Last Saturday I had lunch at my parents with my brother, my sister and their family. My brother’s friend, Gillian, a photographer from New York was there. She was in Israel to photograph Sharon for the New York Times (this was the second time she’d come over for that assignment: the last time, after a big hassle with the security checks, she was barred from meeting Sharon because her usual mini-skirt was deemed "inappropriate").
Anyway, as I sat down my mother said that Gillian had just been telling them about going to Boston (where I’m going for a Science Fiction convention), where she had been to take pictures for an article in Newsweek about transgendered people. My mother asked if I’d heard of the word "Hir".
Sure, I said, that’s a gender-neutral pronoun.
Gillian looked at me wide-eyed and asked how on earth I knew that.
Well, I replied glibbly, several science ficition stories have tried to have a protagonist of neutral gender…
Sometimes I love being the geek.
If I’m mentioning Gillian in the blog, and since the New York Times photo will vanish in a week, and isn’t that interesting anyway, I’ll link to her Photo essay on the victims of terrorism (the pictures were also featured in a New York Times article titled The Maimed, which I found copied around the Internet). Everyday portraits touched by abnormal violence.