Coates said, “The experience of being a hip-hop fan and not being able to use the word ni**er . . . will give you just a little peek into the world of what it means to be black. Because to be black is to walk through the world and watch people doing things that you cannot do.”

* I put “preferred pronouns” in quotes because many nonbinary folks see it as a misnomer. The argument is that pronouns aren’t preferred or unpreferred—they’re either correct or incorrect. To a nonbinary person, being referred to with a gendered pronoun would be just as inaccurate as someone using the word he to describe my mom. It’s not a

As the legendary Betty White once said, “Why do people say ‘grow some balls?’ Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”

“We can’t just pretend to be doing dispassionate linguistics and not recognize that these things are already extremely political and that we may even have a responsibility to those politics,” Zimman says. “I think there’s an overall move . . . to taking responsibility for the implications of what we’re doing.”

The delightfully comprehensive phrase vaginal-cliteral-vulval complex (or VCVC) is another women-invented term I’ve heard to describe said genitalia.

Maybe the idea of naming your own body on your terms will catch

lot of trans people now see a male body as a body belonging to anyone who identifies as a man,” says Zimman. And vice versa for a female body.

CKW conclude their study with this vision for the future: A discourse of sex as pleasure, separating pleasure from procreation, and acknowledging women as active desiring and sexually assertive subjects, not necessarily centered around the erect penis, will challenge and confront established power structures. What is needed is a new mythology, one

The cultural stereotype that all gay men naturally talk like women is as precarious as the stereotype that all women naturally use uptalk and prefer to gossip about people instead of debating ideas. It’s just . . . not that simple.