Quote:
Originally Posted by dsvick
Except that all the pronoun switching has left me confused ...  |
I first discovered my friend Margaret had transitioned when I met her at a conference after not seeing her for a couple of decades. She said "Do you recognize me? You can be forgiven if you don't." I said "You'll have to forgive me.", and she explained who she was.
I mentioned it to another friend later, commenting that I hadn't seen her since she was him, and it left me musing on the nature and use of pronouns. She said her SF writer husband had written a book featuring aliens whose sex changed normally, and had worked out a complete system of pronouns to deal with it.
Ursula K. LeGuin's classic SF novel _The Left Hand of Darkness_ featured a variant of humanity on the planet Gethen who were neuter until mating time came around, at which point they might become either male or female. One of their notions of perversion was folks who used hormones to force a particular gender when they came into kemmer, instead of accepting the luck of the draw. LeGuin commented in later years that if she were to do it again, she would have used she instead of he to refer to them, as it better suited the points she was making.
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Dennis