political commentary

by now you've probably heard about those gender-neutral pronouns put out by University of Tennessee's Office for Diversity and Inclusion. In the interest of gender equality, we're now supposed to ask whether someone prefers he, she, ze, hir, xyr, or xem before striking up a conversation with him, her, zer, hir, xyr, or xem.

Trigger Warning: Inequality mentioned below!

Most of zeeze have been around for quite a while. But frankly, ze idea that inequality is baked into language is starting to look more than a little microaggressive to me. These pronouns won't get rid of the ‘he/she’ conundrum, but only make it worse. We all know that eventually there will have to be 58 of them. Only writers who get paid by the word will like it.

But what about inequality in mathematics? A cursory examination of any math book shows that they are filled with inequalities. Clearly they are the product of the phallogocentric hegemony. Something must be done here too.

In fact, if we look hard enough, we find there is inequality everywhere. Why, for instance, is Mount Everest allowed to be bigger than, say, that little landfill outside of Camden, New Jersey? Granted, we don't yet have the technology to make them equal, but until then we can pretend they are equal by calling them both Mount Camden.

All images on the Internet will henceforth be equal height and width, and each pixel of color shall contain equal amounts of red, green, and blue.

So here's the plan.

The words pink and blue, remnants of the old chauvinist patriarchal rape culture, have to be eliminated, to be replaced with gray, the exact shade to be decided upon by the Committee of Color Inclusiveness.

Even the terms ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are microaggressions, because they imply the possibility that diversity and inclusion might not exist. This is unacceptable; we must make it impossible even to talk about exclusion and non-diversity. ‘Office’ discriminates against people in cubicles. So we should refer to The Office of Inversity and Delusion as ‘The’.

Why stop with language? Every family unit, consisting of two or more persyns of one or more genders, should be equal. Equal numbers of each gender of children, henceforth to be called ‘carbon units,’ will be required. The number of genders will be decided by the Committee at a later date. If it is discovered that some women cannot have 58 children, they will be provided free of charge by the People's People Cloning Bureau (PPCB).

All reactionary math and physics textbooks are to be rewritten to eliminate any inequalities. Superscripts and subscripts, which denote the old imperialist concepts of superiority and inferiority, are forbidden. And, oooh, fractions, one number on top of another against its will, they're rape. Any books failing to comply, along with all books published before the glorious Year Zero, will be officially declared obsolete and destroyed.

Every day will now be Mundy and all ten months must be 36.5 days long; they will all be named Jan to eliminate the obvious militaristic and patriarchal connotations of names like March and August.

Since every day is now Mundy the first day of Year Zero, every day will be exactly the same. All days will be equal, eliminating all concern about what day it is. Eventually all numbers must be replaced with an equal assortment of 1's and 0's; since 0 is the feminine number, 0 must always be first, thereby permanently overthrowing the male patriarchal hegemony. The length of the day will be either 01 or 10 minutes. The workers will rejoice in their increased productivity!

Replacing all numbers on thermometers with 01 will also eliminate global warming, preserving our planet and making every place equally cool. Climate change will be a thing of the past! Using Zzzynglish in math equations See the violins inherent in this equation:

There is overt inequality, with the E claiming to be ‘greater’ and more privileged than the rest. There is racist colonialist oppression in the exponent. And there is even rape, where the male-like ‘1’ has forced itself into a position of dominance over the ‘2’. In our new Zzzynglish notation the kindler, gentler equation becomes
,
depending on whether a 0 or a 1 came before it. So the result of any calculation is now culturally relative, and can be zero or infinity depending on your point of view—which means it is much more diverse and inclusive.

All well and good, you might say, but there is still inequality! Why should A be allowed to come before Z? Why should E, T and A be privileged over J, Q, and X? The alphabet must be changed as well. Capital letters must be eliminated, doing away with feudalistic class distinctions. Spaces must be eliminated. From now on, computers will only have two keys: y and z. All words must be the same length. First, all vowels should be replaced with ‘y.’ Then, all consonants must be replaced with ‘z.’ The Eurocentric term ‘English’ will be replaced by ‘Zzzynglish.’

Now, some might say that this new language of Zzzynglish is somewhat less expressive than English was. But the benefits of making it impossible to express racist, sexist, and imperialistic ideas, and thereby eliminating them from public debate, make it worth the sacrifice.

So far our improved language looks like this: zyzyzyyzyzzyyzzzyzyzyyyz. But there's a problem: how can we ensure equal numbers of ‘y’s and ‘z’s? Clearly the potential for inequality still remains. So from now on, all words will be spelled only with z's, which historically has been the most under-represented letter (we can't say ‘discriminated’, ‘minority’, or ‘trigger’ because the first two are racist microaggressions, and Trigger is a horse). Finally pure language equality will be within our grasp. Power to the xeeple! Or in our zlorious new Zzzynglish: zzzzz!