Following my note about the term "feminism", even if we stick to language, I can name something I feel much more strongly about than my pet peeve with the term "feminism" (and I feel much more strongly about equal-pay (so long as we live in a world where there are 'wages'), stopping rape, etc, than I do about (what I'm about to describe), which as I said is much more important than the critique of the term itself "feminism")

There's been discussion of using "womyn" rather than "women", and so on. I don't have a problem with this but rather I think that a much more radical attack on [the status quo in] language is needed, and that is nothing less than the removal of gender as we know it from language. [Note "as we know it"; obviously one needs, and I want to preserve, the ability to specify gender in a sentence; as I will make clear below, I want to remove the *imperative* of specifying gender, so that in those sentences (surely the great majority) where it is immaterial, one need not specify].

In Spanish there is more differentiation than in English, and in the ancient language of Hebrew (and in modern Hebrew which is based on it) there is even more. So, if I'm a man, I say "Ani Rotze" for "I want" and if I'm a woman I say "Ani Rotza"; in English it's "I want" for both sexes; in Hebrew, even in the first-person, you are reminded of your gender every time you speak.

So even in children's songs e.g. "I am marching forward" you have to pick the gender, which of course was picked to be male, with the gils thus singing "I [male] am marching.."

I think that to struggle for years to get the [e.g. campus] songs, and everything else, which is a hell of a lot, changed to be [male] sometimes and [female] sometimes is, if and when it's successful, to gain a very small amount for a very large amount of struggle.

Let's compare again gender with race.

We do not have separate words "whah-he" and "bah-he" for black and whites; we don't say "bah-he is drinking milk" when it's a black person and "whah-he is drinking milk" when it's a white person ("white" and "black" belong in their own quotes of course, but I wanted to keep it readable).

It's no less absurd to have two separate sentences, "he is drinking milk" versus "she is drinking milk".

Of course we'll need "man" and "woman" -- or whatever two term replace these words, for when there is a real need to talk about gender; but I am convinced that it is AS DESTRUCTIVE to both young and adult minds to force gender into practically every other sentence as would have been forcing them to say "bah-he" and "whah-he" (and brah-he, and so on); Spanish, French, etc, to say nothing of Hebrew, require more radical changed than English.

It's quite possible that feminists, linguists, and/or others, have raised this issue, although I've not personally heard anyone talk about this issue, I am speaking from conclusions I've come up with myself.

It's up to "the people", and with a crucial/central part/role played by women, to choose the new terms.

--Harel Barzilai (copyright)