At a recent town hall, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau explained that the word “mankind” is not inclusive enough. “Peoplekind” is the acceptable form.
It should be noted that Trudeau was lecturing a woman. The young lady used the forbidden word while asking him a question, and he was apparently so concerned she’d offended herself that he interrupted her to deliver a vocabulary lecture. It was the most Trudeau thing Trudeau has ever done.
I find it, of course, quite brave and inspiring. But my fear is that he may not have gone far enough. Ridding the English language of a vulgarity like “mankind” is only the first step. If we are truly going to make our verbiage more inclusive and gender neutral — an admirable goal, to be sure — we may need to reassess these words as well:
1) Human
Let’s begin with the most obvious one. “Human” is so profane that I feel ashamed even writing it. “Huperson” is a much more enlightened choice.
2) Woman
The greatest trick the Patriarchy ever pulled was deciding that the female gender would be called “woman,” thus ensuring that every woman would need a man to be a woman because it’s right there in the name. Let’s change it to “woperson.”
3) Manager
How can we expect wopersons to break the glass ceiling if they are literally being excluded from the word “management”? “Personager” and “personagement” would solve this problem.
4) Commander
Are you sensing a pattern? EVERY position of authority has the word “man” embedded into it. Do you still think the Patriarchy is a myth, you fools?
5) Manatee, Mantle, Adamant, Semantic, Reprimand, Mandible, Manufacture, Manifold. And every other “man” word.
Say personatee, persontle, adapersont, sepersontic, repripersond, personufacture, personifold, etc., instead. It really isn’t very cumbersome to make this simple adjustment to 3 or 400 hundred words in the English language. I think we’ll manage. I mean mapersonage.
6) Man
Let’s not forget that the word man has the word man in it. A man can just be a person. He already has higher wages; he doesn’t need his own identity on top of it.
7) Woperson
If a man is now “person” then “woperson” brings us back to where we started with “woman.” Better to call a woperson a person and a man a person and everyone can just be persons.
8) Person
Scratch that. Persons may be even more misogynistic than humans. I cannot imagine having to tell my daughter when she gets older that only sons get to be perSONS. Forget persons and let’s call everyone “people.”
9) People
On second thought, the word “people” comes from the French “peupel,” which means “mankind.” Now we’re running in circles. People, person, man, woman — all of these words dehumanize women. I mean they dewhateverize women. I mean not women. The people with vaginas. I mean not people. OK, look, maybe our only choice is to take Ben Shapiro’s suggestion and combine the less offensive parts of “human” and “person” to make a brand new word: “huper.”
10) Huper
Ben Shapiro is a sexist monstrosity. Under the guise of creating a gender neutral word, he has only hidden the chauvinism under a thin veil of additional letters. Let’s look at this word again: “HupEr.” See the problem? The word “he” is stealthily smuggled into our minds, the letters separated only by the word “up” (signifying male superiority), causing us to form anti-female biases without even knowing it. Actually. Wait.
11) Female
How did I miss this? FeMALE. Look at that. “Male” is four letters. “Fe” is two. The majority of the word “female” is taken up my “male.” Men don’t just manspread on the subway — they do it in our language, too. I think it’s clear that all labels assigned to “men” and “women” are far too loaded with sexist assumptions. Maybe it’s best just to stick with the pronouns. We can call them “shes” and “hers” (if those are their preferred pronouns, of course).
12) She/Her
Forgive me. How could I not see it? She can’t be “she” or “her” without “he.” Men have co-opted every word in existence. Literally any word we may use to represent uterus-bearing individuals — and any word we may use to signify anything else — will inevitably have bigoted implications.
13) All language
We must abandon language. Verbal communication is a patriarchal conspiracy. All words, all forms of intelligible speech, are exclusionary, elitist, racist, sexist, and archaic. Let us relegate ourselves to grunting, groaning, and hissing at each other, only communicating our primitive emotions but never expressing a coherent thought. That’s basically what people already do on Twitter, anyway.
