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Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ mental health nonprofit notes an "explosion of language that we're seeing around how young people express their gender." A 2001research study of 34,700+ US youth released Monday by the LGBTQ mental health nonprofit the Trevor Project found that over one in four (26%) LGBTQ youth identified as nonbinary. An additional 20% said they are not sure or are questioning whether they identify as nonbinary. The term "nonbinary" refers to people whose gender does not fit within the traditional binary construction of male or female. Drawing from an online survey conducted between October and December of 2020 of over 34,700 LGBTQ youth in the U.S., the Trevor Project found that while the term "nonbinary" has often been associated with a trans or transitioning person, only half of the respondents who identified as nonbinary also identified as transgender. (An additional 20% said they were not sure or questioning whether they are transgender). While 72% of respondents who identified as nonbinary said they use the term to describe their gender identity, other terms were also cited, including queer (used by 29% of respondents), gender non-confirming (27%), genderfluid (24%), genderqueer (23%), androgynous (23%), agender (15%), demigirl (10%), demiboy (8%), genderflux (4%), and bigender (4%). (Queer is also a term people can use to identify their sexuality, which is separate from gender identity. Most the nonbinary youth sampled reported being multisexual or attracted to multiple genders.) "More and more young people are taking control over their gender identity, and finding language and terms that resonate with them," DeChants continues. "And expressing that in the world in [ways] that we haven't necessarily seen in the past." The majority of nonbinary respondents said they use pronouns outside the gender binary-such as "they/them" or "xe/xem." Here, DeChants notes an "emp

How are gendered languages holding up in society's current push for gender-neutral terms? This NPR podcast explores gender bias in the Spanish language, the role of the Real Academia Española, and efforts led by teenagers in Argentina to de-gender the Spanish language.

"...for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. ... Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country's National Encyclopedia. ... critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children ... toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do ... One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys 'gender-coded' them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys."

Yale University said Thursday that it's replacing terms such as 'freshman' and 'upperclassman' with more gender-neutral phrasing like 'first-year' and 'upper-level student.' The changes come after faculty began deliberating the issue in 2016, when students said they wanted 'greater gender inclusivity,' on campus, according to the Yale Daily News. The school said the new phrasing is a way to modernize its formal correspondence and public literature.

People in the workforce are working away from just gender binary pronouns or references. Using more gender-neutral pronouns opens up a safe environment for all people. For example, using the term "they" to describe one person helps you escape awkwardness and stumbling between "he" or "she" pronouns. This is more apparent in workplaces because now, people are not just man or woman, there are many more existing genders.

Helpful article on how to incorporate more inclusive gender-neutral language, and why you should adopt it.

Analyzing the verbs that followed male and female pronouns in 100K stories, the following patterns were observed: 1. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- "she screams", "she cries", or "she pleads." Men tend to be the aggressor: "he kidnaps" or "he beats". Not all male-oriented terms are negative- many, like "he saves"/"he rescues" are distinctly positive- but almost all are active rather than receptive. 2. There's an old stereotype (that's appeared in works like Game of Thrones and Sherlock Holmes) that "poison is a woman's weapon", and this is supported in our analysis. Female characters are more likely to "poison", "stab", or "kick"; male characters are more likely to "beat", "strangle", or simply "murder" or "kill". Men are moderately more likely to "steal", but much more likely to "rob". 3. Based on this text analysis, a fictional murderer is about 2.5X as likely to be male than female, but in America (and likely elsewhere) murderers are about 9X more likely to be male than female. This means female murderers may be overrepresented in fiction relative to reality. David Robinson, the data scientist who ran the text analysis, offers these questions for future research: 1.Is the shift stronger in some formats or genre than another? We could split the works into films, novels, and TV series, and ask whether these gender roles are equally strong in each. 2. Is the shift different between male- and female- created works? 3. Has the difference changed over time? Some examination indicates the vast majority of these plots come from stories written in the last century, and most of them from the last few decades (not surprising since many are movies or television episodes, and since Wikipedia users are more likely to describe contemporary work). 4. I'd also note that we could expand the analysis to include not only pronouns but first names (e.g. not only "she tells", but "M

Research from Columbia Business School professors Adam Galinsky and Michael Slepian shows that merely saying a name aloud sparks an instant connection to a specific gender, evoking a cascading pattern of stereotypical judgments about the masculinity or femininity of an individual, often in the first second of hearing a spoken name. "Names give cues to social categories, which in turn, activate stereotypes," says Slepian. "By considering how names symbolically represent stereotypes, we link sounds to social perception. The most basic social category division is gender and the most distinction between phonemes (the sounds that make up words) is voiced versus unvoiced. We found that female and male names differ phonetically." The Columbia Business School researchers believe that names become established as for males or females through their spoken sounds. They conducted eleven studies focused on distinguishing the different sounds of spoken names. The findings provide consistent evidence that voiced names (those pronounced with vocal cord vibration which often sound "harder") such as "Gregory," "James," and "William" are given more frequently to males, and unvoiced names (those pronounced without vocal cord vibration which often sound "softer" and breathier) such as "Heather," "Sarah," and "Tiffany" are more frequently given to females. These name assignments fit stereotypical gender categories - men as "hard" and tough, and women as "soft" and tender. The researchers also noted other naming trends, namely 1. A rise in gender-neutral names. 2. Parents are more likely to give their baby a name that has recently grown in popularity. 3. Parents often give names that phonetically resemble their social category. 4. Female names go in and out of style faster than male names. 5. Current naming inspiration includes social media and technology, celestial themes, and royal birth announcements.

Issues of equality and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people - along with challenges to their rights - have become a major topic in the headlines. These issues can involve words and ideas and identities that are new to some. That's why we've put together a glossary of terms relating to gender identity. Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another. Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.

The relationship between language and gender has long been of interest within sociolinguistics and related disciplines. Early 20th century studies in linguistic anthropology looked at differences between women's and men's speech across a range of languages, in many cases identifying distinct female and male language forms. Most of the studies showed males have a more dominant speaking style than women, and even as gender becomes more fluid than binary the same trends are still shown.

series of language and gender syllabi

The effects on women because of the commonness of male gendered words

"Everyone's entitled to their opinion regarding pronoun acceptability." The use of singular "they" has always been a bit disreputable - you might say it, but you wouldn't want to write it down. But now it's a pronoun whose hour has come. A few months ago, the Washington Post style guide accepted it. And it's been welcomed by people who identify as genderqueer and who feel that "he" and "she" don't necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. Universities allow students to select it as their personal pronoun. And so does Facebook, so that your friends will get notices like "Wish them a happy birthday." This use of "they" has been around for a long time. It shows up in Shakespeare, Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. Jane Austen was always saying things like "everybody has their failing." But the Victorian grammarians made it a matter of schoolroom dogma that one could only say "Everybody has his failing," with the understanding that "he" stood in for both sexes. That rule wasn't really discredited until the 1970s, when the second-wave feminists made the generic masculine the paradigm of sexism in language. Male critics ridiculed their complaints as a "libspeak tantrum" and accused them of suffering from "pronoun envy." But most writers now realize that the so-called gender-neutral "he" is anything but. Nobody would ever say, "Every candidate thanked his spouse, including Hillary." When you utter "he," you always bring a male to mind. But once the generic masculine fell out of favor, what were we going to replace it with? People weren't about to adopt a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun the way they were adopting gender-neutral job descriptions. "He or she" was impossibly clunky. It was time to restore singular "they" to respectability. And that's been happening, even in edited books and the media.

Jack Qu'emi is a writer and self-described "queer, non-binary femme," who among other terms identifies as Afro-Latinx. That's Latinx. Not Latino. Not Latina. The term (pronounced: la-teen-ex) is gaining traction in Spanish-speaking communities. But many are still asking, "What's the meaning of the 'x'?" Qu'emi explains: "The x [in Latinx], is a way of rejecting the gendering of words to begin with, especially since Spanish is such a gendered language." Like the use of they/them/their pronouns in English (in place of the gendered pronouns he/him/his and she/her/hers), "Latinx" is an attempt in Spanish to include non-binary people, those who are neither male nor female.

Different genders speak differently, and these differences begin in the gestures that both genders use. Gesture use is very important in language development in both genders.

As the topic surrounding gender identity begins to grow, so does questions about appropriate pronouns. The word "they" has been anointed the word of the year in 2015 by the American Dialect Society. Pronouns for those who don't identify under the gender binary system have been becoming increasingly larger. Colleges have started to use words such as "Ze", "E", and "Ey". The Oxford dictionary has also recently added "Mx" (mix) to serve as an alternative to Mr. or Mrs. Most people have learned that it is best to ask a person which pronouns they would like to be used.

A research paper done by Nancy G. Kutner and Donna Brogan, while both being professors at Emory University, on the slang usage of university students split between the gender binary: what sort of slang each gender uses, which gender uses slang more commonly, and the cause and effects of both.

This study explores the use of filler words through the lens of gender. Filler words are more commonly associated with women due to the "valley-girl" stereotype. However, these researchers found that, while filler words were used more frequently by women in the past, men use tend to use more filler words than women present-day. This paper discusses how the shift in gender roles and social dynamics between the genders contributes to speech patters.

gender

Wordles of commonly used words in television commercials advertising boy and girl toys.