How the Colonizer's Tongue Atomizes Us (Patreon)

By Sam (@StuffFromSam)

Many languages do not have third-person pronouns because they're not constructed like English. They don't have the same object-subject tension. Many identities, like even introvert/extrovert, therefore would not make sense.

Languages like Korean are collective, so you say "we" instead of "I." You don't say "my" for people but only for objects or things that can be possessed.

Thinking not only of words as masculine and feminine but even yourself in those terms would be out of place. Gender-neutral terms like "they" are not odd but the norm.

Because of this, I'd say many non-Westerners don't feel comfortable with the he-she binary because that is not the language of their minds. "They/them," then, can also come from a decolonial perspective. Same as having no preference or refusing to identify in that way or how you perform gender in Western culture.

You'll see people who speak English as a second language still accidentally say "he" for a woman and "she" for a man because gendered third-person pronouns are confusing.

Coming to the US (or code-switching to North American settler culture), we have to learn this individualized colonizer tongue, learn new identities to distinguish ourselves from others, only to unlearn it because we had it right all along.