A Kritik of Gender Neutrality, I.

A Kritik of Gender Neutrality, I.

I all ways found in the words Man, He, et cetera, a shelter that housed both and all as though it were a warm café on a rainy day. It was gender-neutral to my mind, for ‘man’ occurred within ‘woman’ and ‘human’, and ‘he’ occurred within ‘she’. From extreme youth, learning the English Language, I found this peculiarly delightful. It was as though ‘he’ and ‘man’ were the ribs of which ‘she’ and ‘woman’ were flesh. I felt no sense of inferiority to women, as I might have, but only interest in that each woman, as though out of manners, was accorded the special dignity of a gender-specific pronoun (for ‘he’ was so often applied with implicit gender-neutrality) and five letters to delineate the sex rather than the mere three that comprised the root-word. ‘Man’ was all ways such a root-word, for obviously it did not delineate a Thing-In-Its-Self (as a logocentric dogma would imply); ‘Mankind’ was valid for its utility – alone, by the same token – as meaning ‘all words of the kind that include the root word ‘man’.’ ‘Humankind’ never affected such a utility, for it could only apply to all words containing ‘human’ (such as ‘superhuman’), unless it were ‘tacked onto’ some Thing-In-Its-Self in a logocentric manner.

Dm.A.