kin, franz

[ survey.gendercensus.com ]

The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

PS: You can see some regularly-updated statistics about incoming data here, with lots of demography and graphs to peruse!

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

Benjamin Foster’s Gilgamesh condenses all the different tablets we’ve found together to make one cohesive narrative which is way less intimidating and therefore my go-to if you want something that feels cohesive while also sticking very close to the language of the original. 10/10

Andrew George is the most thorough and up-to-date, and sticks as close to the text as you can get. It does, however, separate out all the different tablets, and feels very unedited in its style. Definitely not a “pretty” version. 10/10 cuz he’s a legend and this is the most definitive scholarly edition but don’t start with it.

Maureen Kovacs has a lovely translation with some very interesting footnotes on word choices. Her Ninsun is absolutely incredible and if you want to cry your eyes out over Gilgamesh’s fate that’s the one for you. It’s one step up from Foster’s in terms of poetic-ness but still pretty close to the original. 8/10

Sophus Helle is more poetic than Kovacs but BRILLIANT, one of my favourite Enkidus and his Shamhat is wonderful. Top favourite of all time. This is a very good starting point. 9/10

I wouldn’t recommend Sandars simply because it’s prose, and also condenses the twelfth tablet into a nice tidy ending that doesn’t really work with the Standard Babylonian narrative. 6/10

Lewis’ Gilgamesh Retold is more of a poetic retelling than a translation; it’s beautiful but definitely not a starting point. Sweet and gentle Enkidu though, very charming. 7/10

Stephen Mitchell I’m not a fan of. He smooths the poem out into something tame and very expected. This is my personal bias but I really dislike his Shamhat. His Enkidu and Gilgamesh are also explicitly more like brothers, which is a valid interpretation but also again not one I lean towards. 5/10

Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh has some stunning moments in it (Enkidu! They do not know you like I know you!) However it is nowhere near the real text BUT closer than Lewis’. Changes the ending of the poem so it’s about Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu rather than mourning his own mortality; a much sadder conclusion with less resolution than in the Standard Babylonian. 7/10

BONUS ROUND:

Derek Hines’ play GILGAMESH is fucking DERANGED guys. Ten Gilgillion out of ten.

Essentially, politically coherent works are works where the political message of the story is supported by all (or at least most) of the major story elements, and a politically incoherent work is a story where the political messages of different elements are seemingly all shooting off on different vectors.

The nice thing about this is it can bypass authorial intent (and the discussion of whether intent matters). This is about the text.

Like, politically incoherent works that had no authorial thought behind them are a dime a dozen of course, and politically coherent works that clearly had a lot of authorial thought are if not equally common than at least easy to spot. But there are also plenty of works that are politically coherent without the author intending them that way—like, whatever faults there are with Project Hail Mary, the overall opinion the book has about the nature of humanity & of science is consistent throughout. Likewise there are stories where the authors clearly meant a coherent political point and totally wiffed it. (The works @specialagentartemis has collectively termed “cozy colonialism” come to mind)

spider in the corner of the bathroom, r.m.s

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Our latest piece is live! The brilliant Soila Kenya writes about the dominance of English in fandom and especially fanfiction spaces, and why for her and the fellow fans she interviewed from Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, this is partly about the global dominance of English-language pop culture, but especially about the legacies of colonialism:

The deep psychological imprints of this language disparity remain. And therefore, when I encountered fanfiction, it didn’t even occur to me that there were fanfics written in any language but English, let alone Swahili or any of the 42 indigenous languages in Kenya.

Click through to read the whole piece or listen to a full audio version! And if you enjoy it, please consider becoming a (free) member or especially a paying subscriber—we want to commission more pieces from Soila and other smart writers and we need your help to pay them!

yrnende geond ealde holtwudu,

ond ic wille þe gefrignan freolic hwy þu forþræsest

on me swa raðe receleas miltse.

Verse-types:

HE (hypermetric), hB1 (hypermetric)

E, A2b

A3, A1

A3, A1

Translation:

Delightful woodland boar, now I say to you 'hello',

running through the old forest,

and I wish to ask you freely why you are charging