I discovered solar flares at the Teide Observatory.
On the other side of the telescope, barely a meter from my eye, a vivid yellow circle appeared, in which the entanglement and crossing of the magnetic field lines suddenly released the energy, and then the explosion, colossal, but that I saw as a fine golden fountain, emerging from the surface of the burning sphere.
Now I am sitting next to the shore of a sea whose waters were icy in winter, on the sand of a beach that was snowy at this same time.
That's how it was a few years ago.
He trained in open water, and this included swimming in that frozen sea.
He breathed every two strokes and towards the coast.
Through my glasses, in the moments when I barely took half an eye out of the water, I would sometimes see, in the distance, on land, a figure wrapped in warm clothes, a man or a woman, impossible to tell.
Today I continue swimming, same sea, same winter month, but no snow falls on the sand, the beach is no longer lonely;
Like in spring, the dogs bring the balls to the feet of their owners, the people I see passing by, more numerous, are no longer sheltered figures, but in each stroke I can identify if they are men or women.
Or maybe I should refer to the latter as bodies with vaginas?
The label is not mine, it belongs to the cover of the prestigious medical journal
The Lancet.
The creative mind behind such an ill-fated definition wanted to be inclusive of trans people.
And it happened.
It passed for the vast majority, including trans women.
I understand that we are in a time of necessary inquiry into language.
It is the haste that often leads to ridicule and generates the opposite effect: a general aversion, not only because of the reification of certain terms, but because, in the desire to force changes, phrases such as "we are alone" are
heard
. instead of “we are alone.”
When I was a child, on a very different beach, a Mediterranean one, I used to wait for low tide to catch coquinas.
Then I swam about two hundred meters during which my feet did not touch the bottom.
But I knew where I was going: a sandbank where the water level dropped, again, to the height of my knees.
It was my island.
Then, bending down, I put my hand in the sand, stirring it to distinguish the different shapes: stones, empty shells, or full shells.
Based on experience, I learned that the adult coquinas, the largest, were above the youngest and, therefore, smallest specimens.
I didn't need to take the specimen out of the water, the screening was underground.
When he captured them, he put them in a net that was attached to his waist.
I almost always tasted the raw coquinas in the same place, opening them with my small fingernails.
Sometimes I spent so much time in the sea, bent over the sand, that my bottom was scorched by the sun and I couldn't sit down for days.
I still go to that beach today.
But there are no more coquinas, and the water temperature has risen so much that children play catch jellyfish.
Sand castles are not so interesting anymore.
The game is in the extreme deterioration of our seas.
Linguistic changes are extremely complicated;
To be effective, they take a long time.
On the other hand, every language has a life of its own, a life cycle that cannot be forced, that is one of its greatness, that in some way it imposes itself over its speakers as something organic.
The problem with inclusive language does not seem to me, obviously, to be the purpose of inclusion, but rather its imposing desire, its lack of reflection, and precisely at a time when there is something we do not have: time.
The mercury in the thermometer of our seas and our lands rises uncontrollably while that in the thermometer of our actions remains immobile, a heavy metal in our blood.
We speak or write with -e, -x, @, we create a dictionary so chaotic that we only manage to contradict ourselves.
What's more, about six species become extinct every hour.
Does ours, arrogant and failed, deserve inclusive language while we exclude to extinction some of the other eight million species that inhabit our planet?
If we do not unite in the responsibility of alleviating the climate crisis, by the time inclusive rules were rigorously studied and strengthened by their free and fluid use, humanity would no longer exist.
That is the paradox.
That dictionary that they write from the Tower of Babel, where everyone talks and no one understands each other, they will have to leave it to the cockroaches or send it to another planet, because this one is dying.
The good thing is that, then, all the suns in the world will be able to recover the shine that was taken away from the uniqueness of their name.
Marina Perezagua
is a writer, author of
Six Ways to Die in Texas
(Anagrama).
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_