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Feb. 19th, 2019
with her buddy-ship and her buddy-crewmate, and on the way they meet a wide variety of aliens who have a wide variety of sex/genders and related pronouns. I'm not entirely sure if the author is more socially conscious or more enamored of showing off that she's thought about the fact that aliens might have 17 sexes and 8 legs each, but after the third or fourth encounter with a non-human I'm starting to wonder if either the author or the protagonist has ever considered that, actually, gender/sex is rather a bizarrely arbitrary way to divvy up pronouns in the first place*. If you want to really show that you laugh at convention, the naive request of "Tell me your sex/gender so I can use the right pronoun" should be met with "What a strange question! I'm male, but why does that matter for pronouns? Does everybody on your planet have the same color eyes?"
* Assuming, of course, that you even feel a need beyond animate/inanimate - or even feel that distinction of that is necessary! Lots of real earth cultures that definitely have gender roles don't show that in their pronouns.
* Assuming, of course, that you even feel a need beyond animate/inanimate - or even feel that distinction of that is necessary! Lots of real earth cultures that definitely have gender roles don't show that in their pronouns.
but in this case it's pretty much unavoidable due to the subject matter, so I'll just tell you: the book is called Confessions of a Teenage Leper. Eva brought it home from the library, and I read it as I cooked dinner.
It may be the case that most or all people with Hansen's Disease hate the term "leper" and prefer not to be called that. I'm more than happy to oblige! And while the protagonist can get away with it due to also having the disease, the readers of this book need to be told the preferred usage.
But that doesn't make me thrilled to suddenly see a paean to Person First Language in the middle of this book, one which was then reiterated in the afterword. Instead of "put the person first!" nonsense I would have told our main character, when she complained that it doesn't matter which word you use, that the terms "leper" and, to a lesser extent, "leprosy" have been tied down with so much stigma and figurative baggage that it's basically impossible to use them in a literal, non-pejorative sense and that, also, whether she understood it or not it wasn't a very good idea to go around saying rude and offensive things when you know other people can't stand it.
It may be the case that most or all people with Hansen's Disease hate the term "leper" and prefer not to be called that. I'm more than happy to oblige! And while the protagonist can get away with it due to also having the disease, the readers of this book need to be told the preferred usage.
But that doesn't make me thrilled to suddenly see a paean to Person First Language in the middle of this book, one which was then reiterated in the afterword. Instead of "put the person first!" nonsense I would have told our main character, when she complained that it doesn't matter which word you use, that the terms "leper" and, to a lesser extent, "leprosy" have been tied down with so much stigma and figurative baggage that it's basically impossible to use them in a literal, non-pejorative sense and that, also, whether she understood it or not it wasn't a very good idea to go around saying rude and offensive things when you know other people can't stand it.