As I occasionally mention, I'm learning Turkish on Duolingo, partly for interest (second non-Indo-European language! agglutination! vowel & consonant harmony!) and partly because it's turned out to be rather more useful in my day-to-day life than I anticipated when I started (for reasons various).

One of the things I find really very soothing about Turkish is that it's a language that doesn't have grammatical gender, and doesn't have gendered pronouns. Unfortunately, Duolingo hasn't quite caught up with current usage, which means that translations of the third-person singular pronoun "o" get marked wrong unless you use "he" or "she" (rather than "they"); obviously I stubbornly default to translating as "she".

I am also, As We Know, really very fond of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, which "she" as the universal gender-irrelevant third-person singular.

Taken together, this means I'm occasionally catching myself defaulting to gender-irrelevant/gender-unknown usage of "she" in English, and possibly drifting slightly more towards third-person singular "they" as indicating a specific gender space.

I am, as you might well imagine, rather facepalmy over the Entire Situation.

COME AND SEE THE ABLEISM INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM

( Read more... )

As ever, this goes for me only. Do not assume that anyone else does - or should - take the same attitude as I do at this stage in my life. [I note also that this is not intended for people who are misgendering me maliciously (hint: not okay).]

( And with that out of the way, let's move on to the body of the post. )