Mastodawn

@glitzersachen I've been an enthusiastic fan of gender-inclusive language since elementary school, back when you could get made fun of for saying a lot of constructs that are more or less the default at this point. I'm also nonbinary. I don't think those two facts are unrelated.

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Bernie Isn't In Epstein Files Jun 25

@glitzersachen Even the most fastidious inclusive language users in my hometown use the word "guy" to refer to a girl for exactly the same reason most English speakers use "goose" to refer to a large waterfowl even if it they know it's a gander.

I've lived in a different place where using "guy" to refer to a girl will get you looked at like you have three heads and the plural usually is only used for groups of boys.

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Bernie Isn't In Epstein Files Jun 25

@glitzersachen The US altolect is somewhere in the middle, disallowing "guy" to refer to a girl and being a bit squeamish about using "guys" to refer to a group of girls.

If the dialect I grew up with was the altolect, would we be having this conversation? Maybe, but I doubt it. English has a lot of words that are marked for gender only when used contrastively, and no one really complains about any of the other ones.

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Bernie Isn't In Epstein Files Jun 25

@glitzersachen If a dialect where "guy" means male pretty exclusively was the altolect, we wouldn't have this discussion either because everyone would learn in school that using "guys" for anything other than an all-male group is a "common mistake."

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Bernie Isn't In Epstein Files

@glitzersachen The only reason this is an issue is because the altolect is kind of wishy-washy, and the altolect is the altolect because the most privileged people tend to speak it. That means the discussion has classist and regionalist underpinnings even if people don't realize or want to acknowledge it.

None of this is an endorsement of calling anyone anything they don't want to be called, of course.