Gender Space
Feb02
on 2017-02-02
at 00:01
Too Much Information – an online comic
An old house, a geek, a cute transvestite, a very tall lesbian, and at least one ghost–what could happen? – Adult situations and artistic nudity. Not suitable for children.
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I’m going to assume that Hermas is the balance pole of Hanyo. I’ll admit curiosity as to the appropriate pronoun for them.
Considering how much they’re (or rather Andy is) borrowing from Japanese? I’m pretty sure it would be “futa”.
“Han” means “half”, and is being used here to describe individuals with effectively no, or a neutral gender/sex. Given the context of all the details about “hanyo” that have been exposited, it’s rather accurate and descriptive… and as such I would tend to think of it as not insulting or derogatory unless the speaker intended it to be so (like most words).
The Japanese word for “both” is “futa”, which, despite what your experiences with Japanese-flavoured Internet porn may have led you to believe, is a harmless word –or more often part of many compound words (example: “futari” means “together”)– with no kinky implications on its own. The word for a hermaphrodite is “futanari” which literally means “both forms”. English speaking hentai fans are the only ones who shorten it to “futa” and they do so in error. That’s like shortening the word “crossdresser” down to “cross”; the meaning is lost.
Not… really lost, as those who know what the word ‘futa’ means know what is being implied
Implying that a ‘futanari’ and a ‘crossdresser’ are the same is a total inaccuracy
O_o
…Good thing I did nothing of the sort then.
I used the latter as a comparable example of grammar; of how you can lose the meaning of a word if you abbreviate it carelessly (especially if you happen not to know what the root words literally mean).
Never said, or meant to imply, that you did
Just meant, there are far too many people who believe a ‘futanari’ is a ‘crossdresser’
While Hermaphrodite is considered derogatory these days it comes from the offspring of two Greek gods Hermes and Aphrodite.As the two parents were considered to be very attractive, I can’t imagine the child was not also found to be so. They were noted as having the genitals of both genders (which demonstrates that even back then it was a known possibility.)
I’ve always figured that the way to deal with the fact that most feminine terms include the masculine term (fe-male, wo-men) is to take off most of the masculine word and leave just the m. So instead of female, call a wom “Fem.” This also lets the combined terms refer to all humans of any sex, which currently requires the plural as the only gender neutral version of the words.
Anyone else read the Excalibur series of Star Trek novels by Peter David? (Highly recommended, BTW)
The chief engineer was a “Hermat”, a member of a single-gendered species introduced on-screen in TNG. In the books, David dug a lot deeper into their culture, and had all these unique pronouns to properly address them by.
I frankly thought they were a LOT more intelligently chosen than many of the pronouns transgendered people are trying to make popular now, (“they” is a plural, dammit, and I have no idea how I’m meant to pronounce “xyrs” out loud.) I don’t know if David came up with those pronouns himself, but clearly a lot of good thought went into each: they were both meaningfully distinctive from existing English words, but also intuitive enough that someone hearing them for the first time immediately understood their meaning.
The objective of communication is to convey your thoughts and have them be understood by the other party, after all. Frankly that’s an underlying precept of achieving equal rights also; it’s not good if a person whose help and understanding you need is walking away from you thinking “I can’t even communicate with that bizarre person!”
Doesn’t help that a large number of these ‘new-age’ gendertypes are deliberately trying to be confusing so they can rant about how people ‘don’t understand them!’ (example being “xyrs”)
@Hinoron, they is often used if the gender of a being is unknown. This is because the only gender neutral pronoun in English is it, which is considered insulting if used to identify an intelligent being. The early choices for gender neutral pronouns took the German language gender neutral, I’m not entirely certain why that was decided to not work for people, but I suspect it created confusion when speaking with someone fluent in that language.
I suspect most people who object to people giving their preferred pronouns do so because they fail to understand the choice and need. I doubt you would have a problem if introduced to someone with say the name Michael who extended their hand in friendship and said you could call them Mike.