Caption: [So, you’re nonbinary. You’ve got your nouns figured out, you got your pronouns figured out. What could possibly go wrong? Until, there’s a formal setting. You have to use a title. You don’t have a doctorate! So you go online, you look “what are gender neutral titles”, “nonbinary titles” and everything everywhere says “mx”. It’s fine. You just don’t feel like its right for you. So what do you do?
Hi I’m Tuse, I’m nonbinary and I’m a huge linguistics and history nerd. And I want to share some alternate options for nonbinary titles. Let’s start with what we already know. Mister and Missus. Those are the base gendered titles in English. Mrs. comes from Mistress. So, mister and mistress. The ending of those “-ter” and “-tress”, those are the modern English forms of the Latin tor and trix.
So one great option is just removing the gendered ending. So just “Mist”. I really like this because its simply, to the point. I like to shorten it with “M”. But my favorite option is- Latin didn’t have two grammatical genders. Latin had a neuter gender. And so, the neuter equivalent of “tor” and “trix”, is “trum”. So “Mistrum”.
I really like this, I use it for myself. I like to shorten it as “Mm”. And I really like it because it is unambiguous. It is very clearly not mister, not mistress, not missus, and not miss. That’s what I like to use for myself. I love exploring other options for nongendered titles and nongendered language in general.
We have a tendency to come up with one option and then expect everyone who doesn’t fit into the two binary options to use that third option. And we don’t have to do that. If you have other options for what you like to use as your title as a nonbinary person, I would love to hear it. Please share!]
Note: Because this was being commented a lot on the original video, of course these work in English and not necessarily other languages. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be helpful, just that they might only be helpful in English.
(via walrus-queen)
