Nobody Asked Me

But . . .

I'm late . . .

. . . jumping in on this controversy, I know, but if I had jumped into it back when it was hot, here is how I would have jumped in on it:

            The prosthetic nose of Bradley Cooper, in the role of Leonard Bernstein, is not too big, or too stereotypically Jewish — it is too pointed. Unnecessarily off-puttingly pointed. I have never seen a picture of Leonard Bernstein where his nose looked pointed. His nose’s cinema version -- from what I have seen of it online -- looks like Pinocchio's after his first little fib.

By the way I have a Bernstein anecdote. His brother Burt was a writer at The New Yorker. Burt grew up in Leonard’s shadow. Leonard could do everything better. But Burt was good with words. He was good at a game that caught on among people at The New Yorker: take a well-known title or phrase and rearrange the letters in it to produce a comically different title or phrase. For instance, you might turn The Doors of Perception to The Odors of Perception.

Burt ran to his brother to tell him of this game and of his own prowess at it. Leonard heard him out, glanced up from the concerto or whatever he was composing, and said:

“Icy fingers up and down my penis.”

Here is

. . . a quote I jotted down from somewhere online:

            "On the narrow question of being asked to address someone with gender-neutral pronouns such as they/them, those polled were evenly divided."

            This is crazy. No matter how woke/unwoke you are, you don't address anyone with a third-person pronoun. You don't say to someone, "How are they [or he, or she] doing?" You address people with second-person pronouns, which in English are gender-neutral:

            "How are you doing?"

            Or, if both of you are Quakers, "How art thou doing?" Or maybe it's "How dost thee?"

            Okay, you might say, "How's it going?" but that's awfully brusque, and anyway the it does not refer to the person. The truth is, the immediate need for special pronouns does not usually arise until the person in question has left the room. In which case you (if you don't mind my using that term) can refer to her/him/them by her/his/their name.

            By way of greeting, you might try, "Hey, Bud." Unless you think of Bud as a masculinist term. In which case I direct you to Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:

                        Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

                        Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

                        Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.

I don't think anyone accuses Shakespeare of being gender-inflexible.

Speaking of

. . . unnecessarily off-putting, I haven't finished complaining about the term cisgender. I happen to be, myself, in an offhand sort of way, what is now called cisgender. And the term makes me feel othered.

            Sister, according to etymonline.com, derives from the Proto-Indo-European root swesor, "one of the most persistent and unchanging root words, recognizable in almost every modern Indo-European language." Over the millennia, sister has acquired a lot of cultural juice.

            But cis? Looks/sounds sarcastically boosterish: Cis-boom-bah. Or non-edgy: cis-gender as in mom-jeans. Cis is not butchy: "How's it hangin', cis-fella"? And it's not bitchy: "Well don't you look bad-ass tonight, Miss Cis"? The only words I can think of off-hand that have cis in them are narcissistic and vicissitude. Bleh. Cis is not even snaky-sounding. It sounds like the air going out of a small tire.

            Trans-gender, on the other hand, sounds dynamic. Transaction. Secretary of Transportation. Trans-Continental. Transcendental. I can see why trans-folks like it, and I say bully (so to speak) for them, for y'all, for those among us who are going through such a drastic transition. But compare:

            Cisaction. Secretary of Cisportation. Cis-Continental. Ciscendental. Bleh.

            Rhymes with priss. And with kiss, to be sure, but the k gives that word a kick. "Gimme a little cis, will ya huh?" does not work for me.

            The standard definition of the psychological-journal-jargon word cisgender is "a person whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth." Assigned? That makes it sound like, "Damn it, Herb [the town genderizer], you're assigning too many females. Not that there's anything wrong with -- I've got three little girls back home myself, and nieces, and of course the wife and her mom -- but come on, label the next few male." Here’s what feels assigned: I feel like I, and all the male or female people I know over the age of twenty, have been assigned cis-gender. Just out of the blue. Or the pink.

            Cis- is from the Latin preposition cis, "on this side." So it's divisive. Why don't we all try calling each other "Bud."