I commented on a Consequence of Sound link about the Brian Wilson/Zombies tour coming up and this happened.
I guess I’m a full girl if people are creeping on my on the internet. Gender queers of the Forum, what was the strangest way you felt validated?
From the AP (since corrected, more-or-less):
Merriam-Webster announced yesterday that they’ve added 530 new wors to their dictionary. This included a definition of “non-binary pronoun” for the word “they”. Of course the internet kicked up a shitstorm.
I only found this announcement today via twitter, and I was quite honestly perplexed that so many people took so much umbrage with this, but then again we live in a time of radicalization. What struck me as particularly odd is that while I was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin yesterday before bed I came across this passage:
“Thee knows thee can stay here, as long as thee pleases,” said Rachel.
“O, thank you,” said Eliza, “but”—she pointed to Harry—“I can’t sleep nights; I can’t rest. Last night I dreamed I saw that man coming into the yard,” she said, shuddering.
So singular they (or “thee” as the quaker Rachel annunces it in her dialect) is present in one of the most popular books of all time. It of course goes back a lot farther than that, but are people really this uneducated? English is my second fucking language and I didn’t even pause when I read the passage initially, only coming back to it today when I found out about people going all “you can’t even trust the dictionary anymore to not be all pro-SJW” like hateful little shits.
“they” has always been a non-gendered reference word. Only with the popularization of preferred pronouns did anything that challenges a strict gender binary become an “issue”. See also single-person bathrooms, nobody cared before but now labelling one as non-gendered is a statement.
Fifteen characters of super cute!
Does this story go in this thread?
Philosophy Tube knocks it out of the park with this video, including some truly badass musical numbers!
Starting to realize I’m not actually straight. I kinda dismissed my high school crushes on girls as dysphoria for a while there, but I’ve had two recent female/AFAB love interests so…
Went to Sephora for the first time since I was presenting as male and had a panic attack. I felt at home this time.
I find any coming out as gender non-conforming confusing whenever you don’t explicitly say what pronouns you use, but this is still really cool.
This is really cool.
The remarks kinda demonstrate how out of touch he is with queer culture tbh.
“So, that’s what I was referring to. I was talking about men getting in touch with the female side of themselves. I wasn’t talking about sex, I wasn’t talking about being gay or straight. People should read [Jung]. I mean, it would be an interesting education for a lot of people,”
The dude is 82 years old, of course he’s out of touch.
From reading the first interview, I thought what he said was misinterpreted. Billy Dee Williams has always struck me, for lack of a better word, as a dandy. He’s charismatic, and suave, and effeminate to some degree. I’m currently listening to a podcast on Slate about Tupac Shakur and one of the male hosts described Tupak as sexy in a slightly effeminate way, which made total sense to me.
I don’t know where the miscommunication happened here… whether it was on the interviewer’s part of Williams, but again, not surprised at all.
Honestly I think it was a miscommunication between the text and the reader. He never called himself gender fluid, the press just rolled with his quote that way because it fit that label.
Yeah I think you’re absolutely right. Reading the interview, Williams never referred to himself as gender fluid or even mentioned the word. If anything, he probably misunderstood what the word meant in today’s context.
I need to vent a bit, because I’m having a lot of emotions I don’t know how to process.
I don’t feel trans anymore. I feel like a woman, but I don’t feel trans. I just feel like a cis woman who was born a boy. All the other trans people I know really transgress gender, but the longer I’m out the less I feel tied to my past and the more I just feel like another woman. It’s really nice at times, until I get reminded I am trans and feel like an outsider from the transgressors and cis people.
