“Silencing is always political,” Robin Lakoff said in a 1992 paper. “To be voiceless is to have no ‘say’ in what gets done, what happens to one, to have no representation. . . . To be deprived of speech is to be deprived of humanity itself—in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of others.” When one’s humanity is taken away, the obligation to treat them

She came up with a theory called gender performativity, which essentially says that gender isn’t something you are, it’s something you do.

whatever we choose, we can trust that language will move along its merry way regardless.

Pressures for women to position themselves as “normal” and “nice” are almost always a constraint, no matter who’s listening. “None of us is ever free of the need to keep up some sort of front,” Coates says.

“Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”

Sociolinguists agree the creation of these different categories is connected to a deeper human desire to typologize species—to identify groups of living things, sort them, and try to figure out what their relationship is to one another. It’s a form of taxonomy: we create these labels to help make sense of the world around us and ourselves.

“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.”

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.”

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