Hat Chat: Language and Gender
Channel: onesigmaoff
Date: 2016-12-04

In which I possess autocratic control of the English language and deliver a mandate regarding the use of 1984 references in the style of free form poetry. In the unlikely event that someone actually likes this, I will try to perform it with some kind of musical backing and actually wearing eye makeup because I feel like that's what it wants.

=== Transcript-ish ===
you may be wondering, who is this person?
because you don't want to assign them a gender just yet
because you recognize that the false dichotomy of the binary gender system 
fails to accurately describe the lived experiences of many people
whose identity does not fit cleanly into the box of "male" or "female"

and to answer your question, non-binary will do
i get lost in the details often myself, singular they pronouns please
thank you for asking, but let me get back to what i was saying 

i walk through the dark and byzantine cords of the internet
hearing folks mutter and fret about the newspeak i inflict on them because
they're all he's and she's and why can't that be good enough for me
why can't they call me whatever they'd like
i'm infringing on their rights

and i could waste liters of breath on dissecting what's wrong with that
but i'm not going to because that would lend the argument a sense of legitimacy it does not deserve 
instead i will now put on my literary criticism hat

i recognize my literary criticism hat is far too large for my comiclly tiny head
but this hat belonged to my grandfather who was once an editor for the Columbus Dispatch
so of all the hats i own to be my literary criticism hat this one seems most fitting 

the power of language has been frequently analyzed through the lens of science fiction
not always subtly and not always successfully
for all the shiftgrethor of The Left Hand of Darkness 
it obeyed some 19th century grammarian's Latin fetish dictate and used "he"
when anything but "he" would have had much more power in the minds of the readers

in Babel-17 poetry was a weapon, in Native Tongue language was a shield
and in George Orwell's 1984 it was a boot of oppression
a means of control 

newspeak took away the ability of the oppressed class to describe their plight
and depending on how much mileage you're willing to give the Sapir-Worf Hpyothesis 
it took away their ability to even be cognizant of their oppression

neologisms aren't newspeak
yes neo means new but that's where the similarities end 
neologisms give the users of langage power to think about and describe things
things that may have previously defied description
things like selfies, emoticons, grok, and big brother

in spite of the impression possibly left by elementary school English teachers
there is no authority governing the English language
its defined by its usage and in the interconnected world in which we live in
that usage can change quickly and quixotically  

i daresay most English users will have little want or need
to tell their bae they're on fleek
but allowing the predominantly non-white youth who do
access to that language
costs us nothing 

and need i point out that forbidding us from trying on a dressing room of descriptors
like genderqueer, greygender, genderfuck, genderfluid, or demi-man
sounds an awful lot like the more Orwellian position to take?

yet somehow the newspeak is me and we are big brother
and the poor and downtrodden are left to suffer through an existence
in which language is subject to updates
and in patch infinity plus one somebody gets acess to a word
that describes their experience of gender

if we do indeed possess the power of autocratic control of language
may i suggest
a complete ban
on any and all
allusions to 1984? 
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