I did my master’s thesis on emergency contraception and I used gender-neutral language throughout. Most people didn’t notice. My supervisor occasionally asked me to use the word “women” instead of the word “people” but didn’t care enough to follow up when I ignored him. None of the people who reviewed and marked my thesis made any comment on the language I chose to use.
Using gender-neutral language was easy and I suffered no consequences for doing so as an academic, even when writing a detailed thesis on human reproductive biology.
I compared a sample of articles from two different newspapers for my MA dissertation and used the gender neutral pronoun “they/them” whenever I refered to myself and to the author(s) of any article that did not state the author’s name. Nobody even noticed.
Gender neutral language is so easy to use in English, and stuff like the singular “they” is so established that absolutely no-one will take offence or even notice, unless they specifically look for it because they WANT to be a dick about it.
every time I use “they” to refer to a single gender-unknown person on Tumblr, another piece of my grammar-filled heart shatters, and the pieces scatter at the bottom of hell
“They” has been a singular pronoun for hundreds of years, you melodramatic dipshit.
well… actually… no… they is plural. people use they when they should use he, she, or it.
dense motherfucker, the pronoun “they” is an english equivalent for the third person indefinite singular and has been for literally centuries. it remains morphologically and syntactically plural therefore you don’t need to shit your little pantaloons at compromising your surely rock solid grammar rules.
i guarantee every fuckin time you’ve ever had to refer to a person of an unknown gender you’ve used “they” subconsciously. (“The post clerk gave me a message for you.” “Oh, what did they say?”) but you only have a problem with it when people specify it as a pronoun for themselves because you’re a shitlord i fuckin guess.
It’s not about whether a character is trans or gay. Gay characters make sense. People have been gay for millennia. Trans however. Not the case. In a high fantasy setting, how in the balls are they going to perform surgery where they change the sex of the character??? It makes no sense at all. They’d have to explain it. And remember, this is high fantasy, Game of Thrones is also in that category. This is a time where they would reach into your body with an object strikingly similar to a salad tossing spoon to yank out a small piece of arrowhead. Pretty sure they hadn’t figured out a surgery as complex as a sex change…
The people complaining that there aren’t enough gay/trans people in stuff like this are just as bad if not moreso than the people who complain about gay/trans people being in stuff like this.
Create your own fantasy world filled with nothing but gay/trans people. Make it so that being heterosexual is the minority. All the power to you. Good luck trying to create it.
You don’t have to have surgery to be transgender. Lots of transgender people don’t. Transgender people, people who identify with the gender not corresponding with their birth sex, have existed before the surgery. And the existence of and recognition of a third sex or dual sex existed in pre-modern times in lots of places are the world.
So, for one, your “how in the balls are they going to perform surgery“ question doesn’t actually matter. They don’t need to in order for transgender people to exist.
But if they did want to include transgender people who undergo physical changes to reflect their gender/sexual identity, in a HIGH FANTASY world, there’s actually a really easy answer to that:
*ahem*
“How are you going to make someone trans in a fantasy setting full of magic spells, potions, and artifacts?”
shout out to the elixir of sex shift for covering more than just a gender binary.
also lets not forget that in ye old days (aka time of the ancient greeks (aka the bc years)) that people drank the urine of pregnant mares to feminize themselves. like, trans people find a way 😉
…the fucking Sumerians had trans people, brosky.
Sumerians.
They didn’t even have fucking iron, but they had trans women.
also there is a person named John/Eleanor Rykener who was a prostitute in medieval Europe and dressed as a woman and went by Eleanor when having sex with men. We have transcripts from the interrogation they underwent after being accused of sodomy, but we don’t know how John/Eleanor saw themself, and if they were trans or something close to bisexual? Because medieval ideas of sex say that men are active and women are passive and that’s why it doesn’t work for men to have sex with men (or women with women) because one has to take on the role of the other gender to do it. So did they see themself as a woman in a man’s body, or did they think their attraction to men meant that they were female when having sex with men? It’s a really interesting case even if there are very few concrete answers.
@mitch-turn getting dragged through the rainbow of truth
Pass Through Fire 