There are no fishermen left in
Washington State. They are all now fishers. There are no longer any firemen,
only firefighters. The state’s clergymen have been banished to make room for a
genderless clergy. All of the college freshmen have gone on to become
sophomores and will be replaced by a new crop of first-year students. And none
of them practice penmanship anymore, only handwriting.
It’s all part of a grand Utopian
scheme of Washington’s starry-eyed efforts to banish gendered language from the
state’s constitution and official documents. Tellingly, certain phrases have
been left unaltered. You can still call a conman a conman, and a manhole will remain
a manhole. And the word seaman will remain the exclusive domain of man.
Washington is now the fourth
state (after Florida, North Carolina, and Illinois) to mandate gender-neutral
language in its official documents. The state’s Office of the Code Reviser will
keep its 40 employees busy as they pore over an estimated 40,000 sex-specific
legal references at taxpayer expense in their attempt to diligently un-gender
them.
“This was a much larger effort
than I had envisioned,” Welles told Reuters. “Mankind means man and
woman….There’s no good reason for keeping our legal terms anachronistic and
with words that do not respect our current contemporary times,” she/he/it said.
“Words matter,” commented Liz
Watson of the National Women’s Law Center regarding Washington’s move to neuter
its legal jargon. “This is important in changing hearts and minds,” and we all
know that changing hearts and minds is far more important than, oh, balancing
the budget, lowering taxes, or easing unemployment.
Sociolinguists Crispin Thurlow is
enthusiastic about the new law, possibly because they keep sociolinguists named
Crispin Thurlow employed in what are by any objective measure nonessential
jobs.
“Changing words can change what
we think about the world around us,” Thurlow says. “These tiny moments accrue
and become big movements.”
That’s the problem with tiny
moments. Unless you stop them immediately, they blossom into big movements.
But the movement’s been growing
for decades in the halls of academia and the corridors of power. “You can get
people to change their language,” claims Amy Sheldon, a professor from the
University of Minnesota. “It doesn’t automatically change whether people are
acting sexistly and non-sexistly.”
Dear Amy—you can try to get
people to “change their language” until dream-catchers magically emerge, but
you’ll only get me to use the word
“sexistly” when you pry it from my cold, dead lips.
The website to Sarah Lawrence
College—which, if I’m not mistaken, was named after a (do I dare say this?)
woman—offers Gender Neutral Language Guidelines that provide a frightening glimpse
into the latter-day tendencies to get everything backward. Their handy how-to
manual accepts the term gendered as a verb, as if sexual dimorphism is a
diaphanous social construct and one actually has to inject gender into the
language, yet it frowns upon “transgendered” in favor of “transgender,” as if
to imply that these poor creatures were born that way.
MIT offers a guide for removing
the word man from everything except, oh but of course, the word manslaughter.
The American Psychological
Association, which seems acutely afflicted with the mental disorders peculiar
to modern ‘isms, offers Guidelines to Reduce Bias in Language and, because it’s
absolutely and undeniably necessary, methods for Avoiding Heterosexual Bias in
Language.
Movements are afoot to de-gender
The Bible, the entire English language, and every language known to
mankind—sorry, I meant every language known to humanity.
A German university even switched
all masculine-generic language over to the female form.
Where will it end? Will Manhattan
become Personhattan? Will MENSA morph into PERSONSA? Will we have to hire
gender-indeterminate scriveners to alter Lincoln’s Epersoncipation
Proclamation?
But alas, this is all part of
progress. None of this is insane or trivial or reflective of people who are so
hopelessly sheltered, they’d scream at the sight of their own gender-neutral
shadow.
Still, I suppose it’s only fair
to expect that, at any given point in history, language should reflect the
times. The problem is . . . we live in far too interesting times.
