Why I Don't Spend My Time Policing Language

I wrote above about the erasure of femininity and I stand by every word. However, just because something is "right" or "correct" does not mean that every action taken in service of it is useful, strategic, or even desirable.

Language does matter. It really does. However, how we engage with others matters a ton more than language does.

We are living through multiple overlapping crises, and I've had to ask myself what kinds of acts actually protect people, build solidarity, and help us survive.

It is easy to fill our voids, our existential dreads, with self-righteousness. It is a temptation to quicken ourselves by finding the faults in others, especially when we know a community can rally around us.

Working with compassion and empathy is much much harder.

I've chosen not to spend my time correcting or policing others language (including misgendering me) not because I think the words are harmless, but because I think there are more urgent and effective way s to confront those harms.

The reality is that language is fluid and changes. Often times that fluidity isn't kind or fair. In fact, it generally will reflect the zeitgeist, which is neither kind nor fair to the feminine now a days. However, the reality is that "guys" and "dude" are becoming gender neutral terms. We can critique what the flow says about us, but fighting it is sticking your finger in the dam.

And the only way to fight it is to be prescriptive about language. Insisting that there is a "correct", "proper", or "respectable" way to speak is classist garbage, and often racist classist garbage. Asking others to speak in a certain way is actually just asking for them to conform to your in-group affectations.

I despise leftist groupthink. I hated Latinx before it was cool, and don't like "folx" either. I'm not conforming. But more importantly, what asking others to do by conforming, is telling them they are _excluded_ from the group _unless_ they conform.

This is outward social pressure away from progressive voices. This is selective pressure and purity politics in a lesser form. Call outs are not a mechanism for social change, but instead a means of creating cohesive group identity and providing a psychological reward to the person who initiated the callout.

Remember, language is mostly inherited fro our family, community, and peer group. A callout, or policing someones language, is to critique their social identity. People will inherently become defensive. At best they robotically do as told, and engage in performative correctness without examining their values. This is not justice.

Worse, it can create blowback. We are living through dangerous times. Any act which makes someone afraid to speak up is an act of despicable evil. The creation of shame, confusion, or defensiveness; making people afraid in any way, is driving them into the arms of fascism. I worry that by overcorrecting on small things, we push people away from bigger and more vital conversations.

In trying to "win" the battle of words, we are losing the war.

Ultimately, I've become more interested in effective politics than theory. I'm increasingly focused on strategy over performance. What is the most effective way to prevent queer youth from dying? To keep trans people from being legislated out of existence? To prevent women from becoming cattle? To prevent the collapse of our ecosystems and to push back against the encroaching authoritarian hellscape.

When I am serious about what that takes, it doesn't involve arguments about casual language. The fight requires empathy, DIY know-how, mutual understanding, and trust networks.

So, yes. Gender neutral dude is fucked up. No, I don't care if you use it.

#dude #dudegate #LanguageMatters #Feminism #Trans #Empathy #CalloutCulture #FuckPurityPolitics #fascism

I'm going to first talk about the erasure of women and the feminine, because if I start with effective strategies, I'm going to have this nagging at me.

I am going to talk about all the the following:
- Boob plate and chainmail bikinis
- Desexualization as a response to the inherent association of certain body shapes with sex
- Trousers, padded shoulders, and the masculine professionalism
- 2nd waves feminism's destruction of womanhood, and how the 3rd wave saved it
- "Nonbinary" clothes meaning male clothes cut a little differently.

We as a society have, for the past hundred years, had a very very big "default male" problem.

Despite feminist advances, our culture erases, devalues, and distorts femininity and treats it as a deviance from maleness. The "default male" standard is reinforced through desexualization, masculine mimicry, and the framing of neutrality and androgyny within the framework of masculinity.

I need to explain through example, because this is so pervasive as to be invisible unless you notice it.

So, let's talk about boob plate. For decades, representation of women in media often featured hypersexualized characters in molded boob armor or chainmail bikinis. Women could exist in the world, but only if their bodies were presented for consumption of the male gaze.

Yet, the response to this oversexualization wasn't to imagine armor framed to a feminine body or aesthetic, it was to erase the feminine all together. Hot takes and think pieces suggested that:
1. Armor designed for men is armor
2. Armor is already optimized
3. Realistically women should be wearing men's armor.
4. Even in fantasy.

Instead of asking how to have breasts and curves exist without feeding the male gaze, media creators and cultural critics treated all visible femininity as inherently regressive. So feminine coded forms and fashions became taboo, creating a false dichotomy between caricature or erasure.

The hard work is to disentangle the patriarchal axiom that women=sex object. The more a body exaggerates feminine dimorphism, the more we treat the person inhabiting the body as inherently sexual - regardless of their interiority.

So, woman with certain bodies are forced to hide, minimize, and masculanize them for the sake of propriety.

Women with hips, breasts, and curves are told that these features must be concealed to be taken seriously. This frames the feminine form as a disruption of the patriarchal norm that we call "neutrality", "professionalism", or "the learning environment". This narrative insists, without stating explicitly, that the body itself - and by extension the female sex - is the problem instead of confronting the lens that oversexualizes it.

So, the dominant model of professionalism in the late 20th century, as women entered the workforce, was built of masculine visual codes: trousers, boxy blazers, and shoulder pads. These weren't functional, but they allowed women to cargo-cult the existing authority structure. Feminine clothing was considered unserious, and the message was clear: to access power, you must abandon the feminine. Even now, "casual" work environments reward a "neutral" aesthetic that is centered on male fashion: jeans, t-shirts, sneakers.

Again, this hasn't only come from existing power structures. Activists have perpetuated this as well. Second wave feminism brought tremendous progress, but treated the feminine as trap instead of a choice. Womanhood was framed as an inherently imprisoning social construct, and the escape meant the erasure of femininity and the embrace of the patriarchal normalization of masculinity as the default.

The framing here is that man is the default, and adding "wo" for woman is the divergence. Thus, we center men. Therefore practicing makeup, wearing dresses, or engaging in motherhood are framed as collusion with the prison. Third wave feminism would later reclaim sex and femininity as having its own agency by rejecting the association with femininity and being victimized, and insisted that power could be found with wearing red lipstick and raising a fist.

Even within transgender spaces you find the pattern repeating. In recent years the rise of nonbinary and gender neutral fashion promised a step forward, but was a disappointing replication of these mistakes. Over and over again clothes marketed as nonbinary were often just repackaged hipster menswear cut slightly differently to accommodate a few curves.

This was not the capitalist gender revolution we were promised by the marketing hype. The tumblr feeds gooing over the fashion sites boxy cuts, loose fits, and neutral pallets, once again mistook masculinity for universality.

Femininity is too tied loud and too tied performative gender to be considered neutral. So, the "radical" attempts to transcend just replicated the death of womanhood and femininity. Neutral androgyny is just repackaged toxic masculinity.

So it is with the gender neutral use of guys.

It is a microcosm of a broader issue. Masculinity is quietly positioned as the default and femininity is absorbed into it. The fem is sidelined or erased in the process, because accommodating everyone is too complicated, and demanding better makes you difficult.

We do not say "hey gals", we don't use "gal" to refer to anyone male. "Gal" is inherently considered gendered because it refers to the feminine. Pantsuits are professional, slouchy menswear is gender neutral, but a dress is feminine. So, to use gal is to petticoat someone.

Guy is defended as inclusive, but it asks us to accept a form of inclusion that asks women to disappear into maleness and devalues the feminine.

Why? To protect the male ego. The erasure of masculinity is an attack on the male ego and male virility. Thus, the framing of dude and gender neutral is to ask for women to once again sacrifice their identity in defense of male fragility.

We are giving everyone a blazer and saying, "this uniform works for everyone".

So, no. I do not support the gender neutral use of dude, and I have long stricken it from my vocabulary.

My other post talks about why I don't spent time arguing this.

#dude #dudegate #feminism #gender #androgyny #fashion #philosophy #critique #trans