The Power of Inclusive Language

Anyone who has ever experienced bullying or teasing of any kind has probably heard the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Really though, words can hurt, and the words we use matter. They can heal, connect, and empower, or they can harm and exclude. Words have power, and in today’s episode of In the Den, Sara talks with special guest Alex Kapitan to unpack what inclusive language really means, why it’s more than just "political correctness," and how we can all take steps to communicate more authentically and inclusively in our everyday lives.

Special Guest: Alex Kapitan

Alex is the founder of Radical Copyeditor, a transformative resource for using language in ways that align with our deepest values of equity and justice. Alex is a queer and trans activist, writer, speaker, and editor who’s dedicated to helping people use language as a tool for liberation, rather than oppression. 

Links From the Show: 

• Radical Copyeditor website: https://radicalcopyeditor.com/
• More about Alex here: https://radicalcopyeditor.com/author/alexkapitan/
• Join Mama Dragons today: www.mamadragons.com 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara Lawall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Anyone who has ever experienced bullying or teasing of any kind has probably heard that age-old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” But words can hurt and the words we use matter—more often than we often realize. Words can heal, connect, and empower. They can also harm and exclude. They have power in the stories they shape, and in the change they can inspire. And the language we use is so important to our queer kids and beloveds, as many of us have experienced when as we have stumbled. And we all want our kids, and all people, to feel seen and valued, and language is a huge part of that.

So, today we’re going to take a deep dive into the power of words, exploring a topic that is essential for building a more loving and compassionate world: inclusive language. So I am thrilled to welcome our guest today, Alex Kapitan. Alex is the founder of Radical Copyeditor, a transformative resource for using language in ways that align with our deepest values of equity and justice. Alex is a queer and trans activist, a writer, a speaker, and editor who’s dedicated to helping people use language as a tool for liberation, rather than oppression. 

Together, we’re going to unpack what inclusive language really means, why it’s more than just "political correctness," and how we can take steps to communicate more authentically and inclusively in our everyday lives. Alex, welcome to In the Den! I’m so excited to have this conversation today.

ALEX: Thank you so much, Sara. I’m so delighted to be here.

SARA: I’m going to start with just the very direct question to kick off this topic, which is why does language matter? 

ALEX: Well, language is everything in a way. Language is how we orient ourselves to the world and to each other and to our own selves, honestly. Human beings are storytellers, right? So language is how we make meaning. And one of the things that feels most important to me is that language doesn’t just neutrally describe what’s real and what’s true. Through language, we actually reaffirm what is real and what’s true. So we’re actually creating and recreating reality whenever we use language. So we get to decide. What reality are we describing? What reality do we want to create and build through the stories that we tell and the language that we speak?

SARA: Do you think that we fall into this myth that language is fixed? You’re talking about “language describes truth.” And I’m thinking, maybe sometimes we get stuck in this idea of a fixed truth. And yet, life and the world and our words are ever-changing to try to describe the changes around us. Do you think we get stuck there?

ALEX: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% believe that. I think people have an approach to reality that it’s static, or at least linear. That it’s moving in this very linear trajectory as opposed to this spiral or a sine wave or a number of other ways in which people in all kinds of cultures around the world have experienced and believed language and reality to move. And I think people believe that language is absolutely static, even though we have copious evidence to the contrary. I can barely understand something that’s written in old English. And it wasn’t that long ago in the scheme of things that people were actively using words in ways that are practically unintelligible to us today, even though it was technically the same language.

SARA: Right. And we don’t know that because we’ve never experienced that. But it really wasn’t all that long ago.

ALEX: Right.

SARA: I’m curious how you found your way into this work, and how and why it became so important to you?

ALEX: Well, I have always had a gift for language and for stories. I loved writing when I was a kid. Anything and everything, just nonsense stories and just was a very imaginative and creative kid. And I also really love and have a gift at helping other people communicate clearly and effectively, which really is what it’s all about for me. I want to help people understand each other. And I can recognize from personal experience the ways in which different people's brains work differently, different people have different facilities with language or literally speak different languages from each other. And so we can’t just assume that something that makes sense to me will make sense to somebody else and how can we help each other understand each other across lines of difference. That’s the thing that I love. And I also just love helping people communicate with care so that the most people possible will understand what they’re trying to say, that matters to me. The other thing that I think is important around how I got here, particularly as an editor, is that I’m self-taught when it comes to editing. I didn’t take any classes on editing. I just sort of love it and sort of fell into it and started reading style manuals and things like this. And so instead of just passively absorbing the rules as they were taught to me – like the right way to use words and punctuation and stuff like that – I actually explored rules with curiosity. So “Why is this a rule? Where did this rule come from?” And it turns out that every single time, over the course of my career that I have encountered a rule that didn’t make sense to me so I went looking for where it came from and what the point was, it turned out to be a rule that wasn’t rooted in helping people communicate across lines of difference. So any rules, that’s where they come from. If you capitalize the first word of the sentence, that helps people understand and communicate because it’s about consistency and expectation and stuff like that. But whenever I encounter a rule that doesn’t make sense, it turns out when I dig back into it, that it comes from personal preference of someone in a powerful position or elitism or all sorts of other things. Like “We should use this pronoun because men are more important than women.” That’s not a rule that I actually, particularly want to ascribe to. So it gave me a very curious, open, flexible approach to helping people understand why they’re making the choices that they’re making and give them options around that, which is a lot of fun.

SARA: Yeah. And helping us think about the rules and questioning the why behind the rules, so we can make a choice to break those rules in a way that adds more care and compassion.

ALEX: Exactly. Yeah.

SARA: Instead of just following the rules because we’re told to.

ALEX: Exactly. Like being able to make conscious decisions about which rules we follow and why. That’s really what it’s all about for me.

SARA: So you have an amazing website.

ALEX: Thank you.

SARA: Friends, we’ll make sure to put Alex’s website, radicalcopyeditor, in our show notes so folks can look through it. Because you have blog posts, and style guides on all manner of categories and issues that are meant to be really helpful and are really easy to digest and read. And so I wanted to chat about some of the principles and those guides that you have on your website. I was really interested to learn about some of the principles that you use in your approach to radically inclusive language. And one of the things that you write about is language having a spectrum. What does that mean?

ALEX: This is one of my foundational ways that I think about language because I think we live in a world of binaries, a society that loves binaries. And one of the binaries that is most prominent when it comes to language is that language is either good or bad. It’s either right or wrong. And I actually think that language is way more complex than that. And one of the things that I use to understand that is I think about language being on a spectrum. Rather than it being good or bad, right or wrong, I think of language as being falling on a scale from violent to liberatory. And violent language is really easy to spot because it actively communicates hate or disgust or intolerance. It’s slurs. It’s hate speech. And the myth that we’re taught is that every other type of language is just neutral and purely descriptive and good and correct and great. But there’s actually all of these different ways that language communicates norms and values. So the next stage in the spectrum that I talk about is coded language. That is language that is working to communicate oppressive – or liberatory, honestly – values and norms but in a way that is underground, unconscious. It’s what happens when violent language goes underground, right? So you think about things like states’ rights rather than talking explicitly about segregation or racism or slavery. That’s a very classic way in which language can be coded. You can think about things like people talking about “traditional family values” as a coded way of using anit-LGBTQ language. And if you were from a different culture, you spoke a different language as a first language, you might not pick up on what’s being actively communicated here. But that’s what’s actually being said and communicated. Everybody who’s being targeted by that language is very clear. The middle of the scale, which is the most common type of language, is just unconscious language. It’s language that works behind the scenes, all the time, constantly imbedding values and norms into how we use words. Like the fact that the words white, and lightness, and words like that are used to refer to positive concepts. And words like black or darkness are used to refer to negative concepts. It’s just something we don’t necessarily question unless that’s something that we are attuned to. But it has an impact, right? Research has actually shown that associating words like darkness and blackness with negativity, translates into associating darker skinned people with criminality. And this is just one of thousands and thousands and thousands of examples, right. Most of us are just not aware that our language is operating this way under the surface.

The next step in the scale is what I call “minimizing language,” which is language that actually is trying to do good but unintentionally upholds oppressive norms and the status quo. A really key example of this is “All Lives Matter,” spoken by people who really think that they’re trying to say a good thing and improve on the concept that Black Lives Matter. But actually what they’re doing is feeding into a racist backlash against the concept that black lives need special attention and protection because – of course white lives matter – no one is questioning that. But every aspect of our society is set up to negatively impact black folks, and plenty of other people too. So that’s an example. Or when people say, “I don’t see color.” Or when people say, “We’re all one.” These are examples of minimizing language. Another example of minimizing language is the back-handed compliment, right? The sort of, “Oh, you look so much less fat in that outfit.”

SARA: “Or, you speak so well?”

ALEX: Yes. “You speak English so well.” And you’re like, I’m from Chicago. What are you trying to – those are the sorts of things that, again, can happen, people think they have the best of intentions and they think that they’re communicating something positive, but there’s a subtext that is actually pretty harmful in the long run.

And then the final side, the final end of the scale, is liberatory language which is language that intentionally works to create the world that we want to live in, that sort of imbues language and subjects with agency and is on the side of life and love and well-being, basically, for all folks and communicates that, which is hard but worth it.

SARA: Right. You said intentionally and I think with liberatory language, it takes a lot of intention, a lot of conscious intention.

ALEX: Right.

SARA: And so it is hard because you have to pay attention to your words and ask yourself questions and do a lot of self-reflection.

ALEX: Totally.

SARA: Thank you. That was a great place to start. Thank you for taking us through that. Another principle that you talk a lot about in your work is care versus correctness. And you even talk a little bit about debunking this notion of “political correctness.” Can you talk us through that a little bit?

ALEX: Sure. This is also super important, I think, for anyone who is striving to use words with care and to use inclusive language because when we’re motivated by correctness, we are striving to be perceived as good by others. When we’re motivated by care, we’re striving to do good and have a positive impact on others, right? So being motivated by correctness is very self-focused. Being motivated by care is very other-focused. Correctness often becomes about performance. So I put my pronouns on my name tag because I’ve seen other people doing that and I want to be perceived as a good person, but I’m not paying attention to anyone else’s pronouns. We see that all the time. “I did the thing. I checked the box. But I haven’t changed my behavior in any meaningful way.” Care is about actually trying to avoid and counter harm and violence and have a positive impact on the world and on other people. So I put my pronouns on my nametag so that I can communicate that I’m a safe person to talk with about gender and stuff like that. And, I pay careful attention to other people’s pronouns. Both people are putting their pronouns on their nametag. It’s not about putting their pronouns on their nametag, but the motivation absolutely has an impact on their approach to that and where they go from there if that makes sense.

SARA: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I’m curious why you think there is so much reactivity around this idea – false idea perhaps – of correctness and the way in which people often feel like they are being policed.

ALEX: Or attacked.

SARA: Or attacked, yeah.

ALEX: Some people react to it that way, right, when they are invited to try on different language or when someone points out to them that the words they’re using might be actually causing harm, there is a huge reactivity and this sort of experience of feeling attacked on the part of lots of folks. And in my experience, having that kind of negative reaction to an invitation like that is always rooted in something deeper than words. When someone asks you to use a different name for them because they have a nickname, right? You were introduced to them as Elizabeth. But the name they actually like people to call them is Liz. Or maybe you knew an Elizabeth and so you assume that this new person that’s named Elizabeth likes to be called Liz, but they actually like to be called Beth. No one has a problem with that. No one has a huge negative reaction and saying, “But you look like a Liz to me.” “But you were introduced to me as Elizabeth.” “But it says here your name is Elizabeth. How could you possibly want me to call you Beth.” No one ever does that, right? But when someone asks you to use a different name for them because their gender is different than the one you thought it was, that’s a problem for a lot of people. Reactions against that sort of thing, or what we see the most often particularly as an editor, reactions against using “they” and “them” singularly aren’t usually about grammar. People might actually, genuinely, think that they are having a reaction that is rooted in grammar. But it’s usually about unconscious – sometimes – resistance to a challenge to their world view.

SARA: Yes.

ALEX: That’s what’s actually going on. And in this case, in the case of they/them pronouns, that challenge to their world view is the existence of of nonbinary people. So that’s why it becomes such a flashpoint where nonbinary people are saying, “If you can’t let go of this thing that you were taught in third grade, basically what you’re saying is you don’t believe that I am real.” But nonbinary people are real, right? There are lots of things we learned in third grade that turned out to not be true, right?

SARA: Yes. There you go.

ALEX: They/Them pronouns, it turns out we use them singularly all the time! “Who left their phone here? I hope they come back for it.” “Who’s on the phone? Tell them I’ll call them back.” We say this all the time. But when we try to apply it to an individual human being that we have a mental image around, right, then that becomes a challenge to our world view.

SARA: I appreciate you giving us an example of pronouns because that’s a very real experience for so many of us. And particularly for those of us parents who are raising queer kids, that’s often our first encounter with having to change our language.

ALEX: Right.

SARA: Being invited to use different pronouns or different names either for a friend, family member, or our kids, why do pronouns matter so much? Talk to us a little about that.

ALEX: Such a good question, because pronouns do matter quite a lot. And like I just said, pronouns are a way of affirming someone’s realness. They are a way of affirming someone’s self and affirming their own understanding of themself. And so every single time you use a third-person pronoun to refer to someone, you are affirming their personhood. You could just use their name. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. In fact, lots of people actually don’t want you to use pronouns for them, they want you to just repeat their name. That’s perfectly lovely. And so when you use the wrong pronoun for someone, it’s like using the wrong name for them. And if you’re someone who that doesn’t happen to very often, you have a solid sense of who you are and someone uses the wrong name for you, it’s probably not going to affect you that much. But if you’re someone who has to carve out space to exist in a world that is telling you that you don’t exist or that you shouldn’t exist, that’s a really different situation.

SARA: And that makes it even more important in larger spaces, community spaces, workplaces, classrooms. Like, I’m looking at my zoom screen here and seeing both of us have our pronouns next to our name as a way to name how important it is for us to make space for each other.

ALEX: That’s right. That’s right. And how important it is to do that with care rather than just correctness. Because I do see this again and again in all kinds of different spaces. And I’ve seen it for years and years, decades, in all kinds of different spaces from classrooms, to friend groups, to workplaces, to whatever, all kinds of environments. Where people think, “Oh, the correct thing to do, because I heard someone do this somewhere else or I experienced this somewhere else, is to have everyone share their pronouns whether that happens in pronoun-go-round as part of check-in, whether that happens on name badges, whether that happens in email signatures, whether it happens when you introduce yourself, everyone shares their pronouns. That’s the correct thing to do.” When people approach it from a place of correctness, it often goes sideways. It often goes wrong because they’re not thinking through the impact. So if you’re putting your pronouns in your email signature, as an example, at your workplace. Does your workplace actually affirm trans people? Does your workplace offer health care that is trans-inclusive? If a trans person wants to be a client, will they have a positive experience? If a trans person wants to be an employee, will they have a positive experience? Is putting your pronouns in your signature, actually setting someone up to think that they’re going to have a positive experience with you and/or your workplace when that’s not actually true? Those are things that you have to think about if you’re thinking about impact. Not just, “What’s the correct thing to do?”

In a pronoun-go-round, what if there’s someone in that go-round who is uncomfortable with pronouns all together and would just prefer for people to use their name. Is there space for them to say that and articulate that and for that to be respected? What if there’s someone in that go-round who feels really uncomfortable with the pronouns that they’ve been using and that other people have used for them, but isn’t quite sure or ready to share different pronouns? Maybe they don’t even feel safe in that to space to share different pronouns. Now you’re putting them on the spot to commit to some pronouns that don’t actually feel right to them or make a choice that feels impossible for them to make. Maybe there’s someone in that space who feels really confused about why we’re being asked to share pronouns because this is really new to them, even though everyone else has been doing this for years and years and years. And now they feel shame. And they might feel resistance, but we don’t know where that resistance is coming from. So they say something like, “Well, you can call me anything but just don’t call me late to dinner.” We don’t know why they’ve said that. And now other people are having an emotional reaction to that because that’s kind of a crummy thing to say. But it’s because we didn’t actually set up that pronoun-go-round with care to try to help people find their place within it.

SARA: That’s so helpful.

ALEX: And that’s why it matters.

SARA: Yes. And I’m thinking about also the assumptions that we make around gender in particular based on socially constructed perceptions and visual cues.

ALEX: Totally

SARA: So I know that sometimes folks express discomfort with pronouns because they’ve grown up under those conditions where it says “It should be obvious by what you look like what your pronouns are.” So therefore, it’s confusing.

ALEX: That’s right. And it is. It is. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that everyone listening to this podcast has been conditioned and trained to adhere to the gender binary our whole lives regardless of your own comfort within that gender binary. We still have this conditioning. And that’s not a personal failing. That was a design, right? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, that you are uncomfortable. That’s OK. But we need to be real about why. And we need to be real about the impacts of continuing to ascribe to that world view.

SARA: Yes. And I appreciate you clarifying, again, that the intentionality behind the choice really matters so that we’re both doing it and practicing the why behind it.

ALEX: Exactly, right. It’s not the thing itself. It’s not the pronoun-go-round that’s the issue. It’s whether we’re approaching it from a place of performativity and correctness and perception of goodness, or we’re doing it from a motivating place of wanting to create a space of care and caring about the impact on everybody who’s there, right?

SARA: Yes. Let’s keep going along this line. And I’m curious if you’ll share with us some other gender inclusive language, both in how we write and how we speak.

ALEX: Sure. Wow. Well, that’s a whole webinar that I love doing, actually. I actually do trainings on gender inclusive language and it’s a lot of fun because there are so many ways that language operates to continue to perpetuate sexism and homophobia and transphobia, just norms about gender. And it does start with sexism. It starts with the idea that you can divide all of humanity into two categories of being, female and male, women and men, girls and boys, feminine and masculine. And that one of those ways of being is fundamentally “lesser than”, right? So I honestly feel like, as a nonbinary person myself, I am sort of an unintended casualty of this sexist system that was designed to keep straight cis men at the top of the power system and systematically disempower everybody else.

SARA: So let’s share some examples.

ALEX: Yes, so there’s so many ways that language operates to do that. Everything from using “he” as the singular pronoun of choice rather than “they”. That’s sexism. It comes from a sexist place. Two, using particular words for women that you wouldn’t use for men, like “strident” in a woman. Behavior might be described as “powerful, leaderful” behavior in a man. All sorts of things like that. We could probably spend hours just talking about the inequitable ways that women are described relative to men.

SARA: I’m also thinking about some of those socially ingrained ways of ascribing sexist language, or gender-binary language, to entire groups of people that we hear all the time, like “Mankind”.

ALEX: Yes.

SARA: Something as simple as “I’m going to man the table at the craft fair.”

ALEX: That’s right. Treating men as the default human being is so ingrained in language. And I will be honest with you, there have been times in my life when I’m like, “Is it really that big of a deal? Do I really have to change this word choice from man the table to stock the table, or from mankind to personkind?” And the truth is, yes. Manmade, that one’s hard for me, manmade versus human-manufactured or whatever. But there’s actually been research studies that have shown that when we use language that presumes men to be the default human being, it actually has an impact on people’s perceptions of things like career choices. Are women even thought about as an option when it comes to imagining particular ways of being in the world, or particular societies, or particular functions. All of that. Because that is why, during second-wave feminism, people were so militant, honestly, about language changes. And people made horrible fun of folks for saying flight attendant instead of stewardess. Just the level of ridicule. And now it is an ingrained part of the language. Language has evolved and it has made an impact on people’s perceptions of who is suited for different work, which really matters, right. Whether it’s possible for a person to imagine that they will grow up with a plethora of options available to them or not, absolutely has to do with how we use words. So it starts there. And I think it is important to be grounded in the ways in which sexism has been for a long time part of our language and the work that has been done to shift that. Coming up with the prefix Ms. Another thing that was just ridiculed and ridiculed and ridiculed. People made so much fun of each other about this and it really mattered that women had a way of being addressed with respect that had nothing to do with their marriage status. That mattered. So we stuck with it, y’all. I think the reason I bring this up is because the evolutions that we are seeing in language now when it comes to trying to be responsive to language that presumes a gender binary, for example, it’s part of the same tradition. It is not separate from this lineage of trying to help eradicate gender-based bias and oppression and violence from our language and thus from our world because these things do relate to each other.

SARA: So what are some other tips that you have for us around gender-inclusive language and how we might use that?

ALEX: I think the first thing when you’re trying to think about ways to make your language more gender inclusive is to recognize that there are at least three main ways that unconscious language works to perpetuate oppressive gender norms. And the first is invisibility through making certain people like cis women, trans women and men, and nonbinary people invisible and nonexistent. So saying words like, “Mankind”, treating men as the default. Saying things like “Men and Women” treating nonbinary people as nonexistent. The second way is that language normalizes patriarchal, hetero, cis, sexist norms by assuming things like “Mothers are the folks who are going to be primary caregivers for every single child.” Or using words like “Mailman” or things like that. Just norms that get perpetuated. And then the third way that I think we need to pay attention to language operating is through inequity in language, so sexist and transphobic prejudice being communicated. For example, “Boys will be boys.” Or “He cried like a girl.” Saying things like, “She’s hysterical.” These sorts of ways in which language operates to just keep perpetuating these kinds of norms. So the top tips that I often give people for how to pay attention to these things are: number one, avoid treating men as the default human beings. This shows up in words like “Man the table”, “Manpower”, “manmade”, “man up”

SARA: All of those jobs, mailman, policeman, fireman…

ALEX: Exactly. So that’s thing number two is to avoid gendered terms especially like unnecessarily gendered terms like chairman and congressman and freshman and fisherman. And also on the other side like, housewife, stewardess, waitress, secretary. There’s so many ways in which norms are built into types of careers and roles and stuff like that. 

The third thing people can do is to watch out for stereotypes in language. Like referring to all doctors using the pronouns he and him or all pilots, while we refer to all nurses using she and her or teachers or flight attendants. Saying things like, “She handled the fork lift as well as a man.” Just assuming that things associated with masculinity are inherently better, that kind of stuff. There’s lots of ways in which stereotypes get built into our language. 

The fourth thing is to actively counteract sexism and transphobia in our words, making sure we don’t use different words for particular people that we wouldn’t use for other people. Like saying Mom is caring for the kids but Dad is babysitting. As if dads aren’t in a normal position of taking care of kids, that kind of stuff. The number of times in which women are referred to by their first names whereas men are referred to by honorifics, like Dr. or Rev. That kind of thing. The ways in which particular people are described as strident or shrill or pushy or bossy when other people would be referred to as assertive or logical or ambitious. That’s stuff to pay attention to. More apropos to trans folk, avoiding binary language is another great way to practice gender-inclusive language. It can be challenging because things like “Men and Women”, “Boys and Girls”, “The opposite sex”, “Both genders”, “Ladies and Gentlemen”, “Brothers and Sisters”. It’s just so ingrained in our language but it’s actually pretty fun to be able to avoid that sometimes and come up with different ways of using language. Like just saying, “People”, or “People of all genders”, “A Different Sex”, “All Genders”, “Esteemed Guests”, “Gentle Folk”. I love that kind of stuff. It’s so fun. 

The next thing that people can do that’s one of my top tips is to embrace using They and Them and Theirs as singular pronouns. I mean, we talked about this already. But it’s huge whether we’re referring to a person who uses those words as their own personal pronouns – that’s obviously extremely important – but also in all kinds of ways. I mean, as an editor, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is that style manuals across the board are embracing singular they. Because for years, I had to go around and correct all of these sentences to use plural nouns instead of singular because otherwise it would have to be like, “Each student must bring his or her coat.” No one talks that way. No one wants to say that. And I couldn’t do it as a nonbinary person. I wasn’t going to do it. So I had to make all these corrections to say “All students must bring their coats.” Now, we don’t have to do that anymore because all these style manuals are accepting that “they” and “them” are singular. They’ve always been singular, okay to do that now.

SARA: Now we could say each student must bring their . . .

ALEX: Exactly. And just move one with our lives because that’s the way people have always used these words and no one said it was wrong until patriarchy got involved.

SARA: I appreciate the use of plural pronouns as the default when you don’t know or even if names appear gendered because it gives off that suggestion of, “I’m not going to presume gender here.”

ALEX: Exactly. Exactly. Once you know a person’s pronoun, you have to use it.

SARA: Thank you.

ALEX: Particularly as somebody who’s a nonbinary person who doesn’t go by they and them, I love they and them, but it just doesn’t feel like me. So I go by “xe” and “per” which is short for person. So if someone were to use they and them for me, that would be wrong. That would be an act of mispronouning me even though I’m nonbinary because my actual pronouns are not that. So once you know someone’s pronouns, you have an obligation to use them. But if you don't know someone's pronouns, it’s awesome to use they and them. And I would never be offended if someone – in fact I love it when I’m in the grocery store and they at least call me they because they’re not trying to make an assumption – that’s great. So, great example. 

And then the final thing that I will tell people in terms of tips and tricks for using gender inclusive language is to take care in describing trans people in particular. There are lots of ways in which trans folk haven’t been able to be in charge of the language that gets used to describe us. And a lot of cis people use a lot of really crummy language for us. And it’s too big of a topic for me to give lots of examples. But it is something that I talk about quite a bit on my website. So if you’re interested in how to do that well, you can check out radicalcopyeditor.com and I have lots of tips and tricks for how to do things like, avoid treating cis people as the default and trans people as the anomalies, and how to not conflate things like anatomy and identity. These are tricky things because we’ve been ingrained and conditioned to do this. And when we say, “Women’s Health” that means something that’s not inclusive. So how do we do that better? I have a lot of tips and tricks about that on my website.

SARA: That’s super helpful. What are some of your favorite gender inclusive words for groups of humans?

ALEX: Because “Brothers and Sisters”, “Ladies and Gentlemen”, “Boys and Girls”, these are the ways in which we’ve been trained to talk and there’s a lot of different layers to it in terms of why that even is the best language that comes to mind for people. But my favorites are things like “All children”, “Folks”, “Gentle friends”, “Siblings in Spirit”. There are so many ways that we can use language that – again, I think the thing that people often struggle with is this idea that they’re being asked to limit their language or pare back their language or restrict the words that they’re using. When, in fact, the invitation is to expand, is to use even more creativity, and use even more words to describe even more diversity and beauty. And that’s so beautiful. I just love encountering new ways that people are using language to describe the world and everybody in it. That’s a wonderful thing, not a sad, awful thing.

SARA: Yes. I hear that. And it’s a way that we can orient ourselves to practice, to put ourselves in that mindset of more expansive and beautiful and wonderful. And I imagine that really appeals to word people like you. But I know that you probably get asked a lot, “Why are there so many words? There’s so many words out there for genders and so many different pronouns now.” And some people react against that. Talk to us about when you get that question, what do you say?

ALEX: I often will hear from people about why there’s so many different identities, why there’s so many words, why is the acronym getting so long. It comes across as very exhausted and “Why can’t these queers just stop already? Can’t we just say we’ve come up with enough identities?” And the reason is because, like I just said, people are able to find more and better language all the time to describe unique experiences and identities that are indescribable without new words. And, again, as somebody who’s nonbinary, I’m forty years old. I was born in 1984. I was raised way before social media, way before I had any access to role models or language for people like me. Without language, I couldn’t find myself. I couldn’t find my people. I couldn’t figure out who I was relative to the rest of the world. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I encountered words like, “Gender Queer”, and “Nonbinary”. And that helped me find myself. It helped me articulate who I was. If I had had a limited menu of possible ways to describe myself for my entire life, it would’ve had an impact on my ability to be my whole self. And because identity isn’t static, and because identity is impacted by all kinds of different parts of who we are – including things like when we were born, how old we are, our nationality, our race, our ethnicity, our class, our disability or ability, or size – all kinds of things impact our self concept . And that means that there’s going to be unique words that speak to very particular constellations of identities that you can’t articulate any other way. If you’re using the word “Dyke” for example. That speaks to a very particular experience of sexuality/gender/all sorts of other cultural things. It doesn’t mean the same thing as “Lesbian”. It doesn’t mean the same thing as “Butch”. These are very different, subtly different shades of colors where, why would we want to limit ourselves to just red, yellow and blue when we can have purple and lavender and fuchsia, you know, eggplant?

SARA: All the colors of the rainbow and everything in between.

ALEX: So I do like to invite people to see it as a beautiful thing that there are so many words. And I often will hear people tell me, “Oh, that actually helps because I used to think I had to understand all of those words, I had to know the definitions of all of those words, but if there are hundreds of them, I can’t possibly hope to.” And isn’t that better? Isn’t it better if I can just meet each person where they’re at and hear them say, “I identify as a woman?” Huh? what does that mean to you. How about I don’t bring a pre-existing set of expectations or intellectual understandings of what I think that means to this relationship?

SARA: And it’s like coming from the place of asking, “Tell me who you are”, rather than me telling you who I think you are just based on some very particular set of perceptions.

ALEX: Totally.

SARA: And really meaning it, really being welcoming of like, “I want to know who you are. I want you to tell me who you are.”

ALEX: Or what the dictionary says that words means, because that always goes so well.

SARA: You know, Alex, in your style guides on your website – and I want to just share with our listeners that you have style guides for everything from gender inclusive language to indigenous people, to how we understand the word diversity, and communicating around Black experience and Black people in particular – so there’s lots of style guides out there. But you also offer tips about how to use your style guides. And I wonder if you’ll share some of those with us?

ALEX: Sure. I think the number one thing that I always counsel and hope that people will do is not use my guides to shame people or police people or try to ascribe correctness to language. Because guides are guides for a reason. They’re not set in stone. They’re not tablets that we have to follow or hell and damnation will follow. Guides are meant to help us figure out what makes sense given the context that we’re in. And so my hope with my guides is that people will use them to add care to the world, that people will use them in ways that help them use words more carefully, more consciously.

SARA: They’re also just good learning, good grounding material. And in this whole conversation of what does radical inclusivity really mean and what does it look like and how do I practice it. So I really appreciate that because I’ve learned a lot. And it helps me expand my own practice.

ALEX: Thank you.

SARA: You do talk about not using this work – not just your guides, but this work in general – as a tool of shaming and a tool of policing, and rather as a tool of invitation. And I’m wondering if you have some tips for us about how we can, in situations, invite people to consider different language? And I used that language very intentionally for its inclusivity rather than saying something like, “How do we call somebody out when they mess it up?” Because that feels really negative and really shaming, but we don’t want to be silent. So what are your tips for inviting people to consider something different?

ALEX: Yeah. I really appreciate that question because how we engage people really matters. And it really depends on a lot of things. There’s a lot of factors, I think, that go into the best and most caring way to engage folks around language, let’s say – or just behavior in general, also true – and some of the things that we have to take into account are our relationship with that person, who’s listening, and the level of harm involved. So based on these three things, it could radically change what approach makes the most sense and will be most caring in that context. For example, let’s just talk about misgendering because that’s a good example. Let’s say that you’re hanging out with your mom and your kid uses they/them pronouns. And mom is sort of trying, but not really trying, if you know what I mean. Like, she thinks she’s trying but she’s still calling your kid “he” and “him” when she should be calling your kid “they” and “them”. But she wants to do the right thing. She just hasn’t really put in the effort. And your kid’s not there. It’s just you and your mom hanging out. So now we have to look at relationship with this person: You’ve got a really close relationship, you’re immediate family, you’ve been together a long time, you know each other really well. We’re looking at who’s listening: no one’s listening. It’s just the two of you. You’re alone in the house or on the phone or whatever. The level of harm involved: there’s no outright harm in this moment, probably – unless this is harming you because you’ve been working with your mom for so long on this and she’s still not doing it. And you do have to pay attention to the harm that you are experiencing in this moment. But let’s say you’re feeling pretty magnanimous towards your mom. She is sort of trying. You think her intentions are good and you’re just feeling a little frustrated, but you’re not feeling like you are personally being harmed by this. Great. So in this situation, this is a situation where you can lean on that relationship. And you can say, “Look, Mom. I know I’ve been talking to you a lot about this for a long time. And I really need you to understand the impact of what you’re doing on my kid. And it’s getting to the point where I might need to not have you and them share space because I can’t handle it when you continue to call them, ‘he.’ And I’m not willing, in this political moment, to subject my kid to anyone using those pronouns for them who should know better. So what can I do to help you because I know you love my kid? I know this is hard. I know we’ve got to build some new neural pathways. Can we just practice together? Can we get on the phone more often and just practice using they/them? What can I do to help?” So in that situation, you’re pulling on relationship. You’re speaking clearly to the harm. You’re not saying “It’s offensive that you’re calling my kid ‘him’,” because that’s not helpful. Maybe it is offensive, but that doesn’t help this person actually do something different. You’re speaking to the harm. You’re saying “This is what is happening as a result of you using this language.” And you’re offering solutions, options, in a caring way. You’re saying, “How can I help you get this right? How can we do this together?" So that’s example number one. Example number two, let’s say you’re on Facebook.

SARA: Oh, dear. Already this is a problem.

ALEX: Yep. Already a problem. You’re on Facebook and someone uses the wrong pronoun for your kid. And let’s say it’s a family friend that you don’t see that often but you’re still friends on Facebook and they know that your kid is nonbinary and uses they/them. But they don’t have a personal relationship with your kid and so they’re not putting any effort into this and so they use the wrong pronouns. So our relationship with them, they’re a friend of yours, but they’re not a super close friend. Maybe you knew them ten years ago, but you’ve fallen out of touch lately. Who’s listening? The world is listening. Everyone is there. It’s Facebook. You have no idea who’s going to see this. Your kid is probably going to see this – except kids don’t use Facebook anymore – let’s assume that your kid uses Facebook and they might see this. And the level of harm, I don’t know, maybe your kid doesn't care that much about this particular family friend. But there may be other people who see this and it triggers all kinds of stuff for them because that’s the last straw today for some nonbinary person to get mispronouned. And gosh darn it, this is a hard time to be trans. So we’re thinking about these different things, right? In that situation, you want to publically name, “Hey, wrong pronoun.” And then based on how they respond, you get to decide, how gentle am I going to be in this corrective? But you need other people around to hear that this is not okay, to see that this is not okay. Maybe then, do a back-channel Facebook message to them and say, “Hey, you know, this isn’t who I know you to be. Maybe you don’t know the impact that this might have. But here’s why this matters.” So there’s a couple of different things that you can be doing, but you’re paying attention to how can I help avoid harm, name the harm, whatever. If it escalates, you delete that crap. You delete it right away. You make sure no one else sees it that might get harmed by it, right? And then you put something up that’s like, “I deleted this. Thanks to everyone that tried to engage. I just don’t want any trans people to have to see that in this political moment.”

SARA: That’s a really powerful message right there.

ALEX: Exactly. So those are just two examples of what we can do. Let’s say it happens in person and our kid is there. Let’s say it’s our kid’s teacher. And we’re meeting with our kid’s teacher and our kid is sitting right there. And the teacher is mispronouning our kid over and over and over again. That’s a different conversation than the conversation I’m having with Mom when my kid’s not there. There’s a real need to affirm my kid in front of them. Make sure that they actually feel my support, and make sure that they can feel my Mama Bear coming out – or Papa Bear.

SARA: Or Mama Dragon in our case.

ALEX: Right. Sorry. Feel my dragon coming out to protect them in that moment. And so I feel like those sorts of things are the things that I think about when I’m thinking about how do I respond to potentially harmful language. It’s not about calling in versus calling out. It’s about relationship, who’s listening, and the level of harm that is involved, how I can respond to that appropriately.

SARA: That’s really good. I really appreciate that. What about when, we the parents, we the family member, or we the good friend, what about when we mess up? What kinds of things can we do to repair and self-correct?

ALEX: That’s such a good question. First of all, you’re not bad. You’re not a bad person. You’re just a human person. And all of us make mistakes. It’s not about trying to avoid messing up or avoid mistakes. It’s about what we do next. Because we know we’re going to make mistakes. If we’re in relationship with anyone in our entire lives, we’re going to step on their toes at some point for any number of different reasons. We’re human. So the first thing to do is to not beat yourself up about it in a way that sort of keeps you from being able to do the next right thing. This is sometimes helpful for people to hear. As a nonbinary person, I have mispronouned myself, y’all. This is not something that trans people are immune from. It is literally something that we all do.

SARA: That’s helpful to hear, Alex. Thank you.

ALEX: I think a lot of people think that this is just something that some people can do easily and well, and other people just can’t do. And it’s not true. It’s neural patterns. We’ve got these tracks in our brains. And when we need to create – particularly when it comes to names and pronouns but really when it comes to any kind of shift in how we’re perceiving someone, how we’re relating to someone – we’re having to build a new neural pathway which takes work and practice and messing up and jumping back over to the new neural pathway. So that’s hard work. That’s legit. This is not a personal failing or a moral impossibility. So first and foremost, don’t just beat yourself up. Don’t fall all over yourself being like, “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe… I would never… I don’t think of you… and Please…” and crying. Now the person feels like you are asking them to take care of you. That’s not helpful. It’s a perfectly reasonable instinct. It happens all the time. But the number one thing you can do is to hold back your explanations, your huge, overflowing apologies, all of that, and just move directly to quick easy apology. “So sorry.” Correction. Say the right thing even though you said something that wasn’t the right thing. Provide that correction. So if we’re talking about a name or a pronoun, just say it right and move on. And at some point – and again it depends on context, whether other people are listening, was this a really high-stakes situation – there may need to be more repair there. So sometimes that means waiting until later and then following up with the kid and saying, “Gosh darn it. I’m so sorry I did that again. How can I make it up to you? Is there anything that I can do? Would you like me to follow up with so-and-so?” So it does depend on the situation. But in trans community, it is a cultural norm that we interrupt each other and move on. And this is a thing that I think people also don’t necessarily know because a lot of us were taught to be nice and not interrupt. And, oh my gosh, we’re just going to sit here and pretend that no one said anything wrong. And now everyone’s uncomfortable except for the one person who said something crappy. So in trans community, if we were having a conversation in a group and I was like, “Sara was telling me the other day and he said blad-de-blah.” Someone would just say “She”. And I would say, “Right. She. She said the other day that we were doing this that and the other thing.” That’s what we do.

SARA: I love that.

ALEX: It’s beautiful. It’s so simple. It’s not making a big deal out of it. And it acknowledges that mispronouning happens. It’s just a thing. And we just correct it and move on. And then later, if there’s a need for individual follow up or larger repair, then we do that.

SARA: So quick correction and then we can make a larger repair if we feel that’s needed. Or at least an outreach aside from the moment so we’re not overtaking the moment with our mistake.

ALEX: Right. Exactly.

SARA: That’s really helpful. And I’m really glad to hear that and know that about the trans community and the norms of communications. And so I have a question about this current moment and particularly the challenges the trans and nonbinary and gender expansive community are facing particularly with language and the incoming administration and some really hateful rhetoric. Do you have any tips for coping with this moment in terms of the language and how we cope with having to hear all of that a lot of the time now?

ALEX: That is a really, really good question. It’s really, really hard right now. And my heart goes out to you if you’re listening to this and you are in an impossible situation right now, having to choose between impossible things. There are a lot of folks in this country right now who are trying to figure out how to relocate across state lines because it’s the only way for them to get health care for themselves and/or their kids. And that’s not a position that anyone should have to be in. There’s a lot of folks who are afraid of Child Protective Services showing up at their door because laws are being passed to try to classify being trans-affirming as child abuse. So my heart goes out to everyone who might be in that kind of situation. And know how important it is for you to tend to your spirit in this moment. For me, personally, some of the things that I have changed include not checking the news first thing in the morning. I used to check the news first thing in the morning. I don’t do that anymore because I can’t subject myself to who knows what first thing in the morning. I have to make intentional space and put boundaries around how I’m engaging in news right now. And also, it’s extremely important to have community, have someone in your life that you can talk to about what’s hard and make sure that you’re making space for your spirit. Particularly if you’re a parent and you’re seeing the impact of all of this on a kid of yours, you also are impacted. And I know sometimes when you’re a dragon and all of your energy is going toward protecting your kid and feeling like you can or can’t or whatever. And sometimes it’s hard to remember that you need to actually spend some time taking care of yourself as well and making space for that. Remember the great adage, “Dump out and care in.” Pour care toward the center of whoever is hurting the most and dump out away from that person. So no complaining to your kids about your fears when they have their own fears. But you need someone that you can take all of that to, right? Hopefully more than one person. So if you haven’t yet put together a friend group, a signal message group, a Facebook support space. If you don’t have a couple of people that you can just check in with about how this is all impacting you, now is a great time to do that. Because our connections will save us. It will save our hearts, our minds, and it could actually save our bodies in this moment. So reach out to the people that you can connect with around all of that. And make sure that your kids also have those sorts of supports in place.

SARA: And I’ll remind our Mama Dragons community and listeners that we have those community spaces online, on Facebook. And I know we’re going to be migrating to a new platform. We may already be there by the time this episode airs. But feel welcome and to use those spaces exactly as Alex just mentioned to seek that support and community and connection. It is really a powerful place to be around so many parents who are, many of us, going through the same things and having the same fears and the same questions. So I want to make that plug.

ALEX: The last thing I’ll say is you may also want to play around with having some sort of protective spells and rituals that you can create if you haven’t already. So if you happen to be in a doctor’s office with your kid and they’ve got Fox News on, and all sorts of awful things are being said or whatever, what can you do to then cast off that energy, cast away those lies, that hate. That can look any number of different ways. It could literally be a spiritual ritual. It could be like crumpling it in a ball in the air and throwing it. But I think that there are things that we can do together, particularly with our loved ones, maybe it’s a dinner when you say “Let’s take a moment to just reaffirm what’s true here in this house.” And make space for that to sluff off the stuff that we are hearing. Those are powerful things to do even though it might feel silly in the moment, it can make a big difference.

SARA: That’s great. I appreciate that so much. Thank you. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your expertise and your work. It’s amazing. I have two final questions for you and these are questions that I like to ask all my guests at the end of our interviews. And so the first of them is around fierceness. You know the Mama Dragons name came about out of this sense of fierce protection for our kids and fierceness. And so I like to ask our guests, what are you fierce about?

ALEX: That’s such a good question. I am fierce about the idea that everyone deserves to be free. Everyone deserves to be free from oppression, from violence. Everyone deserves a chance to live freely and fully as their most true, most authentic, most alive self. That’s what I’m fierce about. Everyone. You, listening. You. Everyone.

SARA: That’s beautiful. Thank you. And the second question is what is bringing you joy right now, especially now in these times that feel like joy is sometimes hard to find?

ALEX: Joy is extremely important in order to stay alive. This is absolutely true. And for me, one of the things that brings me the most joy is roller derby. I play roller derby and it is The Best.

SARA: I have to ask, then. Alex, do you have a roller derby name?

ALEX: Of course I do, it’s Peter Pandemonium.

SARA: I love it.

ALEX: Yeah. It’s great. I’m actually part of one of the first – if not the first – roller derby teams that was explicitly set up to be all slash, no gender. And I love playing a sport that is a women’s sport. Modern roller derby is absolutely fierce, women-led, very anti-authoritarian, counter-cultural. But also it’s a great sport in that it is a way more trans-inclusive than most other team sports. It has sort of been leading the charge on that within alternative sports scenes and stuff like that. And you don’t need to have a gender to play roller derby. It really doesn’t matter. So it’s just a beautiful, beautiful space. And if anyone listening has access to roller derby, I highly recommend it. Obviously, all teams are different, but it’s great.

SARA: That is fantastic. Thank you for sharing that joy. I’m just smiling just listening to you talk about it. Alex, thank you so much for your time and your compassion and also your fierceness about inclusivity and language. I really appreciate it. I hope folks will go check out your website, radicalcopyeditor, and dig in and learn some things and bring it back to their communities and workplaces and families because it’s just so excellent and so helpful. Thanks for talking with me today.

ALEX: Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone listening for all that you do to make life better, and the world a better place for all those folks you love.

SARA: Thanks so much for joining us here In The Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons also offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at Mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

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