I’d rather they bothered, too, Jenny. Was (obviously!) a petit pessimist, so only saying it is a conundrum for educators. If I have any reasoned objection to the old cheery color/gender/disability blindness, it is merely that it felt like no one wanted to acknowledge it was still logistically harder for certain groups to buck popular expectation and do certain things. It would have been nice to have been prepared for the possibility of a struggle.

Perhaps that has changed in the last 20 years, but I was actually shocked when I encountered real-life chauvinism in college. I had known it existed, but not really understood it existed *for me*, who wasn’t trying to be an astronaut or anything. I hadn’t anticipated the forms it would take. This is part of why I loved E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks so much. A gap in my education was filled retroactively, and I was tickled to think of 14-year-old girls reading it.

I also, notably, am not recommending that we STOP doing it – at some level, there must be a temporary unnatural, awkward period when language or culture shifts (take the awkward phrasing around what we call a homosexual’s partner – why does it feel so strange for people to just say ‘husband’?). Just that, to build on what Ms Trapunto said, I always felt… well not condescended to, but embarrased like I was condescending to people who weren’t priveliged white males – which, after all, when you look at it, shows that at some level, I was identifying my ethnic and gendered position as a group to which I belonged and others did not. It’s a difficult thing, The problem is that, working at an ed publisher now, I can tell you that there isn’t actually a great deal of respect or genuineness aronud these things. There’s a sort of vague collective guilt at times, or else the whole affair is just a big joke or a meh-whatever. A set of pantone swatches that shoudl be applied in equal proportion. But, it’s a difficult thing to balance, because even if grownups are not ready for it, children are ready to learn that we’re all equally worthy and able, so we must teach it, even if we do it rather awkwardly. I don’t know, it’s a muddle :/.

I think I probably notice about half the time, and mostly when I do notice, I kind of blow it off because I recognize that it’s a nuisance to do the work-arounds necessary for bias-free language. But I think now it’s worth people’s time.

Thank you!

I pay attention to lots of gender issues, but this is the first time that I’ve felt really strongly about this particular one.

I wonder if there have been times in the past that I haven’t noticed, and if so, why this particular time should have struck me so strongly. I have no idea about it, though. Just one of those things.

Oh, fascinating! I never knew that before, but it doesn’t surprise me–either that people conceived of the Holy Spirit as feminine in the first place, or that the Latin translators made it masculine.

To me, it’s not so much a question of what offends as it is a question of what terminology causes the groups referred to, to feel like the terminology includes them and identifies them in a way they like to be identified. Maybe? I don’t know, I just thought of that now. I think I’d have to consider it more before I decide under what circumstances terminology should get changed. Certainly some group has to have strong feelings about changing it to get the ball rolling.

I never had that thought when I was a kid. I noticed that the textbooks were doing that, and I knew it was on purpose, but even if it’s disingenuous, the alternative is worse. Either they consciously make the effort to help kids feel like they have all the possibilities as kids of different races/gender, or they don’t bother with it because kids know what the status quo is, and they make all the astronauts white males. I’d far, far rather they bothered.

It was so much less helpful than book bloggers! When I discovered book bloggers, my whole book recommendations system changed completely!

Oh, yeah, it definitely wasn’t implying that. Anyone would be confused, unless eighteenth-century Latin was her specialty. It is not mine. I was super confused. All the spellings were different.

I couldn’t believe it either! I always think she’s a far more important poet than Ted Hughes is; but then I dislike Ted Hughes as a person.

I’ve gone through phases where I’ve given up and used “he” for a while, but I usually pass through them and start doing s/he instead. Now I’m kind of over that too. I wish there were a pleasing gender-neutral pronoun in common use that just meant any person, male or female.