I was wondering how your choice of pronoun would affect translatability and language accessibility. e.g. in Malaysia you'd just be "dia", because everyone is, but it's not indicative of your gender identity at all. In some languages "keoi" may mean something else altogether (like if you chose the English word "air" as your pronoun but in Malaysia people would think you're a water being or something). Also people who may not have been raised/living in Chinese-heavy areas like the both of us may not realise that "keoi5" is a word (and the number is not a typo) let alone a pronoun - especially if they're, say, reading the 15th reblog of a post referring you and don't know you immediately. Any thoughts? - creatrixtiara

Hey Tiara,

Being genderqueer and bi/tri-lingual comes with its own problems. Your metaphor seems to have a few holes to me though: it would hold up if I’d decided to maybe call myself Jal (to burn in Urdu/Hindi, water in Farsi). The combination of /keuih/ and 佢 is exclusive to Cantonese.

Looking at it though,

1) What does “ze” mean in other languages anyway?  Couldn’t “hir” mean something else entirely to someone not familiar with English? 

and

2) Should the responsibility of making sure cispeople accomodate my identity be resting on me? 

The whole idea was that we can have other words for being genderqueer rather than those in use by Anglophone speakers. 

Hope that answered your question :)

Thursday.

∞Posted on March 21, 2011

Notes: 7 notes

Notes

  1. thesadnessofpencils posted this
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