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Writer's pictureJose Arrieta

Gender Doxing Accross Languages

I grew up with a heavily gendered language. I vividly remember trying to discover names for women who did not end with an A: Carmen, Raquel, Ruth y pocos más. Alas, gendering irrelevant things is important when speaking Spanish. God forbid that you say that heaven has a vagina. It is EL cielo, not LA cielo. It naturally has a penis!


Eventually, though, I transitioned into English; my wife would tell me how I speak Spanish when asleep, but other than that, most of my life happens in English. However, I live in Germany, and this land has a similar obsession with the genitalia of nouns.


What bogs my mind is that when people were giving penises and vulvas to things, they failed to coordinate. No two languages agree on what genitals inanimate objects have. So, in German, cars are sterile, but in Spanish, they are men. The moon has a harder job, wearing a penis in German and a vulva in Spanish (it has to be a complex endeavor). This language gender difference has made me avoid learning gender altogether in German. This tends to confuse people, but it feels natural to me.


Gender Disclosure

I am writing this in English, so you might feel holier than you and agree with me. But English has the same problem. What does the doctor that takes care of my genitals need to have a separate title from the one that take care of other people? The phrase: "I visited my urologist", discloses my gender in online conversations. Much less than "Visite a mi urology" or "Ich war bei meiner Urologin," which requires me to disclose not only that I have a penis and my genital doctor has a vulva. But overall, there is a general need to share details on genitalia that I find abhorrent. I mean, what is with this language-structural obsession to share the exact genitalia that people we do not know have? I don't care if your boss has a vulva or a penis. I just don't care. Why do I need to read about genitals all the time?


Doxing

When discussing data privacy, the term doxing often comes up. Doxing happens when people disclose information that is hidden otherwise. For example, one can live online without needing to reveal the type of genitals attached to us. But language requires us to do it.


The need to disclose gender irritates me. For example, if I talk about a colleague, I can try to hide their gender and replace "my colleague" whenever I should write a pronoun (e.g., his/her/them). I could also just say them, but if I am talking to an idiot, they will ask if I refer to one or multiple colleagues... yada yada.


Inclusivity

Furthermore, I feel that it is the incessant gender doxing need that drives the increase in language complexity driven by language inclusivity. Don't get me wrong. your pronouns are yours to choose. I need to conform. But my IQ and attention is limited.


Spanish is one of the fastest spoken languages. To avoid mistakes, it is filled with error correction mechanisms to avoid misgendering or mis-pluralizing(?). So if someone has a name that ends with "a", My guts and grammar correction mechanisms know I need to align pronouns with that "a" and gender dox everything as female.


But if this person uses they/them pronouns. My remembering self might know that, but I, mostly speak faster than I think/experience. So the decrease in redundancy leads me to mess up, shame myself, and write a post as a form of contrition.


Structural gender disclosure

Misgendering hurts, and language structures that promote gendering are not okay. They require us to gender and open up the opportunity for misgendering. Languages are things we use to think. They change our minds. We should be allowed to change them ourselves.


I do not care if you as a person dislike me because of my gender, race, sexual orientation, or religion. However, I do not accept that institutions and other structures that rule our lives discriminate against me for these reasons. The fact that our languages have a whole pronoun infrastructure that requires us to dox what set of genital things have is unacceptable. Again, English is the better language of the ones I know on this, but there is a lot of space for improvement.


The phrase: "I visited my sexual organ doctor" might sound ridiculous today. But It provides redundancy that promotes data privacy. There are no pronouns needed, nor my gender is shared. I might try it out in the future, so if you are confused with how I write, at least you know why. I would just rather avoid sharing gender and the need to provide pronouns altogether.


Pedophilic obsession

It might have been a misgendering event that triggered me to write. Yet, being the parent of a small child with gender-neutral and, most often than not, gender-neutral clothes has shown the obsessive compulsion people have with knowing what type of genitals are attached to my child's veins. My child is too young, but it makes me empathize with how hurtful TERFian "do you bleed?" argument really is.


Why do I need to tell a baker what genitals my child has? Why do I need to gender things correctly to show I am a well-integrated migrant? Why have we not invented something better?


Honestly, this feels close to some very low-level pedophilic obsession. In one byte we can store all possible genders. This one byte forms a very low-resolution image. It might not be enough to get people off, but why do I need to share this pixel with desconocidos? Society needs to know what exactly lies next to my child taint to feel happy. Why the need to think of their taint in so much detail? I don't think of your children's genitals, nor. I care!


Coda

I guess I have a parallel problem as well. Often, when people learn that my last name is Arrieta, they want to know where in the Basque country I grew up. This question brings utter hatred whenever it is asked. Honestly, I have made peace with my last name (story for another post). Yet, the fact that multiple Europeans raped enough Indigenous women for their history of oppression to be perpetuated in my last name means nothing but hatred to me.


I personally dislike the fact that I know Arrieta means "rocky place". That there are multiple towns named after these quarries in the north of Spain. And that whoever raped one my great...great grandmothers came from that area of the world. Many other grandmothers of mine were raped for my DNA to be less than 40% native American. The other 60% comes from rapers (he didn't forget a p, did he?) came from all over Spain, Africa, Italy, and more. Why the obsessive focus on this one Basque rapist?

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