This is the spam check system I've been working on:
tom scott being cool, transmisia, longish
In 2013, Tom Scott made a video about english's singular "they" that referenced nonbinary people who use it because neither "he" or "she" fit them. I just found a... blog post? A sort of blog post thing he wrote about it, which makes a minor correction about something that slipped through the editing process. Whatever. What's much more interesting to me is the rest of the post.
When the video was posted, it was uncontroversial. It gained relatively few dislikes, and he mentions that most of those were from speakers of languages with grammatical gender who felt their language had been insulted. But in around 2016, it started to gather a lot more dislikes. I'm sure those of you here on fedi can imagine why. The reference to nonbinary people went from being "FYI, these people exist" to "I'm taking a side in a political issue" which, I suppose he is, but that was never his point.
But I really like this quote that he uses to finish the post:
It seems that, over the last few years, non-binary and trans folks have reached stage three on the Williams Scale: ‘then they fight you’. Hopefully, it won't take long to reach stage four: ‘then you win’.
~ awoo.space admin ~ bisexual ~ nonbinary ~ likes video games and weird/ old electronics and will post obsessively about both ~ AC, Germany ~ avatar by @dzuk