Hi! My partner, teethingviolets, is Russian and grew up in the USA. He wanted to ask you about how you navigate the Russian language with it being so gendered. But he’s very shy, so I’m asking first. We both think your blog is super cool and informative and love your art style! I understand that you have many asks in your inbox, so there’s no pressure! Thank you for sharing your experiences with people. :3
Sorry for getting back to your question so late! Hopefully you won’t mind me posting this publicly, because I think some other people might be interested in this kinda stuff.
Unfortunately, the answer I give you and your partner might be somewhat discouraging. The simplest way to put it is - I often fail to speak in a gender neutral way in Russian. It is really fucking hard.
Essentially, in order to avoid using any gendered phrasing in Russian I would have to resort to passive tense, like some sort of Disney villain who is morally incapable of telling a lie, yet would nonetheless want to avoid outing themselves as the culprit of a crime. “Yes, the milk was certainly drank. Yes, I know who drank the milk. Yes, the person who did this deed is perhaps I.”
Basically, in Russian, any time you slip into the past tense (”I drank the milk”) you have to use the gendered verb form. It’s quite roundabout, and even if I did manage to keep it going for a few rounds, I often get tired and simply give up.
To top this off, my family, who knows close to nothing about LGBTQ issues would view any deviation from this standard as butchery of the mother tongue. I could opt to have arguments with them every two sentences, but I don’t. I pick my battles.
To those of you studying Russian who are now curiously raising your hand - yes, you, in the back, do you have a question? Ah, that’s right, Russian DOES have three genders, doesn’t it? There IS a neuter noun gender, you are correct. However, it carries with it the implication that the thing is INANIMATE and it is very crude and dehumanizing to use it for yourself, so I am not personally on board with suggesting that as a potential fix.
BUT here’s something else that kind of comforts me - grammatical gender is not something that is inherently tied to human gender. In fact, grammatical gender evolved separately, and became linked with human gender later.
We are used to thinking of these things as indivisible, since many of us have studied German or French in school and often think that it comes as a bundle. However, many languages have grammatical genders which are used for entirely different things. For example, some languages divide it into Animate and Inanimate genders (Basque, Georgian), and some have 6 grammatical genders (Chechen) and some (Swahili) have 20 different noun classes!
Here’s an infographic I shamelessly found on google!
