Bloody gerunds!

[TyroSaysMeow]

Working through my vast backlog of open tabs, I came across this quote in an article someone shared the other day:

This [cisnormativity], for those not up with the language and beliefs of the trans movement, means ‘the sociocultural conditions which allow the belief that being cisgender is the norm and normal’. It is a term which assumes that we all have an ‘inner gender identity’ as well as a biological sex.

And it set me off on an internal rant about gerunds.

Stick an -ed on the end of 'cisgender', turn it back into a verb, and it's exactly the same as what we're all saying here - that the act of being, as it were, forcibly cisgendered - by which I mean pressured to comply with the expectations society holds of women ie looking pretty and doing the washing up etc, is considered normal, and that this is wrong on many levels.

We just don't call it 'cisnormativity'; we call it sex-based oppression operating through the mechanism of gendered sex-role stereotypes and expectations.

The second quoted sentence reveals just where the masses - woke and fast asleep alike - keep going wrong.

One is not a subject in possession of a gender. One is both a subject who genders and an object upon which the process of gendering is performed. That's the entire fucking basis of the whole "gendering is bad" line.

Attempting to perform the process on yourself? We need a word for that, and the most logical one is banned here because we're all GC and so intuitively understand it to be pejorative when directed at us. Three letters, starts with a C.

Can we set up some sort of crowdfunding for remedial grammar lessons for the entire populace? This is hurting my head.

TyroSaysMeow Thank you, yes please.

I feel your pain. The crimes against language are excruciating.

Can we set up some sort of crowdfunding for remedial grammar lessons for the entire populace? This is hurting my head.

Could we also include remedial comprehension lessons?

I still don't understand what this has got to do with gerunds!

Oh Tyro. That’s beautiful.

They won’t care and won’t learn because the words they use are purely the stick to beat us with because we won’t accept our erasure and bow down to our new overlords. How could they dehumanise us if we actually had something in common?

Absolutely, R0. And free dictionaries for all schoolchildren in the manner of Gideon.

Then I got thinking about David Reimer again. They transgendered him and it fucked him right up.

First they came for the nouns, and kept turning them into verbs...

totally - turning verbs into nouns is gerunds, right?

At least I think so, but I was educated in the 90s so not formally educated in these things.

When we're talking about something using a noun, in our heads it becomes a thing which we could conceivably possess. Thus gender becomes gender identity, a opposed unborn quality or brain module or whatever.

When we're talking verbs we're more inclined to remember we're talking about processes which occur over time. Thus gendering becomes cisgendering and transgendering.

Subject / verb / object remedial classes needed also.

'Opposed unborn'? Bloody autocorrect. Supposed inborn.

And if we're doing subjects and objects in grammar then we need to be doing them philosophically too. Because it's very very obvious that the wokesters haven't yet twigged that we are both simultaneously.

I suspect that if you tried to tell them that women can be subjects you'd get a blank stare.

To do is to be - Plato
To be is to do - JP Satre
Doobey Doobey Doo- Frank Sinatra
Scooby Doo, where are you? - Shaggy

I agree with your GC point, but I don't think what you're referring to has anything to do with gerunds! Gerunds are essentially present participles (ending in -ing) used as nouns. e.g. Gardening is a nice hobby.

Does it have to end in -ing to count as a gerund? Every day is a school day!

Possibly gender as used by The Other Side counts as a stealth gerund? They don't pronounce the -ing so they forget it's there?

Sorry to ramble, thinking out loud.

They've pulled the same trick with 'misgendering' as they did with the t-slur, haven't they? Set it up as there being a wrong way to do gendering, so everyone's too caught it up in whether they're following the rules to step back and realise that there isn't a right way to do gendering unless you're using gender as a synonym for sex.

Which they claim is verboten.

This thread is the love child of Feminism and Pedant boards.

I’m in the bath hiding from DH explaining Latin subjunctives to DS.

That's high praise, Chateau!

Things could always be worse (baby name threads - a dark and scary place these days).

Does it have to end in -ing to count as a gerund?
Yes. But I see what you mean now!

Glad I managed to make sense, totally. And I'm glad lazylinguist mentioned gardening because when you hold up gardening and gendering next to each other you can see just how little sense it makes to knock the -ing off and make it a personal quality rather than something one does (very badly, in my case).

Not a perfect comparison though, because it's hard to be the object of gardening when you're a human being.

I expect there’s gerundgender out there somewhere. A verb that identifies as a noun.
How I hated Latin at school.

Okay, I took the probably-unintentional hint and went for a nice calming bath.

It didn't work.

Identity formation is always a gendered process - it always takes place within both a sexed body and a sexist world. The t-slur, when we reclaim it, is a gendered identity. So is GC. So is crazy cat lady.

So how come all gendered identities are sparkly and valid and yay to the nth degree, except 'feminist' and synonyms thereof?

Next time I see some muppet online banging on about t-slurs being subhuman scum I will be asking why they've singled out this particular female-specific gendered identity for derision. Hardly inclusive, is it?

I went to pleb school, borntobequiet. O! how I would have loved the opportunity to learn Latin!

Have googled. Gerundgender is not (yet) a thing. But it can only be a matter of time.

I may be missing the point, but you may prefer
these gerunds

@borntobequiet that's sort of what a gerund is - a verb identifying as a noun. E.g. the verb 'swim' becomes 'swimming' - i.e. 'the act of swimming'.

A gerundive is a verb acting as an adjective. We translate it 'worthy of' or 'ought to be'. For example, 'love' becomes the gerundive 'worthy of love.' The names Miranda and Amanda are gerundives.

OP perhaps you mean a perfect passive participle? A verb acting as an adjective and meaning 'having been -ed.' E.g. take the verb 'wash',
The ppp would be 'washed', as in 'the (having-been)washed vegetables'.

So the ppp of the verb 'to cisgender' would be 'having-been-cisgendered', as in 'the (having-been)cisgendered woman'.

@TyroSaysMeow sorry to skirt over the point of your OP by indulging the pedantic Latin teacher in me!