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More and more of us are experimenting with relationships we can't quite define. Yet. And I have faith that our language will catch up.
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But look how much our language has already changed, in just a few short years! And I'm not just talking about words that start with the prefix "trans." Today "sex change" sounds lurid and dated. Instead we say "sex reassignment surgeries." "Genderqueer," a label that goes back at least to the 1990s (if not further), now pulls up 691,000 hits on Google. Just recently, an article in this very paper discussed the use of "Mx." as a gender-neutral (or trans-specific) honorific. But perhaps the biggest change of all is the emergence of "cisgender," which uses the scientific, Latinate prefix "cis" (meaning "on the same side as") to create a word for people who are not transgender. If that feels like a funny progression, you should know that the word "homosexual" was in common usage long before "heterosexual"—and that "heterosexuality" was at first a psychiatric condition, a "morbid" attraction to a member of the opposite sex.For families like mine, I can't say where things will go from here, what new words will emerge or what familiar ones we will reconfigure into more pleasing shapes. I dream of the day when Facebook will recognize us with a panoply of polyamorous relationship statuses, from "sister wives" to "primary partners." A day when our law and our language reflect the fact that our lives come in a diversity of shapes that detonate the limits of the "nuclear family." In our words, we're not there yet. But in daily practice, in the ways we actually live our lives, we're getting closer by the hour. More and more of us are experimenting with relationships we can't quite define. Yet. And I have faith that our language will catch up.Until it does, most people refer to Tim, Jason, and me as "the boys," much in the way my father lovingly but awkwardly referred to our first lesbian neighbors as "the girls." Unless and until we have a bunch of sons, that works well enough. But I can envision a future time when kids will look back and think that sounds closeted and strange. In fact, I'm looking forward to it. I'm ready to be an eddy in the river English, a pause along the way to a better world, a better word.Just—please God—don't let it be thruple.Follow Hugh on Twitter.I dream of the day when Facebook will recognize us with a panoply of polyamorous relationship statuses, from "sister wives" to "primary partners."