Changing behavior, and behavior in language, especially when you have a connection to it from your youth, is really, really hard.
I’ve been transitioning for over a decade, and I still say dude and man and stuff. Verbally and in text.
I know better, it’s just so ingrained in my online wannabe 90s/00s attitude/culture from growing up.
Which is why the outward and vocal resistance to memes trying to change the behaviors and standards is so irritating to me. It isn’t gender neutral, and only exceptions to the rule exist. Maybe if you acquired the terms/phrases in gender neutral contexts is it actually okay, but then THAT conflict of honest perspectives is a different subject, akin to using words like queer, and how they differ between generations.
Like when I was really young, saying things were gay was just a part of language. Teachers would get mad and tell us not to say it, but like… We didn’t hate gay people, we were just ignorant, and thought it was fun trendy language. And I see a lot of that and stuff like that in a lot of people still today. Did using gay just as a synonym for “bad” closet-ify a lot of people? Looking back, ABSOLUTELY, myself included. But I want to believe that most other people ALSO were too ignorant to be knowingly malicious about it and just got caught in a shitty culture, and thankfully that culture has changed today (for most people, I still occasionally run across a dinosaur still calling everything gay and it’s quite a sight to behold, they look straight out of saved by the bell, but 30 years passed and they never stopped smoking).
Changing behavior, and behavior in language, especially when you have a connection to it from your youth, is really, really hard.
I’ve been transitioning for over a decade, and I still say dude and man and stuff. Verbally and in text.
I know better, it’s just so ingrained in my online wannabe 90s/00s attitude/culture from growing up.
Which is why the outward and vocal resistance to memes trying to change the behaviors and standards is so irritating to me. It isn’t gender neutral, and only exceptions to the rule exist. Maybe if you acquired the terms/phrases in gender neutral contexts is it actually okay, but then THAT conflict of honest perspectives is a different subject, akin to using words like queer, and how they differ between generations.
Like when I was really young, saying things were gay was just a part of language. Teachers would get mad and tell us not to say it, but like… We didn’t hate gay people, we were just ignorant, and thought it was fun trendy language. And I see a lot of that and stuff like that in a lot of people still today. Did using gay just as a synonym for “bad” closet-ify a lot of people? Looking back, ABSOLUTELY, myself included. But I want to believe that most other people ALSO were too ignorant to be knowingly malicious about it and just got caught in a shitty culture, and thankfully that culture has changed today (for most people, I still occasionally run across a dinosaur still calling everything gay and it’s quite a sight to behold, they look straight out of saved by the bell, but 30 years passed and they never stopped smoking).