The students at University of Tennessee are already learning new words this school year.
The college in Knoxville has told its staff and students to stop calling each other “he,” “she,” “him,” and “her.” Instead, they are encouraging people to refer to each other with gender neutral terms terms like “ze, hir, hirs, xe, xem, and xyr” instead….which look more like a cat stomped on my keyboard than words.
Donna Braquet, the Director of the University of Tennessee’s Pride Center said,
We should not assume someone’s gender by their appearance, nor by what is listed on a roster or in student information systems. Transgender people and people who do not identify within the gender binary may use a different name than their legal name and pronouns of their gender identity, rather than the pronouns of the sex they were assigned at birth.
The university clarified that nobody would be forced into using the terms following critics calling the new language regime “ridiculous” and “absurd.”
Anyone else think this sounds like an article from The Onion?
…It’s not.
[Story via]
[Lead image via]
