Juno News - August 17, 2020


Let’s read BC’s guide to “inclusive” coronavirus language

Mentioned
COVID-19 John Smith
Another week of Liberal scandals The elites are changing the channel

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

150.61

Word count

1,044

Sentence count

58

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The BC Centre for Disease Control has released the COVID19 Language Guide, Guidelines for Inclusive Language for Written and Digital Content. In this episode, we look at some of the highlights of this new guide, including the use of pronouns and gender inclusive language.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi everyone! The BC Centre for Disease Control has just released the COVID-19 Language Guide,
00:00:11.440 Guidelines for Inclusive Language for Written and Digital Content. The purpose of this new
00:00:16.800 language guide is to destigmatize COVID-19, and it is brought to you by the same people who
00:00:22.320 advised us all to start using glory holes to avoid spreading the coronavirus. So let's look
00:00:28.320 through some of the highlights of this new guide. It starts out by telling us not to say COVID-19
00:00:34.560 infection because that carries a connotation of being unclean, and they instead suggest that we
00:00:40.080 say COVID-19 virus or COVID-19 virus transmissions. And I was thinking that I have mostly heard people
00:00:47.040 say COVID-19 cases. That has been much more common than saying COVID-19 infections, but nevertheless
00:00:55.280 most of the language suggestions follow this line of thought, so say transmit virus instead of infect.
00:01:02.560 We are also told to avoid using terms like fight, battle, or attack the virus, or the war on coronavirus,
00:01:10.240 or crisis, because battle and war references can evoke images of violence and panic.
00:01:16.800 Now, references to war and fighting against something are overused in general, with all diseases
00:01:23.360 and undesirable social phenomena. So I don't know about you, but I've never heard anyone complain
00:01:28.800 about those references or assert that they feel emotionally disturbed by them.
00:01:34.560 Now, after these two pages of COVID-19 language suggestions, COVID-19 specifically is never mentioned
00:01:41.760 again for the remaining 25 pages of the guide, and instead the guide takes a radical shift to talking
00:01:48.320 about issues of race, gender identity, substance use, and other topics. In the section on substance
00:01:55.200 use, for example, they say instead of saying drug addict or drug user, you should try person who
00:02:02.880 injects drugs slash substances, person who smokes drugs slash substances, person who uses drugs slash
00:02:10.880 substances, or person with lived slash living experience of substance use.
00:02:16.640 And that is because person-first language emphasizes humanity. Person-first or people-first language
00:02:22.560 has been a thing since the 60s, so in many ways this discussion right now is a continuation of the
00:02:28.080 discussion we've been having for decades. There's always been some people saying people-first language
00:02:33.040 is dignifying, and others saying it's too politically correct and unnatural. But people-first language used
00:02:39.040 to be pretty much limited to the realm of disabilities, and then it started gradually branching out into
00:02:45.680 race, and just overall life circumstances. Also on the topic of substance use, the guide says to avoid
00:02:54.080 using the word clean as a way of indicating someone is sober, because labeling the use of drugs as dirty
00:03:01.280 and the absence of drug use as clean invites a value judgment that stigmatizes people who use drugs
00:03:07.280 that does not accurately reflect the complexities of substance use and decisions not to use substances.
00:03:12.800 Then, of course, they move on to pronouns, because we always have to talk about pronouns,
00:03:19.680 which I actually find an interesting issue because it's continuously evolving. For instance,
00:03:24.320 we learn in this guide that, though exceptions exist, for example, someone who does not use pronouns and
00:03:31.520 only uses their name, as a general rule, use pronouns that correspond to a person's gender identity.
00:03:37.040 So, I mean, this was new to me. Someone who does not use pronouns and uses only their name. So now you can
00:03:43.760 elect to not even have pronouns and just use your name, which, I mean, that was new for me.
00:03:51.360 Next, they tell us, a good practice when introducing yourself or even as part of your email signature
00:03:57.120 is as follows. Nice to meet you, blank. My name is blank. I use she slash her pronouns. What's your name
00:04:04.400 and what pronouns do you go by? Or you can put in your email signature, John Smith, PhD, he, his, him,
00:04:12.720 program director. I think it's safe to say that I will actually never do that. Next, we move on to
00:04:20.880 gender inclusive language. Shift to the use of people, everyone, folks or folks with an X to avoid 1.00
00:04:28.160 use of the phrases men and women, you guys or guys. Why? The phrase men and women excludes non-binary
00:04:35.760 people and it is unclear whether it includes trans men and women. They're trying to push this folks
00:04:42.480 with an X on us. And this folks is really only used by one subset of people. And that is the campus
00:04:51.520 activists who work at the LGBTQ center. So it's interesting that they want this folks with an X 0.99
00:04:58.560 to permeate into mainstream culture. This next one is kind of painful. I'm just going to try to
00:05:06.320 get this over with. So we shouldn't say men who have sex or women who have sex, 0.63
00:05:12.560 because that is assuming that men are always insertive and women are always vaginally receptive.
00:05:18.800 And this makes assumptions about sexual behavior based on gender and anatomy that may not be at play
00:05:24.400 for people along the sexuality and gender spectrums. So instead, this guide is suggesting that we say
00:05:30.960 engage in insertive sex and engage in receptive sex. So I'm just going to leave that one there. 0.61
00:05:38.640 Then we can see that they're still trying to push chest feeding and pregnant person and people of a 0.99
00:05:45.280 childbearing age on us. So, you know, this, this just hasn't really caught on yet. And so they're
00:05:50.640 still trying. They're still trying. It keeps then going on to other topics. There's a little section
00:05:57.120 about sex work or prostitution, where they suggest instead of prostitution, they like the term
00:06:03.680 transactional sex. In regards to overweight people, they say to use non weight based indicators to
00:06:11.520 assess health, such as biochemical markers, such as blood pressure, behaviors like physical activity,
00:06:18.560 and mental health like screening for depression. They say, do not use the term people who are overweight,
00:06:25.760 even though that is people first language. Anyways, I think we've had enough of all this for today.
00:06:32.560 What do you think about all this COVID-19 language stuff that had basically nothing to do with COVID-19?
00:06:37.920 Do you think any of these suggestions are justified? Or do you see it as a form of manipulation or just
00:06:43.760 plain silliness? Let us know in the comments. I'm Lindsay Shepard with True North. Thanks so much for
00:06:49.120 watching.