Creaturebeeing - I-might-bite

coming out and being out as a queer person is an act of bravery no matter who you are, and you deserve to be recognized for having that courage.

[Img id: bugs bunny meme. To the left the text reads, "I wish all people with chronic digestive problems a very plesant evening".]

"Toxic masculinity" doesn't mean that all masculinity is toxic it means that some traits we push onto men can seriously harm them and the people around them fellas is 2022 we should all know this by now.

i think we need to put a moratorium on cis people using "AFAB" and "AMAB." they're getting a bit too comfortable with it.

Hi! Gentile here, I've been reading your blog and find it very interesting + informative, thank you for being such a good source of information and explaining things so clearly and calmly despite all the nonsense you have to deal with.

I hope it's okay to ask this, since I understand it's a very solemn / sensitive subject. In a few of your posts that mention / discuss the Tetragrammaton, you mention that the knowledge of how to say or pronounce the name has been lost. As far as I understand, Hebrew has a phonemic orthography (ie each grapheme / letter corresponds to a phoneme / elementary sound unit). If that's the case, could one theoretically know how to pronounce the Tetragrammaton from combining the sounds those four letters make according to normal grammar / pronunciation rules, or is it the case that the knowledge of how to pronounce the Tetragrammaton exists independently of the knowledge of how to pronounce the constituent letters? Or is it something to do with how Hebrew orthography / phonology has changed over time, and modern Hebrew phonology wouldn't be accurate to the pronunciation as it would have existed before the fall of the second temple? Or is there a nuance in Hebrew orthography / phonology I'm missing?

I understand of course you wouldn't *want* to say it out loud anyway given how sacred and taboo it is, I suppose I'm just curious at the semantic properties of the knowledge of the pronunciation. (If this ask is inappropriate or offensive, I sincerely apologise and please do not feel obliged to post it / reply to it.)

Hi there, thanks so much for your kind words and happy Friday!

So there’s a few things at play here, because you are right, generally speaking, the Hebrew alphabet is a phonemic orthography which would generally lend itself to being pronounceable even in the absence of unbroken oral teaching (leaving aside theological and cultural boundaries on doing so, for the moment). But there are a few confounding factors:

1) Hebrew, both ancient and modern, doesn’t have vowels in its alphabet. To indicate vowels typically it uses nekudot, but that’s not done in texts meant to be read by fluent adult speakers/readers and Jewish holy texts don’t contain them. So we don’t have hard evidence of what vowels go with the Tetragrammaton’s consonants.

2) Some of the consonants in the Tetragrammaton can be used to indicate the presence of certain vowels, but they don’t always get used that way. So there’s no way to know of their presence specifically indicates those vowels or they’re being used purely as consonants and it’s coincidence.

3) Pronunciation of some vowels and consonants, although it does not seem to have been a substantial shift, has changed over time (and not in uniform ways, because of the diaspora).

So certainly scholars fluent in the various ancient forms of Hebrew can make educated hypotheses, but there are confounding factors. And, of course, because of the theological and cultural restrictions on the speaking/writing of the Tetragrammaton there is no unbroken tradition we can look at to confirm any of those educated guesses. And that’s before we even get to the limited number of Jewish scholars who are even willing to try to discern pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton for religious reasons.

Research on transsexuals also shows how the elicitation of deference depends on the type of man one is perceived to be. Based on in-depth interviews with 29 transmen, Schilt (2006) found that whereas white transmen beginning to work as men were taken more seriously, had their requests readily met, and were evaluated as more competent than they were as women, young, small Black, Latino, and Asian transmen did not gain similar advantages. Similarly, in her interview study of 18 transmen, Dozier (2005) found that, as men, white transmen reported being given more respect and more conversational space and being included in men's banter. They also experienced less public harassment. Transmen of color, on the other hand, reported being more frequently treated as criminals, and short and effeminate transmen reported being publicly harassed as gay. Gaining the full privileges of manhood is thus shown to depend not merely on being recognized as male, but on the whole ensemble of signs that are conventionally taken as evidence of a masculine self.

— Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts by Douglas Schrock and Michael Schwalbe (2009)

me_irl

ingo and emmet get asked a question