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I feel you on this, even as someone who is currently in their mid 20s. It helps for me to just accept the fact that I'll probably never truly understand how they feel, just like how I can't imagine how it would feel to be blind or to be paralysed. The best we can do is listen and accept.
True, but the world is never going to get away from putting people into boxes because our brains will just always do it. There's no reason why someone shouldn't be able to change what box they want to be in, since that's the next best thing to getting rid of the boxes all together.
I think one of things that would go along way, when it comes to gender, is to remove all gender from languages. There is literally no reason to use the pronoun he/she. If we want equality in all things then we should use the same language for all people. I have lost track in my life where hearing a pronoun changes how you react to someone. Hearing someone's partner has the same sex puts me straight into a mode where I really want to watch my P and Qs. To me this raises the question over how people are evaluated when it comes to jobs, or many other areas in life.
I'm going to be honest, I can't stand this trend of trying to neutralise everything. I grew up in the 90s/00s so I get this might be a generational difference but to me people being more open about themselves is an amazing thing and I'd hate to see it disappear. I don't really see what's wrong with accepting people are different and embracing it, rather than fruitlessly making everything in life a shade of grey.
Personally I actually view it as being kind of offensive, if I'm honest. Terms like "people of colour" to me come across as people minimising the vast and interesting differences in culture and customs that such a broad term covers.
Hmmm, yeah. Maybe it is a generational thing. I mean just take this for example:
Seriously!? Who cares if someone's partner is the same sex? Just be yourself and let others be themselves too. It's an outdated old fashioned way of thinking like this that needs to quickly die out.
It very much depends on the environment you work and what is the flavoured gripe of the month. I worked in a very much male dominated area, which was trying to introduce a balance. People being people we had many instances where there was instruction on how to behave. When working in such an area, you cannot help being defensive.
I know what you're saying, and I don't disagree. But in this real world that we live in, when I help people with something technical on the internet they usually thank an imaginary man. If I point out that I'm a woman, their attitude often does a complete 180 and they sometimes start offering me patronising advice when they originally approached me for help.
Of course we need to address the attitudes behind that wearisome nonsense. But I only have one life to live and it's not going to happen overnight. Sometimes, neutrality helps give people a fair shot because the barriers are all controlled by middle-class, cishet, white men who often lack the self-awareness to correct their own ingrained prejudices, or even acknowledge that they exist.
This is a valid and well-recognised criticism. If you mean a specific group or set of groups, name them. But whiteness being the default often means that all "people of colour"are affected to some degree. When that is that case, it's not reasonable to require an exhaustive list of all possible non-default ethnicities. When the cause of a problem is whiteness, the language should be explicit about that.
Definitely not going to disagree with you on that as I've experienced it myself plenty of times, especially anything to do with programming.
Does neutrality actually help in achieving that goal though? Isn't it just making the stereotyping worse? Let's say purely as an example you were doing IT support and the person you were helping had no idea who you were, their just going to assume a stereotypical dorky cis white man helped them with the problem. Whereas if they knew, let's say a cis black woman helped them, it'll atleast to a small degree help break that stereotype. Maybe I'm just be overly optimistic here though, I'd like to think most people wouldn't care either way, but if there is no representation at all people will just default to the general stereotype and it'll never improve.
I don't disagree if it's used correctly, like you've outlined, but if we're honest a lot of the time these days it's just become a blanket term with no real meaning, that's what I take issue with. The best example of this IMO is when the media is discussing police brutality, we all know black people suffer this the most yet it's always discussed as a "people of colour" issue. A young black man and a young ethnically Japanese man probably won't experience the same issues with the police, so to group them together in my eyes is ignoring the problem. Its basically just an American import to replace "ethnic minorities", which I felt the exact same way about.
This is absolutely true. In the early days of the internet there was loads of optimism that the anonymity would break down barriers but, as you say, it just meant everyone was assumed to be a middle-class, cishet, white man.
It's context, I guess. If non-neutrality mean you never get a foot in the door, you need neutrality. But of course it is lived experience that changes people's attitudes (which is why I usually do point out that the man they are thanking is a figment of their imagination even though the response will often be shitty). But sometimes, you just want to be able to do what you're doing without the sheer hostility emanating from fragile white male egos.
Things need to change but it's already disadvantaged individuals who have to carry the burden of making that change happen. They get to do all the unacknowledged diversity work in the background, and so get to do less of the work that gets them recognised for their skills and not just their identity. There's no easy answers here. We're all prisoners of history.
You will be judged regardless of what meaningless term you give yourself or others. Always have and always will. People need to be more logical and less emotional about things but it's hard to shake that primal instinct so it's understandable why emotional seems to outshine logical.
Everyone has bias built into their psyche. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
Absolutely, I think it is too built into language to be able to change it though.