Keeping up with the ongoing changes in diversity language has become a matter of lifelong learning. For a near-nonagenarian (I turn 90 on April 6), this means continuous learning as well as relentless unlearning. That is, trying to unlearn old uses of language that decades of repetition have deeply wired into my brain.
Take gender. Growing up in 1940’s Kansas City, Missouri, I learned that men were men and women were women. I inhabited a world of man talk and woman talk, men’s jobs and women’s jobs, men’s clothes and women’s clothes. It wasn’t much different in college during the 1950’s. We were men and women, not cisgender or transgender men and women.
Continue reading Diversity and Speech Part 44: Generations of Gender Talk – by Carlos Cortés
