Pronunciation
Someone wrote…
I realised recently I’ve never heard anyone say out loud words like trans*, ze, neutrois … This made me reflect that in a wider sense only discussing things online is great but I also feel like I’m learning to describe an identity that finally feels right to me, as if I’m trying to learn a new language from a book without a pronunciation guide. I hope one day I’ll meet some other speakers and we can work out how to have a conversation and hopefully forgive lack of fluency.
What’s your experience?
Posted by Freiya on October 13th, 2013 at 08:00 am
Category: your voice One comment »
October 14th, 2013 at 10:04 am |
I’m certain you have your own pronunciations for those words, but for the record, I say these:
ze/zie: “zee” (as in the American letter Z)
hir: “here”
neutrois: as if it were a legitimate French word (I speak French)
trans*: “trans-splat” — “splat” being jargon for the “wildcard character” ‘*’ in computer science, that is to say, “trans-whatever”
In many ways the internet facilitates (or should facilitate) gender-agnostic communication. Communication is largely based on text and thus the *content* of what we say comes through first, rather than the minor details like our personal appearance.
Unfortunately, some online communities (most notoriously, the comment trolls of YouTube) are simply doing it wrong…
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