Firstly, the slur is not used towards you. Secondly, you use it because it sounds fancy— then you don’t know how to pronounce it. Thirdly, here’s a word: non-binary.
‘Hermaphrodite’ is a slur, the word for humans is ‘intersex’. We don’t use ‘male’ and ‘female’ to describe planets, it seems, one can say masculine vs. feminine qualities or diurnal vs. nocturnal but the binary is not everything and everything is not a binary, as we know. And Western astronomy has ignored indigenous astronomy and its mythos in which the sun may be feminine.
I just discovered this channel and chances are he doesn’t know it’s a slur, if he doesn’t know how to pronounce it. He does ‘she’ Venus and ‘it’ not ‘they’ Mercury. Unless we get it right, can’t we just ‘it’ all of them? they’re planets.
Concerning intersex individuals, there is a spectrum of many variations, XX, XY, XXY and variations among them. The sources are in the first sentence of this post, I sound very ignorant here.
But I do know that the ratio of intersex people to people rightly assigned male or female is equal to the ratio of twins to the rest of us, mind-blowing huh?
It is, for astrologers, because Mercury is the planetary ruler of Gemini. Then, intersex people and minority genders were accepted before colonisations. Until I do more research on how they made that choice, I wonder if then we should say Mercury is intersex. But also, I wonder if we can incorporate the word in any other work if we do not ally with intersex activists.
