[WFS-India] Draft: Posting/Interacting in a Gender-Neutral Way

[A. Mani]

(This is part of a longer guidelines that I am working on).

The problem has been solved and forgotten in the history of the English language
a few times over.

Summary: Gender-nondiscriminatory and non-sexist language

0. Simply use no salutations (in Emails) or non-gendered ones and
avoid gendered references.

For the second part, this boils down to getting your pronouns right.
The best practice would be to use "they", break grammar rules on
number and do not not respect gender-normative rules.

Thus "they is pretty " should be fine. The rationale is that grammar
should follow usage and "they is pretty" was grammatically correct for
many centuries and is correct again.

Do not use s/he and such as these presume a binary state of affairs
(trans people get included) and discriminate against bi-gendered,
a-gendered people and others.

Words of salutation: "Hey Y'all"  "all y'all (plural)" "Hi = Hello"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:EN-y%27all.ogg

1. The other option is to avoid personal pronouns... it is possible if
you are never verbose enough.

References:

http://www.autostraddle.com/more-than-words-keeping-it-pronouns-pt-1-186683/

http://www.autostraddle.com/more-than-words-pronouns-pt-2-howd-gender-get-in-here-188430/

http://www.autostraddle.com/more-than-words-adjective-invective-194457/

http://web.mit.edu/trans/GenderNeutralPronouns.pdf

http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/intro.html

http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/faq.html

http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Nonsexist_language  (needs more updating)


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Best

A. Mani



A. Mani
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