(This is not my usual fare for this particular outlet; I’m assuming some familiarity with the mechanics of generative syntax, and use a lot of jargon that’s particular to minimalist syntax notation. Please feel free to skip it, and check out my more accessible posts elsewhere on the blog!) Let’s…

why i sometimes let people (especially bosses and doctors) misgender me so I can gain valuable intel I moved across the country this year, after living in Seattle for 7 years, which is the longest I lived anywhere as an adult. As such, I’ve been slowly rebuilding my life, including…

Pronouns aren’t gender. If you’ve been around the pronoun conversations for a bit, you’ve likely seen this line, but I find it’s either intuitive to you (like lightbulb-moment “oh, that explains a lot”) or you’re stuck on like, “….sure, but what does that mean?” I will run you through a…

Hey cis people! You should change your gender marker to X on your legal ID documents. Uhh why do you say that, Kirby? Well, the current thing that scares a lot of trans and non-binary people off of getting our ID genders changed to X is that, as it stands…

Q: Should I say ‘themself’ or ‘themselves’ with singular they? A: This is a question I have gotten a few times, and when I’ve answered it in live Q&A sessions, my answer has been that infuriating Linguistᵗᵐ Answer: I dunno, which one do you say? What feels more right? I…

I am listening back through the archives of the comedy podcast My Brother, My Brother, and Me. It’s a comforting and familiar media, and I like having background noise that feels sociable but undemanding when I’m hanging out at home. Yesterday in my backwards binge-listen I hit Episode 553: The…

This is a post I have been meaning to write for ages, but I was finally spurred into action by this episode of Big Mood, Little Mood with host Daniel M. Lavery and guest Divya Victor. On the podcast, they give advice to an anonymous letter writer who, as a…

I get asked this a lot! This will be a short, informal version of work I’m in the process of writing up for formal publication in linguistics — it’s not yet peer reviewed, I’m not putting a ton of time into citations, and I’m not going to go deeply into…

Hello all! I had hoped to get this out in pride month, but it’s falling in wrath month instead; it’s fine, we’re still all totally in our feels this hot nonbinary summer, so we’re good! This is a guest post from Vasundhara Gautam, a computational linguist at Dialpad (moving to…