USA: Liberale Verwendung von Personalpronomen an Hochschule für Frauen setzt sich durch

Warum nur hat der folgende Beitrag auf Yahoo-News bislang 10.620 Kommentare geerntet? Vermutlich weil die meisten Leser ahnen, dass das darin Geschilderte bald auf unsere Gesellschaft insgesamt zukommt. Über andere Entwicklungen aus dieser Szene haben wir schließlich auch zuerst gelacht – und plötzlich hieß es an zwei deutschen Unis "Herr Professorin":

The weekly meetings of Mouthing Off!, a group for students at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, always start the same way. Members take turns going around the room saying their names and the personal pronouns they want others to use when referring to them — she, he or something else.

It's an exercise that might seem superfluous given that Mills, a small and leafy liberal arts school historically referred to as the Vassar of the West, only admits women as undergraduates. Yet increasingly, the "shes" and "hers" that dominate the introductions are keeping third-person company with "they," "ze" and other neutral alternatives meant to convey a more generous notion of gender.

"Because I go to an all-women's college, a lot of people are like, 'If you don't identify as a woman, how did you get in?'" said sophomore Skylar Crownover, 19, who is president of Mouthing Off! and prefers to be mentioned as a singular they, but also answers to he. "I just tell them the application asks you to mark your sex and I did. It didn't ask me for my gender."

On high school and college campuses and in certain political and social media circles, the growing visibility of a small, but semantically committed cadre of young people who, like Crownover, self-identify as "genderqueer" — neither male nor female but an androgynous hybrid or rejection of both — is challenging anew the limits of Western comprehension and the English language.

Though still in search of mainstream acceptance, students and staff members who describe themselves in terms such as agender, bigender, third gender or gender-fluid are requesting — and sometimes finding — linguistic recognition.

Inviting students to state their preferred gender pronouns, known as PGPs for short, and encouraging classmates to use unfamiliar ones such as "ze,"sie," "e," "ou" and "ve" has become an accepted back-to-school practice for professors, dorm advisers, club sponsors, workshop leaders and health care providers at several schools.

As neologisms like "ze" have moved beyond conversation and into students' academic papers, some professors have expressed annoyance and uncertainty about how to respond (...).

Naja, wenn y reaktionär-fundamentalistisch Profess_orixes* mit den wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten ves "semantisch überzeugti" StudentOi nicht mehr zurechtkommen, können vuii Professor...(1/2/3) die Hochschule ja auch verlassen. So viel Flexibilität wird ou ja wohl von Akademikeriki erwarten können.