On terminology and stigma: Ah, I finally found this essay I posted back in January. No wonder it took me so long. It was on another site, not this one. But here it is, and I think it applies.

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Here's what was running through my mind as I took care of the litter boxes today.

Let's examine my cat, Alex. There is nothing wrong with him, and a lot right with him. He's a wonderful cat, and a cat is a perfectly noble thing to be. Therefore, it's completely acceptable to refer to him as a cat, right? I love my cat.

Now let's attach a stigma to it. Let's say society has determined that there is something subtly wrong with being like Alex. To be Alex makes you somehow less acceptable, and gets you less respect, while being compared to Alex is an assault on dignity. All over the place, we would hear "cat" as an insult. "That was a totally catlike thing to do." "Ah, what else can you expect from a cat?" "Mommy, at school they're calling me a cat. Am I a cat?" "Of course you're not a cat. Don't be silly. Whoever called you a cat was just being mean." "Don't call me a cat. I am NOT a cat!" In this environment, we still have Alex, who is in fact a cat, and always will be a cat. But we love him, and we don't want him to endure the shame and the rejection. So we come up with another word. "Let's not say Alex is a cat. Let's say he is a feline." Then "cat" becomes essentially a swear word, and they start censoring it out of support websites.

This works for a while, but soon people catch on that "cat" and "feline" are the same thing. Now "feline" becomes the insult. "That was a feline thing to do." "Mommy, am I a feline?" "Don't call me a feline."

Still we have Alex, and still we love him. Still we don't want to shame him or use a word that may insult him. So now we can't call him a cat or a feline. Where do we go from there? Is he now a whiskered citizen? A miniature lion? A speaker of meow? Are we going to borrow a word from another language and start saying "gato" or "koshka" or "gorbe" or "popoki"? We're probably not going to go to "felid" now, because that's too close to "feline."

I don't think the particular word of choice is the real problem. I think the real problem is that we need to realize, stigma is an imaginary construct. Because we see that there is nothing bad about Alex being exactly what he is, that's why we can call him a cat and say it with pride. Now, why can't we do the same thing with humans who are somehow marginalized for being what they are? Why can't we just stop using the concepts of being mentally ill, or having a low IQ, or being homosexual, as an insult. Then we won't have to come up with politically correct alternatives to describe people who really are those things.