You’re on Mute

Institutions promised more humane and inclusive language. Too often, they produced a vocabulary that obscures ordinary people—and leaves everyone afraid to speak.

A few years ago, on my first day at a new job, I attended a ninety-minute DEIJ training. I soon learned that these trainings happened every two weeks—attendance mandatory.

We learned about operating within an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial framework. We were encouraged to avoid words like crazy, stupid, psycho, wheelchair-bound, mute… At the end of the presentation, our executive director smiled reassuringly from her little box on the screen and reminded the team that none of this was intended to make anyone feel as though their language was being policed.

Within hours, people were frantically apologizing for saying, “You’re on mute,” during our seemingly endless, back-to-back virtual meetings.

Not because anyone had corrected or reprimanded them.

Because they weren’t sure anymore.

Of course, it wasn’t really about the word mute. It was about what the training had accomplished: ordinary, well-intentioned people no longer trusted themselves to speak normally.

That feeling wasn’t entirely new to me. Working in human services, I had already acquired a whole parallel vocabulary. Latinx. Houselessness. Unphoned. Justice-involved person. Folx.

 I had spent much of my career working directly with people living on the margins of society, and I made it a point to use the plain, accessible language they used for themselves. The people creating this vocabulary were rarely the people expected to live inside it; they were largely members of a highly educated, and frequently white, professional class busily renaming people whose lives bore little resemblance to their own.

I never heard a Latina woman refer to herself as “Latinx.” I never heard a homeless man say he was “experiencing houselessness.” And unphoned—a real term, despite sounding like something I made up—was never used by anyone I knew who lacked access to a phone.

Whether the people being described found these terms useful seemed almost beside the point. The vocabulary served another purpose: demonstrating the enlightenment of the people using it.

I also learned an entirely new way to describe myself. I was no longer a woman or a mother, but a uterus-having, menstruation-experiencing birthing person who had chestfed my kiddo with my lactating body.

The absurdity masks something important. Language is supposed to help us recognize one another. Much of this new vocabulary does something stranger: it translates recognizable human beings into anatomy, legal histories, demographic categories, and unfortunate circumstances. The descriptions grow more elaborate while the people inside them become harder to see.

This was routinely described as “humanizing language.” Much of it did the opposite—then congratulated itself for treating people with dignity.

The vocabulary also functioned as a social password. Knowing the newest term proved that you were informed, compassionate, and ideologically aligned. Using yesterday’s term, even innocently, could suggest otherwise.

Nobody needed to issue an explicit threat. We had seen how quickly a misplaced word could become a correction, a private message, a conversation with a supervisor, or simply that unmistakable change in the room.

I watched intelligent, compassionate colleagues become genuinely afraid of getting it wrong. They corrected themselves mid-sentence. They apologized before anyone had objected. They searched the faces around them for some indication that an ordinary word had revealed an unacceptable belief.

The language was supposedly becoming safer. The people using it felt increasingly afraid to speak.

Once I recognized the pattern, I began noticing it everywhere.

A few months ago, I was speaking with a hematologist about a genetic bleeding disorder. Throughout our conversation, she repeatedly used a phrase that caught me off guard: “people who menstruate.”

It wasn’t that I had never heard the phrase before. It was that we were two women discussing how a bleeding disorder affects women in the rather obvious area of…bleeding—and she never once used the word women.

Three young medical students were also in the room, hanging on her every word. This wasn’t simply an accommodation used when relevant. It was apparently the language the next generation of doctors was learning to use by default.

I understood the rationale: the phrase was meant to be inclusive. There may be situations in which that broader language is relevant. But inclusion had somehow come to require avoiding the word that accurately described both people having the conversation, and the overwhelming majority of patients affected.

There is nothing especially humane about reducing women to a recurring bodily function. The phrase may be technically inclusive, but as a default replacement for women, it is sterile, clinical, and strangely degrading.

So what, exactly, has all this extra linguistic labor accomplished?

The same habit appeared in a different form last week, when I was reading an after-visit summary for my little boy and noticed that every pronoun was they or them.

Medical professionals have told me they default to singular they because it is faster, “covers every possibility,” and avoids misgendering anyone.

I’m not sure they appreciated the humor in that explanation.

The intake forms had asked for my child’s sex at birth, identified gender, and preferred pronouns. We answered all three. The institution collected more information about his gender than any doctor would have required for most of human history—and then wrote the report as though the answer remained an impenetrable mystery.

Everyone involved knew he was a little boy. The institution had collected three separate answers confirming that fact and still couldn’t bring itself to write he.

There is something oddly joyless about all of this. Woman, mother, and son do more than classify us. They locate us in human relationships. Their bureaucratic replacements may be more technically elaborate, but they are emotionally barren.

None of this is earth-shattering. Language changes, and sometimes new terms help us speak with greater accuracy or compassion. But language ordinarily earns its place because people find it useful. Institutions prescribed this vocabulary and attached a moral ultimatum to it: decent people would adopt it, and anyone who hesitated had better be prepared to explain why.

Most people do not object to courtesy. If someone asks to be addressed in a particular way, most of us will make a sincere effort. But that ordinary human accommodation bears little resemblance to an institutional culture in which every word is monitored for evidence of ideological failure.

There is a difference between thoughtfulness and vigilance, between choosing our words with care and monitoring ourselves in real time for evidence of our own moral inadequacy.

When every sentence carries that much moral weight, candor begins to disappear. Eventually, people learn that saying less is safer.

Sometimes it looks like a room full of well-meaning adults taking turns apologizing for telling a colleague she is on mute for the third time during a Teams meeting.

It seems like a small thing. And maybe it is.

Or maybe it is a clue that many of our institutions have begun speaking a language increasingly unfamiliar to the people they are supposed to serve—and, in the process, teaching the rest of us to distrust our own.

Ordinary conversation begins to feel like a quiz no one remembers studying for.