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Gender Neutral Pronouns and Other Terms

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For Use in Stories with Gender Non-Binary Characters But they work great in real life too! I developed the following set of gender neutral terms for use in my writing when working with characters who do not identify as men/women or boys/girls. These gender neutral terms are for people who identify as gender nonconforming, gender queer, as a third gender, agender, gender fluid, gender variant, non-binary, etc. These terms aren't supposed to replace non-gender terms (child, parent, sibling, or spouse). The purpose of these terms is so that an identity can be made visible, not hidden.  For example: My child is 12 years old. This actually obscures the gender of the child and could make a non-binary gender identity seem less valid. Whereas: My thawn is 12 years old. This makes it very clear that my offspring identifies along the gender spectrum, but not as a boy or girl. I hope you'll find these terms useful:  Purchase this as a poster for your classroom at my Redbubble shop .
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Non-fiction: A Pothos Plant

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My great-grandmother had a pothos plant.  It's a type of viney plant that can look very similar to a philodenron. When my grandmother inherited the plant, she split it into three pots because it had grown so large. Pothos plants can grow pretty rapidly given the right conditions, and they are hearty survivors. When my mother inherited the three plants, she decided that when my siblings and I moved out, we'd each get one -- my older sister moved out first. One thing that pothos plants can't survive are cats that chew on them. So, my sister gave me hers when I moved out. Because this meant that I had two pothos plants, I kept "mine" at my apartment and "my sister's" in my office at work. Now undisturbed, her plant quickly recovered from the cats, and within a year went from having 4 vines and 30 leaves, to this Jumanji-aspiring beauty -- crawling along the walls for meters, filled with over one hundred leaves. Eventually, I took some cuttings and propa...
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The Scottish Revolution

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When Americans Think Of Scotland They try to recall what's the difference between it and Ireland. And whether or not it's part of Britain or England or whatever the UK is. They don't even bother trying to picture where it is on a map -- that's just stretching the powers of memory too far. And that's fine. That's the way the people of Scotland want it to be. The last thing they want is for Americans to go messing around with their affairs. Because then they might start to notice things...things that aren't easily explained. Like fog -- that talks to you. Britain's much better at explaining away their phenomena when the Yanks comes to visit. That's because Americans have always known that -- whether it's supposed to be called Britain or England -- it's a place that a long time ago was a contemptible place (although an American would probably use a different adjective) that tried to take their money, but nowadays it gives them many of their favo...
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Communist Aliens from SPACE!

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They came in super technologically-advanced spaceships. They had traveled a bagillion space miles, or light-years or whatever. They came to do all the typical alien things that humans (at least the ones in the USA) are afraid of extraterrestrials doing. They wanted to introduce a huge multi-functional monarchy that ran on a communistic economic system that didn't benefit the rich or men...just the aliens. The space kind, not the foreign kind. It was a nightmare. And the demons of Earth were of no help. They didn't want to get involved in the affairs of humanity. Or at least, they were waiting for Ms. Kills-A-Lot to give them the go ahead. But she couldn't because she herself was mostly dying shortly after the invasion took place because the aliens were also quite good at wholesale slaughter. The aliens blasted up the entire planet. Indiscriminately, really. They were killing humans in a very evens-Stevens sort of way. At least, that's what all the other countries claime...
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Ten Thousand and One Lives

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"No, I don't know what I want for dinner because I'm not even sure I've ever eaten dinner before.  In fact, it's possible that I'm incapable of consuming food.  But I guess, the shrimp in marinara sauce sounds good enough."     That used to be a typical daily conversation for me in the beginning -- if we go ahead and change a few details. Namely, that I was living alone in the woods and had never heard of "sauce" let alone marinara before, but of course I knew about shrimp -- no, wait...my mistake, that can't be right, let me start over. Some people think it would be rather nifty to have lived ten thousand lives. And maybe that could be true if they were all reincarnations and you couldn't remember any of them. Or even if you could remember a few of them, it was only  a few of them, and they were relatively neatly organized in your mind. You might say, "Oh yes, in this my current life, I had Mrs. Gellstahlt as my 2nd grade teacher. I...
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