“
(there is no pepper on the table; evidently pepper perks the libido),
”
”
Tom Hillman (Digging for God)
“
Big dick energy is gender-neutral
”
”
Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
“
As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is
also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural
sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture,
a politically neutral surface on which culture acts
”
”
Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity)
“
In spoken Chinese, everything is gender neutral. There is no she or he. The more I think about this now, the more I like this about the language. Man or woman? Does it matter? A person.
”
”
Weike Wang (Chemistry)
“
Gender-neutral language isn’t about replacing an old norm with a new one. People have the right to self-determine their gender whether it be a man, woman, or a nonbinary gender. The goal of gender-neutral language is to get rid of gender normativity, not everyone’s gender.
”
”
Alok Vaid-Menon (Beyond the Gender Binary)
“
Failing to include the perspective of women is a huge driver of unintended male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as 'gender neutral'.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
It is a form of generational narcissism to change texts to suit one's own needs.
”
”
Luke Timothy Johnson (The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters)
“
What we need to do is to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive. In doing this, we gradually acquire the habit of affirmative thinking.
”
”
Ernest Shurtleff Holmes (The Philosophy of Jesus: Updated and Gender-Neutral)
“
Jesus was not the great exception; he was the great example.
”
”
Ernest Shurtleff Holmes (The Philosophy of Jesus: Updated and Gender-Neutral)
“
We were never trying to deny our femaleness. Instead, we wanted to expand the notion of what it means to be female. The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. We were considered a female band before we became merely a band; I was a female guitarist and Janet was a female drummer for years before we were simply considered a guitarist and a drummer. I think Sleater-Kinney wanted the privilege of starting from neutral ground, not from a perceived deficit or a linguistic limitation. Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly.
”
”
Carrie Brownstein (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir)
“
I'm perfectly natural the way I am. Why can't you humans ever understand that I might not want to be afflicted with gender?
”
”
Carolyn Ives Gilman (Halfway Human)
“
The climb is different even though the destination is same. Ultimately it all depends on 'What I Want' which determine success.
And 'I' is gender neutral!
”
”
Anuranjita Kumar (Can I have it all?)
“
I am a she. The mask is a he, or is actually gender-neutral. People love the character.
”
”
K. Guillory
“
Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree (“Each man in their degree”).
”
”
John McWhorter (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English)
“
Gender-neutral fashion does not start and end with the masculine for me.
”
”
Rae Spoon (Gender Failure)
“
Cross-gender behaviour is seen as less acceptable in boys than it is in girls: unlike the term ‘tomboy’ there is nothing positive implied by its male counterpart, the ‘sissy’.
”
”
Cordelia Fine (Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference)
“
in medical research is a data gap. And as I will show, failing to include the perspective of women is a huge driver of an unintended male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as ‘gender neutral’. This is what de Beauvoir meant when she said that men confuse their own point of view with the absolute truth.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
You realize it’s sexist to say man-whore, right? If you have to use the term you should at least be gender-neutral about it.
”
”
Karen M. McManus (One of Us Is Lying (One of Us is Lying, #1))
“
...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs.
Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'.
Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
“
Oh, right,” Dani waved off the error as irrelevant. “I knew it was one of those—what do they call them—gender-neutral names?
”
”
Jen Lyon (The Unfinished Line)
“
BIG DICK ENERGY IS GENDER NEUTRAL.
”
”
Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
“
We call these GPs (or combination of GPs) the “key men” (and, yes, I realize that is not gender neutral, but old habits die slowly in the private equity world). If
”
”
Scott Kupor (Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It)
“
Plainly put, the imperative to “be professional” is the imperative to be whiter, straighter, wealthier, and more masculine. A wolf in sheep’s clothing masquerading as a neutral term, professionalism hangs over the head of anyone who’s different, who deviates from the hegemony of white men.
”
”
Jacob Tobia (Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story)
“
It might seem daunting to a congregation to have to learn about pronouns, or to designate a bathroom gender-neutral, or to have difficult conversations about what it means to affirm LGBTQ+ identities. But transgender people are not a burden for Christianity, or for the church. They come bearing gifts!
”
”
Austen Hartke (Transforming: The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians)
“
There is no singular meaning of wife. That is the point. That is its meaning. To see the wife fully through a multi-faceted lens is one of the central challenges facing society in the twenty-first century. To do this, new scripts are required that employ wife as a verb and as a gender-neutral concept. These are essential if we are to create necessary new narratives, new ways of living as women and men together.
”
”
Anne Kingston (The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-first Century)
“
As American English speakers, we are perfectly at liberty to use whatever language we want; we just have to know that our words reveal our social and moral beliefs to some extent. So if one were to use the term comedienne instead of comic or the pronoun she to describe a Ferrari, they could be opening themselves up to criticism, not for flat-out sexism but definitely for expressing an indifference to gender equality. What rubs people the wrong way about political correctness is not that they can’t use certain words anymore, it’s that political neutrality is no longer an option.
”
”
Amanda Montell (Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language)
“
Between bad ideas of gender neutrality and even worse ideas of the innocence of pornography, we reach the world so vividly described by so many dissatisfied women today, one where men act like stereotypical women, and retreat from real relationships into a fantasy life via pornography (rather than Harlequin novels), and where women conversely act like stereotypical men, taking the lead in leaving their marriages and firing angry charges on the way, out of frustration and withheld sex.
”
”
Mary Eberstadt (Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution)
“
I used the word “genitals” too much in this chapter so I went on Twitter to ask what a gender-neutral word for junk was and I got three hundred responses in ten minutes without a single person’s questioning why I was asking. A few of my favorites that I didn’t get to share earlier: “niblets,” “nethers,” “naughty bits,” “no-no zone,” “squish mittens,” “Area 51,” “the danger zone,” “the south 40,” “the situation” (with a suggested circular hand motion near said area), “the Department of the Interior,” “crotchal region,” “fandanglies,” “groinulars,” “groinacopia,” “my hoopty,” “my bidness,” “my chamber of secrets,” “my charcuterie,” “front butt,” “privy parts,” “private parts,” “pirate parts” (which I suspect was a typo but now I’m embracing it), and my personal favorite, “the good china.” This is exactly why I love the Internet. That and the fact that it’s where those fancy dictionary robots that yell “cockchafer” at each other live. The Internet is a goddamn wonderland, y’all.
”
”
Jenny Lawson (Broken (In the Best Possible Way))
“
According to Flinders, all religious and spiritual traditions and specifically meditative practices—because they were built by men and for men—promote the following: self-silencing; self-naughting (destruction of the ego); resisting desire; and enclosure (turning inward, sealing off from the world). As a feminist, naming these four requirements of transcendence troubled her. “I realized that however ancient and universal these disciplines may be, they are not gender neutral at all. Formulated for the most part within monastic contexts, they cancel the basic freedoms—to say what one wants, go where one likes, enjoy whatever pleasures one can afford, and most of all, to be somebody—that have normally defined male privilege” (emphasis mine).
”
”
Holly Whitaker (Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol)
“
Children weren’t color-coded at all until the early twentieth century: in the era before Maytag, all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy, and faithfulness, symbolized femininity.
”
”
Peggy Orenstein (Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture)
“
The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.
”
”
Manon Hedenborg White (Double Toil and Gender Trouble? Performativity and Femininity in the Cauldron of Esotericism Research)
“
One study confirmed that women’s influence is so pegged to warmth and appearing caring and prosocial that the “performance plus confidence equals power and influence” formula that’s so effective for men blows up in women’s faces. The study’s author concludes: “Self-confidence is gender-neutral, the consequences of appearing self-confident are not.” Portraying confidence does not work for women, so telling women to simply be more confident is twisted.
”
”
Elise Loehnen (On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good)
“
but there are many languages on earth that are basically gender neutral, using the same word for he, she, and it, or not using pronouns at all. You’ve probably heard of some of them. They include: Armenian, Comanche, Finnish, Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Quechua, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.
”
”
Dashka Slater (The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives)
“
We keep your entire childhood electronically monitored to such a degree that it makes the Big Brother house look like a damn wonder of integrity, and we go to baby swimming lessons and buy breathable, practical clothing in gender-neutral colours and we’re just so insanely, insanely terrified of making a mistake.
”
”
Fredrik Backman (Things My Son Needs to Know About The World: From the New York Times Bestselling Author of Anxious People and My Friends)
“
Using gender-neutral language isn't about being politically correct, it's just about being correct.
”
”
Alok Vaid-Menon
“
the ‘generic masculine’ (using words like ‘he’ in a gender-neutral way) is not in fact read generically.20 It is read overwhelmingly as male.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
male bias is so firmly embedded in our psyche that even genuinely gender-neutral words are read as male.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
gender in and of itself is neutral. It’s just a form of expression or a lens through which we view the world.
”
”
Zachary Zane (Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto)
“
It’s easy to slam phone manufacturers and social media platforms as sexist (and, as we shall see, they are, if often unknowingly), but the reality is that even if they had somehow managed to design an image of a ‘gender neutral’ runner, most of us would still have read that runner as male, because we read most things as male unless they are specifically marked as female.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our "gender-neutral" society," there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under fifteen or over sixty-five made it. Only 5 percent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three percent of men aged 20 to 24 made it.
”
”
Mark Steyn (After America: Get Ready for Armageddon)
“
Feminist ideology about the goal of gender-neutrality and the absence of innate differences between males and females goes out the window when it comes to the subject of domestic violence.
”
”
Phyllis Schlafly
“
Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.73 This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased. An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back74 – perhaps working on their ‘polite interrupting’75 skills. But there’s a problem with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn’t gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.76 He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
I am a teller of truths, a slayer of patriarchs, a fearless metaphysician. I teabag the foes of justice with a gender-neutral scrotum. I suckle the babes of hope with my sinewy teats of equality.
”
”
Titania McGrath (Woke: A Guide to Social Justice)
“
Since in Arabic there is not a gender-neutral pronoun such as "it," Allah uses huwa or "He" in reference to Himself because in Arabic the male gender form is inclusive of the female, not exclusive.
”
”
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
“
She doubted a generation that had grown up with WAP, murder hornets, Covid, cataclysmic social unrest, and being forcibly home-schooled by a bunch of depressed day drinkers really understood the threat of pool halls, but Leigh had to hand it to the drama teacher for putting on a gender-neutral production of The Music Man, one of the least offensive and most tedious musicals ever staged by a middle school.
”
”
Karin Slaughter (False Witness)
“
When I decided to retire from the gender binary, the narrative that I had about being a man stuck in a woman's body didn't make sense anymore, unless I was a gender-neutral person who'd been stuck in a man's body stuck in a woman's body all along. I started to consider that I was not essentially a gender, and that bodies should not be gendered based on the rigid binary system. I decided that my gender and sexuality had been a fluid narrative that I had constructed based on the options that I was given. I had not been a man or a woman for any reason other than that I had believed that I was one. Now that I had the option of opting out of the binary, the story could expand and evolve to include that identification as part of my history.
”
”
Rae Spoon (Gender Failure)
“
The struggle is real. Yet when girls strike back against this fatigue, society casts them as deviant—as disruptive to the order of a (supposedly race- and gender-neutral) social structure without consideration of what might be fueling their agitation.
”
”
Monique W. Morris (Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools)
“
Words like mompreneur, SHE-EO, and girl boss illuminate the notion that entrepreneur and CEO are not actually gender-neutral teens but are tacitly coded as male. The suggest that when a woman endeavors in business, we can’t help but to cutesy-fy her title.
”
”
Amanda Montell (Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language)
“
That’s exactly the point: when the playing field is uneven to begin with, you don’t have to be “a bad person” to benefit from nasty institutions or unwarranted privilege. You don’t have to be a bad person or even have bad intentions to personally profit from sexism, homophobia, or transphobia. You don’t have to do anything. As a heterosexual, cisgender masculine guy, you simply have to throw your name in the ring against someone like me and automatically you have those forces on your side. All you really have to do is say nothing against them. All you really have to do is keep quiet, remain “neutral” in the face of fucked up power structures, and those fucked up power structures will go on to do what they do best: walk all over people of difference. But just barely.
”
”
Jacob Tobia (Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story)
“
Throughout even the most recent applications of Theory, then, we see radical skepticism that knowledge can be objectively, universally, or neutrally true. This leads to a belief that rigor and completeness come not from good methodology, skepticism, and evidence, but from identity-based “standpoints” and multiple “ways of knowing.”33 That such an approach doesn’t tend to work is considered unimportant because it is deemed to be more just. That is, this belief proceeds from an ought that is not necessarily concerned about what is.
”
”
Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
“
This is how Jeremy talks to her: like they’re bros. Jeremy hasn’t even called her “Renee” since night one, when he reduced her to a monosyllable. If guys want to marry you, they give you pet names, not gender-neutral monikers like “Ren” that are also used by insane cartoon chihuahuas.
”
”
Samantha Allen (Patricia Wants to Cuddle)
“
Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party; Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention.
”
”
The Washington Post (The Original Watergate Stories (Kindle Single) (The Washington Post Book 1))
“
The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare," while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and
cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a
technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.
”
”
Lisa Duggan (The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy)
“
Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women, whether or not they are displaced. That would require a wholesale restructuring of society and an end to male violence. But getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
someone like me and automatically you have those forces on your side. All you really have to do is say nothing against them. All you really have to do is keep quiet, remain “neutral” in the face of fucked up power structures, and those fucked up power structures will go on to do what they do best: walk all over people of difference.
”
”
Jacob Tobia (Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story)
“
Given the steady stream of abuse reports from around the world, perhaps it’s time to recognise that the assumption that male staff can work in female facilities as they do in male facilities is another example of where gender neutrality turns into gender discrimination. Perhaps sex-segregation needs to extend beyond sanitation facilities, and perhaps no male staff should be in positions of power over vulnerable women. Perhaps. But if this is going to happen, authorities would first have to countenance the idea that male officials might be exploiting the women they are meant to be variously helping, guarding or processing. And, currently, authorities are not countenancing this.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
When I consider the seven women I chose, I see that most of them were great for reasons that derive precisely from their being women, not in spite of it; and what made them great has nothing to do with their being measured against or competing with men. In other words, their accomplishments are not gender-neutral but are rooted in their singularity as women. All
”
”
Eric Metaxas (7 Women: And the Secret of Their Greatness)
“
In Sweden, enforcing gender stereotypes in schools has actually been illegal since 1998. Instead, the government funds gender-neutral kindergartens, where you’ll find teachers saying “friends” instead of “boys” and “girls”; lessons are taught using gender-neutral mediums, like nature and modeling clay; toy animals replace baby dolls; and characters in books are pictured defying traditional gender roles
”
”
Amanda Montell (Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language)
“
It is standard for academics to subject their work to rigorous critique by peers: papers get torn to shreds in seminars and referee reports, and experiments pored over to look for potentially confounding variables. And for good reason: history is littered with bad theories and empty theoretical concepts, from inner demons to bodily humours to phlogiston. There’s no reason to think there isn’t room for similar error here – in fact, there is extra reason to think there is, inasmuch as some (though not all) trans people so clearly desperately want gender identity theory to work, which might be affecting their neutrality. Many trans people assume – wrongly, as I will eventually argue – that the existence and recognition of their political and legal rights depends upon gender identity theory’s correctness.
”
”
Kathleen Stock (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism)
“
For example, when we say that women give birth, we neglect that some women are not capable of giving birth while some trans men and nonbinary people are. The gender-neutral alternative “people who give birth” holds all of these realities just like the gender-neutral “siblings” includes brothers, sisters, and nonbinary siblings. Using gender-neutral language isn’t about being politically correct, it’s just about being correct.
”
”
Alok Vaid-Menon (Beyond the Gender Binary)
“
The word “Allah” can be seen as the same singular God that is referred to in the Torah in Hebrew as Elohim, or spoken by Jesus in Aramaic as the strikingly similar Allaha. Allah is neither female nor male, for He is beyond anything in creation and transcends all the limits that the human mind can create. Since in Arabic there is not a gender-neutral pronoun such as “it,” Allah uses huwa or “He” in reference to Himself because in Arabic the male gender form is inclusive of the female, not exclusive.
”
”
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
“
The California Board of Education provides, through its virtual libraries, a book intended for kindergarten teachers to read to their students: Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity by Brook Pessin-Whedbee.19 The author begins with a familiar origin story: “Babies can’t talk, so grown-ups make a guess by looking at their bodies. This is the sex assigned to you at birth, male or female.”20 This author runs the gamut of typical kindergarten gender identity instruction. Who Are You? offers kids a smorgasbord of gender options. (“These are just a few words people use: trans, genderqueer, non-binary, gender fluid, transgender, gender neutral, agender, neutrois, bigender, third gender, two-spirit….”) The way baby boomers once learned to rattle off state capitals, elementary school kids are now taught today’s gender taxonomy often enough to have committed it to memory. And while gender ideologues insist they are merely presenting an objective ontology, it is hard to miss that they seem to hope kids will pick a fun, “gender-creative”21 option for themselves.
”
”
Abigail Shrier (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters)
“
But the next thing she says provides something of an explanation for how male-default thinking could be so prevalent in a world that is, after all, 50% female. ‘It’s just a feature of human psychology,’ she explains, to assume that our own experiences mirror those of human beings in general. This is a concept in social psychology that is sometimes called ‘naive realism’ and sometimes called ‘projection bias’. Essentially, people tend to assume that our own way of thinking about or doing things is typical. That it’s just normal. For white men this bias is surely magnified by a culture that reflects their experience back to them, thereby making it seem even more typical. Projection bias amplified by a form of confirmation bias, if you like. Which goes some way towards explaining why it is so common to find male bias masquerading as gender neutrality. If the majority of people in power are men – and they are – the majority of people in power just don’t see it. Male bias just looks like common sense to them. But ‘common sense’ is in fact a product of the gender data gap.
”
”
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
I think the whole area has become politicized,” said psychotherapist Marcus Evans, who resigned from England’s national gender clinic, the Tavistock Foundation, over the lack of careful protocols in its treatment of transgender-identified children. “The drugs, you know, the hormone blockers, first of all, they say it’s a neutral act. What are they talking about? You’re going to powerfully interfere with a person’s biological development,” he said to me over Skype. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it…. But you don’t say it’s a neutral act…. They’re not with their peers anymore.
”
”
Abigail Shrier (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters)
“
How different it could all have been … Taylor Swift was never meant to be a singer-songwriter; she was supposed to become a stockbroker. Her parents even chose her Christian name with a business path in mind. Her mother, Andrea, selected a gender-neutral name for her baby girl so that when she grew up and applied for jobs in the male-dominated finance industry no one would know if she were male or female. It was a plan that came from a loving place, but it was not one that would ever be realised. Instead, millions and millions of fans across the world would know exactly which gender Andrea’s firstborn was, without ever meeting her. In Taylor’s track ‘The Best Day’, which touchingly evokes a childhood full of wonder, she sings of her ‘excellent’ father whose ‘strength is making me stronger’. That excellent father is Scott Kingsley Swift, who studied business at the University of Delaware. He lived in the Brown residence hall. There, he made lots of friends, one of whom, Michael DiMuzio, would later cross paths with Taylor professionally. Scott graduated with a first-class degree and set about building his career in similarly impressive style. Perhaps a knack for business is in the blood: his father and grandfather also worked in finance. Scott set up his own investment-banking firm called the Swift
”
”
Chas Newkey-Burden (Taylor Swift: The Whole Story - Free Sample)
“
Even when a word has been in usage for a long time, those whop are suspicious of what that means in terms of gender are quick to claim the change is too fast. 'They' has been used as a singular pronoun in English for hundreds of years; we find examples of the singular 'they' in the works of Shakespeare, Austen, and Swift. But trans people like me, who use the pronoun 'they' as a gender-neutral alternative to 'he' or 'she,' are often mislabeled in the media by editors who struggle with its usage. By implying that trans people are faddish and difficult about words, writers can cast aspersions on the validity of our language - and our selves. By claiming that our words are too hard to understand, the media perpetuates the idea that we are too hard to understand, and suggests that there's no point in trying.
”
”
C.N. Lester (Trans Like Me)
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At first glance, professionalism tries to convince you it’s a neutral word, merely meant to signify a collection of behaviors, clothing, and norms “appropriate” for the workplace. We just ask that everyone be professional, the cis white men will say, smiles on their faces, as if they’re not asking for much. We try to maintain a professional office environment. But never has a word in the English language been so loaded with racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or trans exclusion. Whenever someone is telling you to “be professional,” they’re really saying, “be more like me.” If you’re black, “being professional” can often mean speaking differently, avoiding black cultural references, or not wearing natural hair. If you’re not American, “being professional” can mean abandoning your cultural dress for Western business clothes. If you’re not Christian, “being professional” can mean potentially removing your hijab to fit in, sitting by while your officemates ignore your need for kosher or halal food, sucking up the fact that your office puts up a giant Christmas tree every year. If you’re low-income or working class, “being professional” can mean spending money you don’t have on work clothes—“dressing nicely” for a job that may not pay enough for you to really afford to do so. If you’re a woman, “being professional” can mean navigating a veritable minefield of double standards. Show some skin, but don’t be a slut. Wear heels, but not too high, and not too low, either. Wear form-fitting clothes, but not too form-fitting. We offer maternity leave, but don’t “interrupt your career” by taking it. And if you’re trans like me, “being professional” can mean putting your identity away unless it conforms to dominant gender norms.
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Jacob Tobia (Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story)
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By trying to eliminate the sexual division of labor that was the basis for family life, feminists have not created a gender-neutral utopia, with men and women interchangeably caring for children and earning wages. Instead, they have merely placed women as well as men on the employment treadmill. By flooding the workforce with new workers, they have driven down male wages, intensifying pressures on families to send the woman into the workforce and for the man to work longer hours, giving him less involvement with his family. The result is “big business socialism,” where every adult must work and provide tax revenue for the growing state machinery. Meanwhile children are institutionalized in day care and extended school days and activities for ever-longer hours at ever-younger ages, their childhoods regimented in preparation for similar lives as worker bees and suppliers of state revenue.
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Stephen Baskerville
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This book focuses on science and development as patriarchal projects not as a denial of other sources of patriarchy, such as religion, but because they are thought to be class, culture, and gender neutral.
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Vandana Shiva (Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development)
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This has further spawned a number of self-interested beliefs that are closely and proudly held by the tech “tribe,” including notions such as “as long as I produce outstanding results I won't be fired,” that technology itself isn't good or bad, but neutral (“there is no bias in code”), tech “solutionism” (“tech will solve everything,” “we just need better tech, more tech,” etc.), gender/race-neutral approach (“we only hire the best”), and so on.
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Maelle Gavet (Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech's Empathy Problem and How to Fix It)
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It’s tempting to think that the male bias that is embedded in language is simply a relic of more regressive times, but the evidence does not point that way. The world’s ‘fastest-growing language’,34 used by more than 90% of the world’s online population, is emoji.35 This language originated in Japan in the 1980s and women are its heaviest users:36 78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emoji.37 And yet, until 2016, the world of emojis was curiously male. The emojis we have on our smartphones are chosen by the rather grand-sounding ‘Unicode Consortium’, a Silicon Valley-based group of organisations that work together to ensure universal, international software standards. If Unicode decides a particular emoji (say ‘spy’) should be added to the current stable, they will decide on the code that should be used. Each phone manufacturer (or platform such as Twitter and Facebook) will then design their own interpretation of what a ‘spy’ looks like. But they will all use the same code, so that when users communicate between different platforms, they are broadly all saying the same thing. An emoji face with heart eyes is an emoji face with heart eyes. Unicode has not historically specified the gender for most emoji characters. The emoji that most platforms originally represented as a man running, was not called ‘man running’. It was just called ‘runner’. Similarly the original emoji for police officer was described by Unicode as ‘police officer’, not ‘policeman’. It was the individual platforms that all interpreted these gender-neutral terms as male. In 2016, Unicode decided to do something about this. Abandoning their previously ‘neutral’ gender stance, they decided to explicitly gender all emojis that depicted people.38 So instead of ‘runner’ which had been universally represented as ‘male runner’, Unicode issued code for explicitly male runner and explicitly female runner. Male and female options now exist for all professions and athletes. It’s a small victory, but a significant one.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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When gender neutral parenting, or discussing the arbitrary nature of the of the gender binary is brought up, people are often accused of 'shoving an agenda down kids' throats.' But what people fail to see is that the 'norm' itself is an agenda, and at least deconstructing the binary is one with the freedom to choose beyond imposed and meaningless limitations." - Rowan Ellis
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Ashley Mardell (The ABC's of LGBT+)
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The problem isn’t that women are irrationally polite. It’s that they know – whether consciously or not – that ‘polite’ interrupting simply doesn’t exist for them. So telling women to behave more like men – as if male behaviour is a gender-neutral human default – is unhelpful, and in fact potentially damaging.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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Gender and sex can, and do, mean different things in different contexts. More than that, they interact. Why is it that we classify bodies into "male" and "female" first, rather than through any other categorization? Why do so many ideas about sex cleave so strongly to gender stereotypes? Is it possible to consider the body as something neutral that exists apart from the sexed and gendered terms we use to describe it?
Some trans people would prefer to avoid this argument altogether; others to others to bring it to a head. I stand with the latter option. Not because trans people are a problem to be explained away - validated or refuted by a singular notion of scientific truth - but because, when the facts of our supposed sexes are used to invalidate and endanger us, it is too dangerous not to. Not only that: the possibilities as to what trans people can teach us all about the science of sex and gender are too precious to dismiss.
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C.N. Lester (Trans Like Me)
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Sexism, and its expressions, are multi-layered and complex. Often, it comes in gender-neutral language, decorated with gendered accents. It comes in the form of pink walls for young girls and blue for young boys. Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe’s. Skirts and dresses and Bermuda shorts. Fairy tales that shamelessly teach that women need a Prince Charming and superheroes who are almost always men. That boys don’t cry. It comes in the form of ‘protective’ mothers and fathers who don’t allow their daughters to date, while the son has many girlfriends. Or in the idea that while a woman may be doing well for herself, she must marry a man who does better than her or marry at all! And the over-glorification of motherhood that carefully cloaks the sacrifices a woman makes to raise a child and systematically alienates the man — the father. There is sexism everywhere if you stop and pay attention.
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Prachi Gangwani (Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India)
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My experience in classrooms and congregations demonstrates that while some reader/hearers read and hear God as gender-neutral or gender-inclusive, many read and hear “God” as male, as the polar opposite of “goddess” (which in their construction does not merit the capital G of “God”).
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Wilda C. Gafney (Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne)
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When you’re not a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied actor, of course, you never quite walk into the room as a blank state… how easy it is to forget the privilege to having a body that can walk into a rehearsal room neutral, crisp as new page
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Sarah Walker (The First Time I Thought I Was Dying)
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Most founder-led and family-owned businesses, as well as many small businesses that have been bought by an individual and even most franchises, have what I call a paternal owner. I mean this in a gender-neutral sense: The owner is a dominant leader, who takes sole responsibility—and control—of the business. The business is an extension of the individual or their family.
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Greg Harmeyer (Impact with Love: Building Business for a Better World)
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I have found that sometimes when people want to use the phone it's just because they don't want to take the time to organize their thoughts into a written form. But sometimes it's because they want to put me on the spot and pressure me into doing something I don't really want to do, like take on more work, or accept less pay, or cause some other inconvenience to myself. In such cases, this is ingressive energy that I want to neutralize. I can do it quite simply: by using email instead of a phone call.
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Eugenia Cheng (x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender)
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There never was a war of the free world against fascism, there was only war between two versions of fascism - because the so-called free world has tortured and massacred more lives than the third reich could only dream of.
There never was a world war between good and evil, there was only war between two evils. There never was a world war against tyranny, there was only war between an established tyrant regime and a rising one. The real first world war has just begun - the war between good and evil - the war between emancipation and occupation - between inclusion and exclusion - between expansion and contraction - between reason and rigidity - between humanity and inhumanity. I call it, World War Human.
And unlike previous times, we won't win this war by old-fashioned bullets and bombs, or by deceit and diplomacy. The World War Human can only be won by education, and education alone - by an ardent, absolute, unambiguous, unbending, undoctrinated, unphobic, unwhitewashed, decolonized, nonpartisan, gender neutral, valiant, self-correcting and conscientious execution of education.
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Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets)
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The real first world war has just begun - the war between good and evil - the war between emancipation and occupation - between inclusion and exclusion - between expansion and contraction - between reason and rigidity - between humanity and inhumanity. I call it, World War Human.
And unlike previous times, we won't win this war by old-fashioned bullets and bombs, or by deceit and diplomacy. The World War Human can only be won by education, and education alone - by an ardent, absolute, unambiguous, unbending, undoctrinated, unphobic, unwhitewashed, decolonized, nonpartisan, gender neutral, valiant, self-correcting and conscientious execution of education.
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Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets)
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Ibrahim presses play, and they all watch as the figure in the motorcycle helmet walks down the row of lockers and stops in front of 531. The figure inserts a key.
'Looks like he's having trouble with the lock too,' says Joyce.
'Or she,' says Ron. Ibrahim notes that Ron is getting much sharper on his gender neutrality.
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Richard Osman (The Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club, #2))
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And so these differences go ignored, and we proceed as if the male body and its attendant life experience are gender neutral. This is a form of discrimination against women.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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The market is not a neutral plethora. The market is raced, classed, and gendered.
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João M. Paraskeva (Unaccomplished Utopia: Neoconservative Dismantling of Public Higher Education in the European Union)
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And as I will show, failing to include the perspective of women is a huge driver of an unintended male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as ‘gender neutral’. This is what de Beauvoir meant when she said that men confuse their own point of view with the absolute truth.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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If we are committed to fair equality of opportunity, then rights to parental leave should be gender-neutral.
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Daniel Chandler (Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society)
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Critical and feminist theorists show that most leadership research, including studies of transformational leadership, continue to present prescriptions - heroic or post-heroic - as if they were gender neutral. The critics argue that, although there is a search for a different kind of leader- a 'post-heroic hero' who displays characteristics different from the traditional model - even this leader continues 'to enjoy the same godlike reverence for individualism associated with traditional models'.
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Amanda Sinclair (Leadership for the Disillusioned: Moving Beyond Myths and Heroes to Leading That Liberates)
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Many youth who come out in adolescence report not having a strong sense of gender during preschool, kindergarten, or elementary school. Young children are physically fairly gender neutral. If a six-year-old wears girls' cloths and grows long hair, she will be seen as a girl. If the same child cuts their hair and wears boys' people will assume he is a boy. Its only with secondary sex characteristics such as breast, facial hair, and a deeper voice that clothed bodies become more clearly male or female. As a result, gender may not have seemed particularly important for some trans children. It is the onset of puberty and the increased ways they are sexed/gendered in the world that typically precipitate the emergence of adolescent onset gender dysphoria. [page 90]
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Elijah C. Nealy
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I don't like shopping. In movies that depict a futuristic dystopia, people tend to wear uniforms in a single colour, usually a metallic onesie with a high neck and gender-neutral panelling in the front. I am fine with this. I look great in silver and gold.
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Scaachi Kour
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In another invaluable service to the Allies, the resistance movements in every captive country helped rescue and spirit back to England thousands of British and American pilots downed behind enemy lines, as well as other Allied servicemen caught in German-held territory. In Belgium, for example, a young woman named Andrée de Jongh set up an escape route called the Comet Line through her native country and France, manned mostly by her friends, to return Britons and Americans to England. De Jongh herself escorted more than one hundred servicemen over the Pyrenees Mountains to safety in neutral Spain. As de Jongh and her colleagues knew, being active in the resistance, regardless of gender, was far more perilous than fighting on the battlefield or in the air. If captured, uniformed servicemen on the Western front were sent to prisoner of war camps, where Geneva Convention rules usually applied. When resistance members were caught, they faced torture, the horrors of a German concentration camp, and/or execution. The danger of capture was particularly great for those who sheltered British or American fighting men, most of whom did not speak the language of the country in which they were hiding and who generally stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. As one British intelligence officer observed, “It is not an easy matter to hide and feed a foreigner in your midst, especially when it happens to be a red-haired Scotsman of six feet, three inches, or a gum-chewing American from the Middle West.” James Langley, the head of a British agency that aided the European escape lines, later estimated that, for every Englishman or American rescued, at least one resistance worker lost his or her life. Andrée de Jongh managed to escape that fate. Caught in January 1943 and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, she survived the war because, although she freely admitted to creating the Comet Line, the Germans could not believe that a young girl had devised such an intricate operation. IN
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Lynne Olson (Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour)
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I’m trying to modify my NYPD piggishness. I have not hit on one single—or married—female in the ATTF. I was actually getting a reputation as a man who was either devoted to duty, or was devoted to some off-scene girlfriend, or was gay, or who had a low libido, or who perhaps had been hit below the belt by one of those bullets. In any case, a whole new world was opening up to me now. Women in the office talked to me about their boyfriends and husbands, asked me if I liked their new hairstyles, and generally treated me in a gender-neutral manner. The girls haven’t yet asked me to go shopping with them or shared recipes with me, but maybe I’ll be invited to a baby shower. The old John Corey is dead, buried under a ton of politically correct memos from Washington. John Corey, NYPD Homicide, is history. Special Contract Agent John Corey, ATTF, has emerged. I feel clean, baptized in Potomac holy water, reborn and accepted into the ranks of the pure angelic hosts with whom I work.
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Nelson DeMille (The Lion's Game (John Corey, #2))
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(Latinx is the gender-neutral term we use to challenge the Spanish language’s gender binary.)
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Rowan Blanchard (Together We Rise: Behind the Scenes at the Protest Heard Around the World)
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What is worth winning in this world? The three veds (sufferings). The one who has conquered ved (sufferings), he has conquered the whole world. What are the three veds (the sufferings)? The male, the female and the neutral gender.
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Dada Bhagwan (Brahmacharya: Celibacy)
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Tinor was much younger than Jane had thought. Children were considered genderless until puberty in sectilian culture. If she spent any time with this child or any other, she’d have to remember to use the third set of pronouns, the gender-neutral set, or risk making a fool of herself.
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Jennifer Foehner Wells (Remanence (Confluence, #2))
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Normative statements about "women's roles" and girls' and women's behaviour being "appropriately feminine" were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as "naked facts" of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour.
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Rebecca M. Jordan-Young (Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences)
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New research in the Journal of Pediatrics suggests that gay, lesbian and bisexual young adults from very rejecting families (as opposed to families who were neutral or mildly rejecting) are nearly six times more likely to have major depression and three to five times more likely to use illegal drugs or have unprotected sex,” the article reported.
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Lori Duron (Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son)
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The language in which the revealed Hindu texts are composed, namely, Sanskrit, has a neuter gender in addition to the masculine and feminine. In fact, the ultimate reality, the Supreme God of Hindus, is often described as neutral gender. A verse of Rigveda says that all the various deities are but descriptions of One Truth (ekam sat), and it is in neuter gender as if to emphasise that God is not male.
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M.L. Ahuja (Women in Indian Mythology)
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Cherokee is not English Sex-gender Neutral Cherokee does not make a distinction between “he”, “she”, or “it”. Whenever you see an English translation of “he”, you can usually substitute “she” or “it”. To save space and typing, only one of the “he”, “she”, or “it” words will be provided depending on context.
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Michael Joyner (Cherokee Language Lessons)
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MANLINESS noun man·li·ness \'man-lē-nәs\ (1.) the set of qualities considered appropriate for or characteristic of men —Merriam-Webster’s definition (1.) the last impediment to a gender-neutral society, and the final refuge of white, cisgendered patriarchy (2.) an anachronistic set of behaviors that are the hallmark of male privilege —A Leftist’s definition
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Eric Bolling (Wake Up America: The Nine Virtues That Made Our Nation Great—and Why We Need Them More Than Ever)
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…This lack of morality is not limited to rank. In Alaba, for example, even the simplest social structures are ignored. Alabans claim that concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ do not apply, and insist they have either five or six genders, depending on how they are counted, between which these heathens will move depending on their whims. As a tonal language, the same sound with different inflections carries different meanings, so a Naridan must be very careful to avoid misrepresenting himself: for example, ‘mè’ is ‘high masculine’, used by those in whom the fire of manhood burns strongly, while ‘mê’ is ‘low masculine’, for in Alaban society it is no great shame for a man to admit to womanly character. The largely uninflected ‘me’ is the gender-neutral formal, but ‘mé’ is ‘low feminine’, favoured by women who lack the qualities appropriate for their gender, and ‘mē’ is ‘high feminine’, the only appropriate usage for any Naridan lady of decency. Even stranger is ‘më’, used only by those who insist they have no gender, even in the most informal settings. Such immorality is hardly unsurprising in a land that has provided succour to exiled pretenders since the Splintering.
Needless to say, Naridans should resist these pernicious local customs and only use the ‘high’ forms for themselves when visiting this land, lest they cause themselves considerable embarrassment.
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Mike Brooks (The Black Coast (The God-King Chronicles, #1))