I’ve posted before about gendered language, and how I’m generally in favor of moving towards gender-neutral occupations and supporting a gender-neutral third-person pronoun in English. In Khmer for the most part this is already reality…but there are a few funny quirks in the language which still don’t make sense to me.

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This is an afterword for a three-part story with a twist. You should read the story first if you haven’t yet!

So, like everything I write—like everything anybody writes—this story has elements of real experiences in it. The characters and relationships are composites of people I know, either firsthand or secondhand…but of course none of them are based entirely on any one real person or situation.

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This is a follow-up post to Tuesday’s “Society vs. Individual Choice”.

It’s not entirely unreasonable to conflate ethnic and gender discrimination under a common term “genetic discrimination”—you have no control over your ethnicity or sex¹, and you may be discriminated against because of either. In the past, such discrimination was institutionalized, and your choices were limited because of the results of your birth lottery. In the present, such discrimination is…still practiced, and your choices are limited because of the results of your birth lottery.

Let’s take this out a bit farther: when would such discrimination be…

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