lkiser thoughtfully writes:
"just thought you should know. Emptywheel is a woman."
And so I should have. Thank you. My apologies. For getting it wrong, I mean. Not that she's a woman.
May I say in my defense that it did occur to me as I was writing and came to the first pronounic requirement that I did not know Emptywheel's choice of gender, and, being educated in the last century, I use "he" as the third person neuter instead of trying to come up with some rococo sentence construction that would avoid the issue entirely. So, no sexist presumption involved. Honest. Sorry.
Online, at least, one can freely choose one's gender, or none at all.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I prefer the tormented sentence construction thing. That way I have plausible deniability regarding which of my housemates I am slandering/libeling.
I will go so far in this as to use exclusively nicknames and surnames to refer to people, such that gender is never entirely apparent.
But, I'm kind of a freak.
While we're nitpicking, it's actually "emptywheel" with a lower case e. Not to be confused with Emptywheel, the racist homophobic poster on LGF. I'm kidding.
ReplyDeleteI forgot to add that I like your blog. Got here via Daou Report.
ReplyDeleteS/he is my new favorite. Although him/her and his/her are still pains in the butt.
ReplyDeleteI like your blog too.
I've been known to go with the mildly creepy old usenet/IRC "sie" and "hir" on occasion. (Also in my slightly creaky vocabulary: "SO", "MOTOS" "MOTSS".)
ReplyDeleteOf course, some of the people I hang out with, "Y'all" and "th'y'all" are more appropriate.
There are plenty of gender-ambiguous words out there. The trick is finding the set within any given group that raises the fewest eyebrows, since if you have to explain the ones you're using, you're probably going to end up making more definite statements than you would have if you'd simply picked a pronoun in the first place.