The continued thoughtless use of the word person continues to puzzle me. Who was the Per whose son gave his name to every member of our species on the planet? Per is a well-known first name of Scandinavian men: Is it claimed, therefore, that we are all descended from a Scandinavian man? Is it not common knowledge that our species first emerged in Africa?
And why son of Per? Parthenogenesis, the development of an organism from an ovum without fertilization, is at least a biological possibility, but reproduction from a man’s gamete alone is not.
On two grounds, then, the word person is profoundly sexist, and its use ought not only cease but be strictly prohibited. It should be replaced by something gender-neutral: I would suggest parthen (from the Greek parthenos, virgin) for per and offspring for son, making, when put together, parthenoffspring.
And while we are on the subject, why do we continue to use the sexist word hangman? It is true as a matter of historical fact that, at least since Judith decapitated Holofernes, most executioners have been men, that is to say were assigned male sex and gender at birth, but this is yet another example of sexist ascription of roles in life. According to the stereotypes deeply ingrained in the Western psyche, women knit at the foot of the scaffold while men play the active role upon it.
If ever capital punishment were reintroduced into Britain, therefore, I would expect the now-customary statement by interview committees for public employment that applications for the post of executioner were particularly welcome from women, members of ethnic minorities, and the disabled (because the employers were against discrimination, except in favor of some). In fact, it would be necessary that all executioners for centuries to come were women, to right the immemorial historical injustice of the past centuries, when there were no female hangmen (or hangpersons, that is to say hangparthenoffspring). In the days when murderers in Britain were, or at least could be, hanged by the neck until they were dead, the authorities used to receive five unsolicited applications a week for the position of hangman (which was already adequately filled): all of them from men. Could there be more powerful testimony to the prevalence, persistence, and malignity of gender stereotyping than that?
But natural justice requires that what is sauce for the (gender-assigned at hatching) goose is sauce for the (gender-assigned at hatching) gander: and therefore that all those gender-assigned-at-birth women who demonstrated during and after the confirmation hearings of Judge Kavanaugh, to the effect that the women who accused him of misconduct are to be believed qua women, are in fact guilty of the most flagrant sex stereotyping. They degrade their own sex and render it less than human.
