Hebrew for nonbinary people

[redbird]

brithistorian just wrote a post about linguistic innovations that enable nonbinary people can refer to themselves in Hebrew, and allow other people to talk about them without misgendering.

Hebrew genders verbs as well as adjectives and nouns, The article focuses on Lior Gross and the forms they and Eyal Rivlin introduced, then widens the scope to include a different set of non-gendered endings for Hebrew, and compares one set to similar innovations in Spanish, where some people are using -e as a non-gendered ending for words that get -o if masculine and -a if feminine.

Gross and Rivlin aren’t the first to create a Hebrew grammar for nonbinary people. Habonim Dror, the labor Zionist youth movement, innovated a nonbinary Hebrew that takes the suffix -ol for singular words and the -imot suffix for plurals. Rivlin said that in Israel, some transgender people choose to speak in the gender they now identify with. Others switch off sentence to sentence.

This looks like a situation in flux, a little bit like pronouns in English. (All language changes, but some bits faster than others, and we pay attention to some and adopt others without noticing.)

I'm linking to this because it might be useful to some people reading my journal (as well as interesting to some of us who don't speak Hebrew).