>>9640958
Thanks! I agree that it can be a positive thing. How one deals with language can either make or break a person. This goes back to scriptures written about philosophy thousands of years ago that I've read. It's not just in the Bible. It's in Eastern religion/philosophy as well. It's an understanding of the whole human species, not simply one group or another.
One of the biggest risks is giving away ground in this. Allowing for the change of the definition of: man, woman, he, she, to refer to cross-sex people is a problem on a psychological and philosophical level. Hannah Arendt has a good quote on this:
"Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."
Hannah Arendt, from "Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution"
It's fundamentally damaging to a person's understanding of reality to toy with basic terms like that, because they can no longer finish a thought or speak a sentence properly. It puts them at odds with truth itself. Orwell also spoke about this:
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better."
George Orwell, from "Politics and the English Language" (essay)
Some people might think this isn't much of a hill to die on. But, it's important to understand that language is the key into someone's mind (a mental keystone, if you will). It's how they manipulate us, in addition to the imagery they show us (violence, transgender actors/actresses spending their whole lives impersonating the other sex, the imagery of abuse over and over again on TV and in movies, etc.). It's important not to underestimate it, I think. Particularly this day and age when English standards are flying out the door, the subset of words they use to manipulate us becomes easier to handle because people's vocabularies are smaller.