It used to be called “inclusive language,” now more and more it’s being called “genderless language.” If genderless language is anything like inclusive language, it will fast become an idol. Allow me to explain…

My first church valued inclusive language to the point where if something wasn’t written that way – even things written long before the advent of inclusive language – they couldn’t hear it and wanted to exclude it from gatherings of the church. They would alter it when they could, and all of our songs were castrated for our protection, but there were times it just didn’t work. If you waltz into a piece of poetry, for example, and set about changing the language to remove the penises (penii?), you change the rhyme and the meter and effectively destroy the work of the artist in service to your own ego. Genderless language, whatever else it might do, does the same thing. Becoming a proponent of it often leads one to look at every piece of writing or speech they encounter with an eye toward gender first. Since in all likelihood the writer didn’t have gender on their mind when they wrote whatever it is you are sanitizing, keeping the world safe from gender is an exercise in missing the point.

Many of us know someone who feels compelled to mention gender or sexuality in nearly every conversation. Statements like, “As a queer woman, I like green beans,” are simply nonsense, yet some people will go to rather cumbersome lengths to ensure we don’t forget their sexuality. To be completely honest, I find such practices profoundly boring. I occasionally listen to a podcast where in more episodes than not one host mentions being a queer woman, another mentions teaching theology in a university setting, and the third mentions having worked in a lay capacity for a religious order for many years. They are more or less equivalent expressions of their unmet ego needs, not all that different from insisting on genderless language. Such practices are extremely boring and obtrusive to me. Go ahead, use whatever language you care to use and find your identity wherever you need to find it. Just get on with it, already, and perhaps we can talk about something of substance!