What's up everyone! My name is Ashley Wylde, welcome to a video... on my channel...
where I'm going to talk about some stuff. This is a gender video, so if you like
videos about gender I've got a playlist called the Gender Resources
Playlist that you might want to check out. I want to talk today about gendered
language. Not about pronouns, which is where we usually go when we talk about
gendered language, but about words that imply gender. Over the last... gosh, eight
years! Holy-moly, eight years I have been
identifying and understanding myself to be someone who is nonbinary and gender
non-conforming. Over that time period I've slowly
started to see a breakdown in my relationship with words that didn't
bother me in the beginning, which I'm starting to feel differently about now. I
think about words that describe relationships most specifically. As many
of you know I was assigned female at birth, and what that means is that I am a
nonbinary adult who is a whole lot of things. I am a sister. I am a daughter. I'm
a niece and a granddaughter. I've been a girlfriend. But as someone who's
nonbinary, words that apply to women really don't feel good to me, and they
don't fit right... they don't fit right. These are words that have the intention
of explaining the connection between two or more people, but because they're
gendered, because they allude to "woman" as a gender marker, they don't feel good to
me. Being someone's girlfriend or being
someone's wife is something that you want to feel good about!
So if girlfriend stops fitting, it starts to change the way that you think about
those relationships. My interest in being called those words has shifted and I've
noticed that the cracks started most obviously in words that described
relationships that I was less close to. So for example, when I think about my
brother: I take an enormous amount of pride in being
his sister because I love him, and he's a wonderful person, and he means the
absolute world to me, and he loves me and for him the fact that I'm his sister is
something exciting, worth celebrating. Sister means something really big and
beautiful, and so it's easier for me to be his sister than it is for me to, for
example, think about being a mother. Because I'm not anybody's mother, and
that means I will get to choose if I'm ever going to be somebody's mother. I
will get to decide whether mother is going to have anything to do with my
relationship with my children- that word, that gendered implication. And then I get
to words like "daughter" and I really start to have a hard time because it
means something to me. And because it means something to me, I want to start to
think about how I can describe those relationships in ways that don't feel
bad. I don't want my relationship with my mom to have any weirdness associated
with my gender. I don't want to be a daughter if "daughter" doesn't feel good,
but I want to be clear that that relationship matters and I want to figure out a way
to be something other than a daughter without diminishing the significance. And
there are potential answers, there are words that you can replace. In this
example you could replace child or offspring for daughter, but it also got
me thinking about words... about the power of language. It reminded me of a TED talk
that I saw when I did TEDx. The talk was by Xajés Martinez, I'm gonna put it in the
description below, and they talk about, how do you summarize yourself in one
word? It's an incredibly moving talk and it made me wonder how would I summarize
my relationship in one word. I think about my brother, the default answer is
"sister." It's sister. I'm his sister, that's what I am to him. But if I don't want to
be a sister, what am I? And that question makes me excited
because that makes me feel like we get to decide together. That makes me feel
like my brother and I get to sit down and say, "Who am I to you?"
Forget sister, am I your co-conspirator? Am I your rock? Am I your cheerleader? Am I your
best man? And if I'm none of those things, can we make something up? Can we figure
out how to twist and bend language to serve us? Can we figure out how to make
this language honor us, and name our bond in a way that doesn't really care what
the rules are? And if we can do that, how cool. And so it started to get a little
bit away from, "how do I switch this from a gendered word to a non gendered word" and
it started to become, "how do I authentically explore
"the content of my relationships? And what
"words feel powerful enough to describe them?" This isn't a video where I can tell you the
answers to those questions, this is a video where I wanted to tell you that
I'm asking those questions! Because I feel excited about them! Because words
are so important, words are so so so powerful. You can take agency over them
and make them into what fits you best. I hope you're having a really good day, I
am! I mean, I am, I'm having a great day. And I hope you have a really good week.
I'm thrilled to have been able to make this video for you, and excited to
continue to make videos for you. Shout out to Rachel Anne, hotpinksun, for this
shirt. Accessibility should be a basic human right. Get your read on. Learn some
stuff about that. Let's talk about it in the comments. That's all I've got for you
this time and I will see you very very soon. Buh-bye!