Why are relational terms gendered? Why keep such a binary and honestly boring system? My parents are straight but they don’t follow the patriarchal norms of “husband and wife.” They don’t identify with the terms or adopt the conservative ideals of what society expects from people who use said terms. Same with “mom” and “dad.” They don’t conform to the societal norms for the gendered roles of parenting so that means the terms mom and dad hold no significance except to signify who a kid is talking about (the way that a same sex couple might use ‘mama’ and ‘mum’). But my parents genders aren’t the big thing that differentiate each other. As a writer if I were to write a character and their only description was “woman” I would be a bad writer. So why don’t we use terms that actually *mean* something to that person. The actual role that a person plays in my life, their interests, their personality etc
I started thinking about this because the term boyfriend and girlfriend are so annoying to me. And how if you’re a girl, boyfriend means romantic partner and girlfriend means platonic. And the terms only means something if you’re assuming friendships with the opposite sex are this impossible thing. And queer people have used these terms and that’s great and valid. There’s something very gender /pos to me about the term ‘boyfriend’ and ‘husband’ and something comfortably sapphic about “girlfriend” but as a non-binary person who uses gendered terms they make even less sense. Since those terms don’t even tell you my gender so what’s the point of specifying it when I could use a term that actually describes myself as a partner or a person.
