6

Prevent Erasure

IT WAS MONDAY MORNING, and my new colleague Lauren had a slight smile that kept on shifting into a wider one. “Hey, you look happy,” I said. “Did you have a good weekend?”

“Yeah, I did.” She paused. “I had a really good first date. It feels . . . promising.”

“Oh, good for you. So exciting! Tell me, what’s he like?”

She stopped for a good few seconds, her smile now gone. Finally, with a very small sigh, she said, “Actually . . . it’s she. What’s she like. I date women.”

It’s more than a decade later, and I still wince at the memory. Just one tiny word had told Lauren that I didn’t see her. That I hadn’t considered the various possibilities of who she might be. That I hadn’t been inclusive or remembered to pay attention to the fact that there are people out there who aren’t like me. Lauren hadn’t given clues, like wearing rainbow earrings or a Pride shirt, but she shouldn’t have had to.

I had put Lauren in an awkward position where she had to make a snap decision. Could I be trusted? I’m relieved to this day that she decided the answer was “yes” and trusted me enough to just make that gentle correction and move forward. I hope that I had been inclusive in other ways that let her take that leap of faith.

It is painful to not be seen. To be erased. In this chapter, you’ll learn more about how you can avoid causing this kind of pain.

HEY, GUYS

Mike opened the meeting the way he likes to, with praise for his team. “You guys, you did such great work this week!”

And throughout the meeting, he said things like “Hey, guys, let’s move on to Q3” and “Guys! This is what we have to focus on.”

Later that day, Mike and Nayeli were in their weekly one-on-one meeting when she paused and said, “Hey, Mike? I’ve been talking with the other women on the team, and we’d appreciate it if you stopped calling us all guys. It’s just not inclusive.”

Mike was surprised—and a little hurt. He prided himself on his easygoing and relaxed management style. “But guys means everyone!” he protested. “You know I’m including you when I say, ‘you guys’ to the whole team.”

So, was Mike being inclusive? Do phrases like you guys actually refer to everyone?

Remember how semantic frames map a word to the world around us? Well, it turns out that male-specific words create male-specific mental models.

There is a classic study where people were asked to choose illustrations for a textbook. One group was given gender-specific titles, like Industrial Man. The other group was given gender-neutral titles, like The Industrial Age.

As you might expect, the Industrial Man group chose photos of men way more frequently than the Industrial Age group.¹ Experiments like these show that words like man have a male-specific framing and help create and reinforce mental models that are also male-specific.

We can do some easy semantic testing to see if guy and guys are universal when it comes to gender, or if they are gender specific.

1. Nayeli, who is female, is in a restaurant and needs to use the bathroom. The first restroom door she walks by says Guys on it.

Does she decide this is the bathroom for her? Or does she keep walking down the hall and look for a door that says something like Girls or Gals or Dolls? (She’s probably not going to find a restroom labeled Gender Inclusive at this restaurant.)

2. Nayeli and Mike are sitting outside. Mike points at two people sitting at a table in the distance and says, “Hey, Nayeli, who is that guy over there?”

Does she think he’s referring to the person at the table who appears to be male? Or the person at the table who appears to be female?

3. Mike is straight. Diego asks him, “So, since you moved to town, how many guys have you dated? I know it can be hard to meet people here.”

Does Mike think that Diego is asking about all the people he has gone out on dates with, regardless of gender? Does this sound like a usual question to ask a straight man? Or does it sound like Diego thinks that Mike dates men and is asking only about men he has dated since moving to town?

The semantic testing for 1, 2, and 3 tells us that the common semantic framing for guy and guys is male. Not gender neutral. Not universal. But specifically male.

So, when people use guys and you guys and hey, guys to address mixed-gender groups of people (and, sometimes, all-female groups of people), there is a real mismatch—even though their intention is to include everybody. The semantic framing points to male people only. Using guys as if it represents everyone erases people who aren’t male.

• • •

During just a single week while writing this chapter, I saw several museum labels describing the craftmanship of pieces that were created by women. I read about the fate of mankind in a time of climate crisis. I heard about manmade materials. I read about manned space flights. I heard about freshman year in college. I saw someone described as the middleman. I read a statement from a committee chairman.

These are all examples of gender-specific language. In particular, masculine words are frequently used as if they represent everybody. But, as we saw with that semantic testing for the word guys, gender-specific words only represent some people. And they erase others.

English speakers—and speakers of many other languages—will often treat male-specific words as if they are universal. As if maleness is the default state. As if every human fits under the umbrella of words like man and mankind. And as if every animal you see, unless obviously female, is a male animal. (I can’t tell you how many wild animals on the internet I see referred to as “this little guy” or “this fella.”)

But this is demonstrably false. So, to be more inclusive, you can shift to gender-neutral language, which avoids the erasure that comes with gender-specific language. See the suggested substitutions in the Resources section at the end of this book for some gender-neutral substitutes.

Shifting from gender-specific language to gender-neutral language is an important way to prevent erasure.

AVOID MISNAMING PEOPLE

A few years ago, a woman named Tina wrote to Reddit to get advice. She was the only Black person in her office, and for a full year, her colleagues had been saying her name wrong—calling her Tiana, Tiara, or Tia. After a year of politely correcting them, she’d had enough. And she was considering calling her colleagues wrong names in return. Like if Charles and Jennifer called her Tiana, calling them Chad and Jessica in response.

It may seem like a small thing to get someone’s name wrong. But imagine how Tina felt after a year of her teammates repeatedly saying her name wrong, even after being corrected. The message she received is clear:

• You’re not important enough for me to put in effort.

• You don’t matter enough for me to be careful with you.

• You’re different, so I’m going to highlight your difference with an “exotic” name like Tiana, not a “normal” name like Tina.

These are all the opposite of the messages you send with inclusive language. Inclusive language tells people that you see them. That you’re paying attention to them.

Names are a foundational part of inclusive language. When we misname people, we are erasing an important part of their identity. And sometimes we erase their unique identity altogether.

For example, in the 1860s, George M. Pullman started hiring Black men as porters for his luxury railroad cars. He specifically hired men who were dark-skinned, reasoning that this would make them “more invisible” to his white passengers, who were middle class and upper class.²

Instead of being called by their names, these Black porters were usually addressed as either “George” or “boy” by those passengers. In Chapter 5, I pointed out that many Black Americans with English family names don’t trace their ancestry back to England but instead to an ancestor who was named after a man who “owned” them—in other words, enslaved people were forced to take on their owner’s family name as a sign of his ownership.

When train passengers called the Black men serving them George, they were following that same tradition of erasing individual identities and naming someone after their “owner”—here, company head George Pullman. Calling these porters George and boy instead of their names was dehumanizing and a sign of disrespect that was meant to put them in their place. Porters were called George well into the twentieth century.

American actor Mr. T once explained why he had chosen that name for himself:

Being misnamed, or not being named at all, is really quite common for people from underrepresented groups. Here in the US, most of the examples I see come from situations when there are very few—maybe even just two—of a particular kind of person. I call this kind of misnaming the other one.

In March 2022, I was reading my Sunday New York Times when I came across an article with the headline “Tennis Star’s Venture Firm Has Raised $111 Million.” The article was about Serena Williams, so I wasn’t surprised to see that she wasn’t named in the headline—leaving women’s names out of headlines is a common journalistic practice. (This is a subtler kind of erasure.) But I was surprised to see the article illustrated with a photo of Serena’s older sister, Venus Williams—here, labeled as Serena Williams. “Oh, the other one!” I said and took a photo to upload to my database.

On Twitter, Williams called out the New York Times for their mistake.⁴ She noted that her fund was specifically “to support the founders who are overlooked” by people who are “woefully unaware of their biases.” Because, as she pointed out, “even I am overlooked.”

I hear similar stories of misnaming and erasure from my clients. A senior manager once came to me with a problem. His team used to have just one Latine man, Miguel, until Miguel left for another company. A few months later, he hired Antonio, who had also grown up in Mexico.

And people on his team, especially the ones working in satellite offices, kept on calling the new hire, Antonio, the name of their old teammate, Miguel. This made Antonio seriously unhappy. “What, are all Mexicans the same to them?” he asked his manager, who was mortified.

When a team or a department or a company has just two people from the same underrepresented group, those two people are often confused for each other and called the other one’s name.

In fact, it’s so common that pretty much every time I talk about this kind of misnaming in an in-person workshop, at least one person will come up at the end and give me a new example.

I used to think this was only an issue for people who weren’t very high up in the org chart. But at one workshop, a woman stood up to talk about her own experience, and her story gave me new insights. She was South Asian and was constantly being called the name of another South Asian woman in her organization. But what was genuinely surprising to me was that both of these people were Vice Presidents.

Why was this so surprising?

Because when you misname someone, you’re not really paying attention to them. And we usually pay a lot of attention to people in power. So I had assumed that being a Vice President would mean that people paid enough attention to get your name right.

But it turned out I was wrong. Being female, brown-skinned, from an underrepresented group, and with an unusual name—these were all factors that combined to outrank the status of Vice President.

And when people are misnamed at work, there are negative outcomes that go beyond how disrespected and excluded they feel. For example, what happens when it comes time to evaluate a misnamed person’s work performance? If two people are being mistaken for each other and misnamed all the time, how do you know who should actually get credit for something? And if just one of them is saying or doing problematic things, how do you know who to give feedback to?

Another important kind of misnaming is deadnaming. This is when someone changes their name, usually when changing their gender presentation, and instead of the new chosen name, they are called by their old name. Their deadname. I’ve heard stories where people are deadnamed by their colleagues, by their friends, and by their family. If you grew up thinking someone named Tony was male and then they tell you, “Actually, I’m female, and now I go by Isabella,” then the only polite thing to do is call that person Isabella from that point onward.

Some people find it hard to accept that a person’s gender isn’t what they thought. And that this person’s new name, which better reflects their gender, is the only name for them now. Or people just slip up and use the deadname because they aren’t used to the new name. But using someone’s deadname erases their gender identity, their perspective, and their reality.

And being deadnamed can be extremely traumatic for a trans-gender person. It can bring them back to a time of gender dysphoria (feeling a mismatch between your biological sex and your gender identity), which for many is a time of depression and anxiety.⁵ Or possibly even a time when they were suicidal: it is estimated that 82 percent of transgender people have had suicidal thoughts and that fully 40 percent of transgender people have actually attempted suicide.⁶

So it’s important to use someone’s correct name. In headlines, in emails, and in conversations. Even if they look like someone who you feel should have a different name, or used to look different, the respectful thing to do is pay attention to what a person wants to be called and then call them that. Being careful with names will help you prevent erasure and avoid causing people unnecessary pain.

FLESH-COLORED, SKIN-TONED, AND NUDE

Have you ever thought about what it means for a bandage to be flesh-colored? Or for clothing to be called skin-toned or nude?

Back in the day, I had a crayon called flesh color. I used to sometimes wear nude hose when I was dressing up for work as a temp secretary or for fancy events. And my bandages were skin-toned.

These phrases described basically one color, a sort of peachy tan. Mapping flesh and skin to just one color suggested that this was everybody’s skin tone. It certainly wasn’t my skin tone, even though I’m technically considered white—my skin is tan with olive undertones, so the bandages were paler and pinker than skin surrounding them.

This usage erased people who didn’t have skin that matched a sort of peachy tan. In general, it erased people with darker skin. They weren’t part of the group that the products were being designed for. And what’s worse, the non-inclusive language suggested that they didn’t even exist.

In the early twenty-first century, large manufacturers finally started to create makeup, underwear, and bandages for the actual diversity of skin tones in the world. People who aren’t a peachy tan are now able to spend their money on products that were actually designed for them.

And their joy in something as simple as a bandage purchase is palpable. In 2019, Dominique Apollon, a darker-skinned man, tweeted two photos of his hand with a bandage on it. He wrote, “For the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a band-aid in my own skin tone. You can barely even spot it . . . For real I’m holding back tears.”⁷

When we use inclusive language that prevents erasure, it reminds us that more than one kind of person exists. For example, I now regularly see skin tones talked about in the plural, in a way that better reflects reality. And this use of the plural can help remind us of different perspectives, different experiences, and different needs.

HISTORY BEGINS WITH US

In 2019, I went to Denver to co-run a workshop on inclusive language and race. Before I went, I did something I like to do before I travel somewhere in the US; I googled “when was Denver settled?” This is what popped up as the first result:

Google let me know that this text came from the History of Denver Wikipedia page. In 2019, if you clicked through and read the full entry, you would have seen that the history of Denver apparently started in the 1850s.

You’d have to already know there is more history and do extra work to learn that the land where Denver is located has actually been inhabited since at least 1500 BCE, and that in 1851, the land where I delivered the workshop belonged to the Arapaho nation. (Given recent archeological findings a little further south in New Mexico, it is likely that the area has been inhabited for at least tens of thousands of years.)⁸ White settlers started arriving in the 1850s, and after an 1864 massacre, both the Arapahos and Cheyennes were brutally and forcibly relocated out of Colorado, “clearing the way” for today’s towns and cities.

For the casual internet searcher, this history has been erased.

It is as if the history of people on the land begins with white people. With settlers of European descent.

Of course, that’s not true. The territory that is now the United States was fully inhabited, coast to coast, when the first European colonists arrived. (It was also fully inhabited centuries earlier, when Vikings reached the coast of what is today Canada but got pushed back to Greenland by the local Inuits.) If you are reading this in the US and are not Native, I’d like you to take a moment and find out what percentage of the local population where you live is Native American. (By local, I mean your town or city—something smaller than a county.)

And if you’re reading this outside the US, you can play along by picking a location that’s interesting to you and then going through the same steps. If you’re in a country that was settled by European colonizers, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, you can go through the exercise using your own town or city (or other small region).

Okay, do you have the percentage of Native (or other indigenous) people in your location? Now I’d like you to think about what percentage of the local population was Native American in 1491. (Or the year before European colonizers arrived in the country you’re looking at.)

In the US, unless you’re in Alaska, Oklahoma, New Mexico, or Arizona—or on a reservation or pueblo or rancheria—chances are excellent that the local Native population is 1 percent or less.

How did the places where almost all US residents live go from 100 percent Native American population to 1 percent or under in the last five hundred years?

You might think the answer is European diseases, but that gets you only part of the way there. If you grew up in the US, did you learn about the role of white people in the genocidal removal of Native people from their lands? I sure didn’t.

I grew up in a town in New York called Commack, an abbreviation of Winnecomac, a name meaning “pleasant lands” in the language spoken by the local Secatogue people. My elementary school was called Indian Hollow, and the occasional lucky kid might find an arrowhead in the schoolyard or the small woods behind it.

But we never, not once, talked about where those “Indians” now were. Or why we were living on their land. And we certainly weren’t led to consider whether or not they should still be there. I didn’t even learn the name of the Secatogue nation until decades later, when I was living nearly eight hundred miles away.

I had to dig to get this information, and one of the challenges I faced was due to another form of erasure: in many places where I encountered information about the original inhabitants of the places I lived, the different nations were simply called Indians or Native Americans. This is a form of erasure I still encounter all the time, even in museums, which really should know better.

I’m taking a cavern tour, and the tour guide says, “The Native Americans used to . . . ” and I think, “But really, don’t you mean Miwoks?” I’m in a museum reading about local history and it says, “The Native Americans used to . . . ” and I think, “But really, don’t you mean Ohlones?” I’m reading a tourist brochure, and it says, “The local Native Americans used to . . . ” and I think, “But really, don’t you mean Modocs?”

As I pointed out in Chapter 5 with the word Oriental, talking about people who are culturally distinct and geographically widespread as if they’re all the same group is insulting. It erases the ways that each group is distinctive and suggests that their distinctiveness is unimportant and uninteresting. I hear something similar from people who grew up in places like El Salvador and Honduras, who are often assumed to be Mexican, and people from Korea and Thailand, who are assumed to be Chinese. And I see people and objects described as simply “African” all the time, which erases vast geographical and cultural differences.⁹

When I was in grad school, I used to do some volunteer work on language revitalization with people from California nations. Language revitalization is work that people do to push back at what is known as language contraction or language endangerment. A group in which everyone used to speak a language has now been backed into a corner by a whole range of societal pressures, and now only a small percentage of the group—maybe even just a few people—speak it. Language revitalization work pushes out from that corner and makes it possible for more people to use the language and bring it back to places it has disappeared from.

For a week, people from all over California would come to UC Berkeley, and grad students would assist them with a language project. I’d help people learn to read the International Phonetic Alphabet so they could access grammatical knowledge that had been written up when their language was more widely spoken. I’d help people compose new prayers and ritual language. And I’d hang out with them during lunches and campfires and hear just a little about what it was like to be a California Native.

A lot of what I’d hear in casual conversation was workshop participants talking about the ways they felt erased. I learned from a Wiyot woman about the 1860 massacre by white people of almost every person on the island called Tuluwat, where her family lived. She was descended from one of the few children who had survived the attack. Through tears, she told us how it felt like outside of the Wiyot nation the memory of this massacre had been erased. “For them, it’s like it never happened.”

And Chochenyo, Rumsen, and Mutsun Ohlones, whose families had settled in Northern California many centuries before the Europeans arrived, would tell me how people were shocked to realize there were still Natives living here. “They think we’re a myth,” one told me. “Or all long dead and gone,” another added. “I feel invisible on my own land,” said a third. The Ohlones in the Bay Area are consistently denied access to their sacred sites, some of which now have malls and radio towers sitting on them.

There is a constant and ongoing erasure of indigenous people, both here in the US and elsewhere. Many non-Native people write about places as if their history begins with white people. And use umbrella terms like Indians or Native Americans instead of recognizing cultural and ethnic differences.

To be more inclusive, those of us who aren’t indigenous to the places where we live need to put in more time, more attention, and more effort to remember and correctly name the people who were here first. In addition, the more we uncover the hidden and erased histories of the people indigenous to our area, the more we can also reflect their reality, show them respect, and draw them into the conversations we shouldn’t be having without them.

INVISIBLE LESBIANS

The erasure of women from domains like history, product design, and public discussion is incredibly common.¹⁰ So is the erasure of people who aren’t heterosexual, which is one way of being heteronormative. (Heteronormative describes a world view in which heterosexuality is the only—or the only “normal”—sexual orientation.) So what do you get when you combine the two? A greater likelihood of being forgotten.

On the one hand, it makes sense for there to be some ambiguity when it comes to identifying if someone is female and lesbian. (Or a dyke, or queer, or bisexual, or pansexual. There are many sexual orientations, and a range of words that people use to describe themselves. Even when you look at just the set of women who date only women, there isn’t a single umbrella term out there that everyone uses to self-identify. Preferences are often generational, like in the debates on what to call Dyke Day LA.)¹¹

For example, in the US and many other countries, physical affection between women is way more socially acceptable than it is between men.

On the other hand, women who are lesbian and queer and bisexual and pansexual genuinely do exist. And we need to make sure they are not forgotten or rendered invisible by the language we use.

I’m subscribed to a subreddit called r/SapphoAndHerFriend, which highlights the erasure of women who are romantically involved with other women. The subreddit name is itself a joke that references one of the most common kinds of erasure—labeling two women who are romantically involved as friends, best friends, or roommates. (In case you don’t know, Sappho was an ancient Greek poet who lived on the island of Lesbos and wrote highly esteemed lyric poetry that includes homoerotic content. The word sapphic derives from her name, and the word lesbian derives from her home island.)

Despite the ongoing jokes, it’s clearly distressing to the group’s members that they are considered so outlandish, so irrelevant, so marginal, that people continuously forget that they exist.

Here are just a few examples of erasure that have been posted:

1. A photograph of a wooden plaque that reads “Women will never be as successful as men because they have no wives to advise them.”

This is problematic for a few reasons, but what I’ll highlight here is that it assumes that a) there are no women with wives, and b) all men have wives. Heteronormativity in action!

2. A photograph of a touchscreen kiosk for patient intake at a medical office. The kiosk screen asks the question, “In regards to sexual orientation, do you think of yourself as:” and then gives the following set of options for the patient to choose:

• Straight or heterosexual

• I do not understand the question

• Prefer to discuss with my doctor or practitioner

• Prefer not to answer

• More options

What is noticeably missing is a straightforward option for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, pan-sexual, or asexual. (Or other options, as the list of words we have to describe sexual orientations keeps on expanding to better reflect reality.)

3. A Skeletor meme in which Skeletor says, “Every hand you’ve ever shaken, male or female, has had a dick in it at one point.” The person who posted the meme added, “Lesbians don’t exist, I guess.”

So, to return to the story from the beginning of this chapter, when I asked Lauren to tell me about her date, saying “what’s he like?” I was in good company. Good company in that there is a lot of erasure out there of women who date other women. But, of course, it’s also bad company, in that every one of us engaging in erasure has made at least one person—and usually, a lot more—feel bad.