Transphobes can’t take this from us. These are literally old English pronouns.
-fae
[video transcript:you’ve heard of neopronouns, but what about archeopronouns? These are the pronouns used in old English. As you can here, the third person pronouns are pretty different on all accounts, but let’s take a look at the neuter pronouns: hit [pronounced heet], hit, him [pronounced heem], and his [pronounced hees]. Hit was the old English precursor to it, also old English also has wit and gif, so it doesn’t feel as impersonal as it can. Let’s try using hit in modern English scentences! Hit is my friend. I saw hit yesterday. I borrowed his car. I gave him a car. These are pretty similar to the modern he/him pronouns, so they may not be for everyone, but these also feminine archeopronouns, so let’s hear them. Hēo is my friend. [pronounced heyo] I saw hī yesterday. [pronunced he] I borrowed hire car. [pronounced here-ay] I gave hire a hug. Transphobes cannot get me. I know too much about grammar. Feel free to ask me more questions! /end transcript.] image description: the text “third person. Third person pronouns refer to another person involved in a conversation, like modern English “he”, “she”, “it”, and “they”.” Below that is a table of the Old English pronouns. /end description]
Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.
Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?
And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.
So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.
But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.
And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.
And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?
And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!
And I was like, and how do you do that?
And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!
And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.
Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.
Well then he should have searched harder!
How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?
He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.
(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)
And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.
Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.
But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.
Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.
(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)
If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.
But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.
Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.
I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.
If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.
I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.
We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The things discussed here were a big motivating factor for me in writing this post. There seems to be a lot of disbelief in the claim that people can do things without knowing they’re harmful, because “[people most impacted by the thing] knew it was wrong,” but that’s A) Way too simplistic and B) Not entirely true.
Now obviously, if we’re talking about things like genocide and slavery, that’s a very different kettle of fish, because there have always been detractors trying to prevent or end crimes against humanity. But even then, the frameworks for those detracting arguments haven’t always lived up to modern standards (“You shouldn’t kill or expel the Jews, just convert them gently!”), and when it comes to more subtle aggressions, it can be extremely hard to see the forest for the trees, even when you think you’re operating within the pinnacle of progressivism.
Y'all, I had no fucking clue as a pre-teen/teen in the 1990s that Ace Venture: Pet Detective was grossly transphobic. Even after I became more aware of what being trans was outside that film’s punchline and actually had a brief period of gender contemplation one Summer in the late 90s or 2000s (thank you, Velvet Goldmine), I still had no firm grasp of how harmful certain depictions on television were, because they often seemed at least vaguely supportive within the context of 90s mainstream society (See: tired plot lines about trans sex workers on Law & Order). How the hell was I supposed to know they actually contained harmful tropes? The internet was nascent at that point. I could barely navigate my way out of a Britpop Geocities web ring. Who the fuck was going to tell me? sXeChampagneSupernovasXe? DamonAlbarnGurl105? I was the one in those groups reading Robert Rodi novels (90s gay lit author) and mainlining Margaret Cho comedy specials. They probably had even less of a clue about anything to do with LGBTQ representation than I did.
Not even to mention that a lot of marginalised people can’t even give voice to how something is harmful for years before they’re able to express it. I didn’t have the phrase “cultural appropriation” to back me up when I argued with kids at school about their church’s mock Seders, or any online communities invested in fighting antisemitism. I just knew it felt wrong, even though I couldn’t succinctly articulate why.
And there were times when I genuinely just did not pick up on shit, even when it impacted me. There are Jewish or South Asian depictions in media that make me cringe now, which seemed like good representation in the past. At the time, I was just happy to be represented on screen at all! It took years of seeing harmful patterns for me to arrive at different conclusions. Sometimes you don’t even think about something for eons, only to have the problematic aspects hit you like a tonne of bricks decades later.
Case in point: When I was 14, I was in a school production of The King and I as a “featured concubine,” along with two other friends who were also some variety of mixed Asian (the play is definitely problematic in and of itself, but that’s not even the point I’m making here). It literally never occurred to me how fucked it up was that the three girls of mixed Asian heritage (Me being partly Bengali, my bestie who was half-Sindhi, and our other friend who was half-Japanese) were cast in the those roles, nor did I contemplate how fucked up it was that they still made us all spray-dye our hair black, to look “more Asian,” since we all had hair colouring that skewed more dark brown. They cast us as concubines because we were mixed Asian and then told us we didn’t look Asian enough, and somehow we were all just like “Ohhhh yay, we got featured parts in the play, this is great!” I brought this up to said bestie last year, and she was like “Oh shit, you’re right, I guess I never thought about it.” THIS WAS OVER 20 YEARS LATER, AND IT WAS THE FIRST TIME WE WERE EVEN CONTEMPLATING IT (I’m also now realising that in our school production of Cabaret, I and the only other Jewish girl in my class, were cast in leading parts as Nazi characters, but maybe that was just a fluke idk).
There is literally not one single person in their 30s who is not stumbling over shit from their earlier years, being like “Damn, I can’t believe that was socially acceptable!” Do you know how many of us have rewatched beloved sleepover movies and comedy routines only to realise some of the jokes in those films aged like milk? And that’s a good thing! It’s good that we can be critical of stuff we used to love and see how they don’t reflect our values any more, because we’ve grown as human beings!
And I’m telling younger people now: Even with the internet—with this vast access to instant information and connections to millions of people around the globe—the same thing is going to happen to you. Somebody is going to make a case against a concept or institution you accepted as a given, and you will have to reevaluate your entire world view, because that is just how progress works.
Social justice is like physics or medical science; the paths to equity are out there, but we haven’t discovered all of them yet, and there are some we’ve found but can’t quite comprehend at this stage and are still working to unravel. You can’t win at social justice because it’s a relay race that’s never finished. All you can do is run your leg and try to get as far as possible from where you started.
my mom makes background stories for all of her animal crossing villagers and she has, inexplicably, determined that pietro had a wife who died mysteriously. so she put a tombstone outside his house because he “moves her body with him from island to island”. i asked her to elaborate. she will not.
i just asked if she thinks he killed his wife. the answer: “I don’t know. I just know he loved her very much. He loved her very much. Maybe a little too much. I don’t know.”
why would i ever want to have serious academic thoughts about homeric texts when instead i can just think about how rosy-fingered dawn and the wine-dark sea should kiss
the best thing about this is that when there’s plenty of resources, domesticated cats will naturally form colonies. in these colonies female cats raise their kittens communally with their kin. so you get situations where moms will raise kittens with their daughters from a previous litter, cats from the same litter will raise kittens together, etc. so not only does this little old kitty see her human as family, she is also excited to help her with her kitten.
Sometimes a grandma is a little creature that lives on the floor
