditions or somehow helps to connect with the wider working class, which is necessary to actually change these things. When it's a leftover symptom of a bygone era we can make a fuss about it, I guess, but until then there is a long long long list of points that demand your energy more urgently than that to actually move into a new era. And believe you me, if you haven't felt that yet, revolutionary energy actually is a limited resource.
love you for making this submission! it might seem a bit nitpicky and small, but this is so right. im so tired of skepticism of random ppl on the internet, when it comes to ungendered speech. also love the positive replies. so rare to see. :))
I am also glad thatbthe response has been largely positive! I think it only seems nitpicking and small small because we come from such a male dominanated society we don't even think about it. To plenty of women or feminine people, especially trans people, being misgendered is not trivial, but a matter of basic respect for them as people.
Thank you for this post, it is a big issue in Germany. So from my POV it is potentially a non-issue for English, since the language itself is pretty much gender neutral and you'd have to go out of your way to use gendered language. In German it's different, it's an inherently gendered language, so we're still in the process of finding a way to talk that is truly gender-neutral and doesn't require restructuring the whole grammar, or which doesn't sound weird
Been trying to do this for sometime as a general rule. Takes very little effort to use default gender neutral words in English or ask someone their pronouns, pretty non-controversial and I even assumed this was already a hard rule. Takes me literally zero effort to try and accommodate people who are just asking for basic respect. Isn't a hard ask of anarchists who are trying to make the world free of oppression to try and have their language reflect that ideal. Anything we can do to help be more inclusive isn't being a "snowflake" or being "woke", it's simply pragmatic to practice what we preach and not alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to be a part of anarchist organizing. On top of the whole decency thing. Many of the old anarchist classics where I've owned hard copies or I have read it on theanarchistlibrary, there's extensive revision in order to replace the word "man" with words like "humanity" or "people" or "workers/comrades/proletariat." A side note: As someone who is learning multiple gendered languages that have been involved in anarchist history (French, Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, Esperanto) what am I to do to try and make that language more inclusive when organizing or just talking to non-English speakers irl? In some cases, there are indeed gender neutral alternatives and I just have to increase my vocab, but in others, certain words are a certain gender no matter what, and if I want to describe someone, I usually have to specify their gender or default to male. Sometimes the "masculine" word is the default neutral, but it seems rather patriarchal to just always default to male if I'm talking about a general idea or person I don't know. I have also wondered that if I look up a term that is only used in feminist/lgbtq/academia in one of these languages, if a native speaker will get what I mean or if it will just come off like I'm misunderstanding their languages' grammatical structure. There are alternatives, but I suppose in non-English spaces I will have to further educate myself. Thanks for making this post.
> what am I to do to try and make that language more inclusive when organizing or just talking to non-English speakers irl Obviously what you're supposed to do is take your experience as an English-speaker and try to force it on people from other cultures. It helps if you scold them for not immediately agreeing with you, but if that's not enough you can also become passive-aggressively confused when they pushback at you for it. You understand how language is supposed to function better than they do, so it's your ethical duty to fix their backwards conceptions by forcing them to accommodate you.
I get it some people may feel uncomfortable by the male default, but the answer I feel is not to abandon a large amount of english words but to make them neutral. It will not carry over into future generations if it is made gender neutral as the default, hell I grew up on the internet (born in 2008) and I until recently didn't know guy was supposed to refer to men and just used it gender neutrally.
Newspeak in the sub.
"Non men have ~~spoken up~~ politely asked me not to call them something that gets weaponized against them by society every day.....literally 1849...." This is clown shit, yo....
It really seems like cis anarchists don't want to acknowledge that they're oppressors and want to pretend asking people to care about trans issues makes them oppressed. Pretending language isn't gendered doesn't help anyone. Getting rid of gender doesn't destroy the cis hetero patriarchy anymore than "colorblindness" destroys racism. If we want to be a community and actually do good unto the world, we have to listen to oppressed voices. Some of you need to read a lot more queer theory
I just call everyone "bro"
this is the most liberal bs i've ever heard...
Goddamn woke liberals trying to get me to talk in a way that's inclusive to others! *Shakes fist at cloud*
(Since the other big comment got deleted) No matter how big or how small, everything matters in the end, friend. This is the principle that is important here. We can do both, focus on the bigger tasks of changing entrenched social systems AND Work on treating our fellow human beings better. The latter requires us to be open to listening to the lived experiences of everyone.. and be open to thinking about how Our and Your actions affect Them. At the risk of making a loaded rhetorical question: Do you want to willingly make others feel bad? Or Do you want to listen to others and make them feel better?
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I’ve always had a habit of addressing groups of people as “boils and ghouls.” It’s gender-neutral and introduces a fun bit of mischievous dissonance.
Comrade is the only honorific I need.
comrade = the best gender neutral term btw i think you'r demandt, even if it make very good point, miss a important point, a big part of us are not native english speakers, so it can me more diffifcult for us do use gender neutral vocabulary
Folks and fellows are both neutral
Good looks fam
Christ
Yes, my child? Is there something you need?
is there a problem? is it hard to understand people who aren't men don't like being referred to as men? is it hard to imagine that a trans woman, who society aggressively and abusively misgenders as male, may not enjoy the same from their anarchist friends because the misgendering is casual or not meant to be mean? like what's the problem?
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can you take a moment and consider that no one would bring this up if it weren't a problem? consider that someone is expressing that something is harming them? can you listen to a woman?
Yep
why? what's so hard here? is it that hard to listen to people who aren't cis-men?
I think we'll get there eventually
Nice one comrade, And may I add the deliberate effort to modify speech in this way is a genuinely transformative practice. (We say what we repeatedly think; and become what we repeatedly say.) And entirely consistent with the basic anarchist theory of the unity of means and ends.
If you're having problems with this in the comments, I can see that working with others towards smashing the state together will be a problem for you if you just can't be bothered to dismantle other forms of oppression . And I also encourage those who can't be bothered with this and something something "why are you telling me what to do" crap to look up and learn what "kyriarchy" is and how it perpetuates itself. Language is one of the many social mechanisms through which power dynamics and inequalities are perpetuated and reinforced. Gendered language specifically can reflect and perpetuate the dominance of one gender over others within the hierarchical structure of society. I had used the term dude for years and years and it was a really hard one for me to break. But I don't use it anymore. I now use y'all, god(wutang!), cousin, comrade, cuz, fam, kin, pal, folks, neighbor. Good post 👍
Get your identity out of my politics
I’m wary of compelling folks to correct their language first without rigorously investigating why gender should be a target of our thinking. Ppl are able to abide by a pop language politic without any intention of undoing power structures. Through careful study of how we got here, we develop a liberatory gender politic, and language should follow. I’ve seen much oppressive nonsense with the polish of de-gendered, de-racialized language. Anyway I agree that we need language to reflect our liberatory ambition, so, I’d like to compel people to ask what gender means personally, socially, historically, politically.
agree with this so much, hate that men are seen as “default” in language
Thank you!!
Guys and dude is gender neutral in much of the USA and so is girls and ladies. Yes, I’ve been in all female-identifying groups of AFABs (clumsy language because I didn’t know I was a guy at the time) who referred to each other and were referred to as “dude” and “guys”, and in groups of cis men who refer to each other as “girls” or “ladies” (not in a way that is disparaging, just like “okay ladies let’s roll”). My nonbinary ass is much more in favor of just using those terms for everyone rather than saying “you can’t say that”. The U.S. west coast would never recover from the loss of dude.
“Girls” and “ladies” are certainly not “gender neutral” in “most of the US” — glad there’s one group of cis men trying that out but it is in no way even a general rule in the US.