had to do a Cultural Competency Training and why has no one ever gotten through to these companies that most communities really hate person-first language
it sounds so apologetic! "Cliff, a person, a human, just like us normal people, if you prick him does he not bleed, who happens to incidentally be of transgender identity" oh my goodness were you just riding on the ragged edge of thinking I might not be a person before we cleared that up
or like someone told them not to use slurs and they got all pouty like "well I guess I just won't use any adjectives ever now, are you a person of happy with that"
I suppose it serves as a useful social marker of the group of people who are attempting to follow what they were told are best practices, and so can probably be trusted not to do something outrageously aggressive, but also cannot be trusted trusted
I’ve always seen person-first language as actively malicious* rather than passively malicious, but this post is a good reminder that it can be both at once
*if u do not understand why, consider what we do and don’t use it for- we say ‘blind person’ and ‘deaf person’, but ‘person with cancer’ and ‘person with COVID’. When you say ‘person with autism’ or even ‘person of color’**, it really really really sounds like you’re intentionally putting them in the linguistic camp of diseases :/
**I am not one of those so if I’m wrong on this feel free to yell at me
It's worth noting that the name "person first language" comes from (or was at least popularised by) people with AIDS campaigning to be called people with AIDS rather than "AIDS patients" or "AIDS victims".
That it has spiraled into a pervasive "adjectives are bad" mentality was probably unforeseeable. Especially since AIDS isn't even an adjective.
