I’ve often thought about how much more complicated language would get if we had pronouns to indicate traits other than gender. Age? Race? Mental diagnosis? You’d have to know several details about people just to mention them in conversation. And the combinations and permutations of the various descriptors might result in hundreds of pronouns.
Plus, race and mental condition are spectrums; it’s hard to define just where someone falls, when the line between one side and the other is so fuzzy. But then, the same goes for gender, and we somehow think we can have pronouns for that.
TEXT OF COMIC:
I was reading a Wikipedia page about a famous transsexual.
Hmm.
A male-to-female transsexual. She wanted to be considered female, but people who objected to her lifestyle insisted she was really still male.
Well, that’s a controversial topic.
And it’s harder for Wikipedia to stay neutral on that than on most controversial topics.
Huh? Why would this one be especially hard?
Well, even the pronouns you use will reflect a bias.
The only way the article could remain completely neutral would be to avoid using pronouns altogether, and just use her name in every instance.
Abby is so wrapped up in Abby’s weird obsession with literalism that there should be a special pronoun just for talking about people as weird as Abby.
