Language matters. It defines the limits of our imagination. You don’t have to be a gender theorist to understand that if we have only two ways of referring to human beings – “he” or “she” – we will grow up thinking of people as divisible into those two categories and nothing more. So it is significant that, in late August, OxfordDictionaries.com – an online resource created by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary – added an entry for the gender-neutral title “Mx”.
This is how it’s defined: “a title used before a person’s surname or full name by those who wish to avoid specifying their gender or by those who prefer not to identify themselves as male or female”. Earlier this year, the OED added to its lexicon the word “cisgender”, meaning “not transsexual”. That matters, too, because without a word for it, you were either “trans” or you were “normal”.
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