Thank you to Del. Danica Roem for calling this out; would love to see more people do it, and not “normalize” the use of dehumanizing words like “illegals” or “a transgender” or whatever. Here’s how Del. Roem put it, very articulately as always:
“Again, I don’t think people necessarily have bad intent all the time if they say this. But I want to make sure when we use language, the words that we say about people in our communities matter. We can’t call a group of human beings ‘illegals’. It really…as someone who has been singled out and stigmatized for who I am – and I get called ‘a transgender’, which is just…you know, it’s an adjective and not a noun; ‘illegal’ is an adjective, not a noun. And when we’re talking about human beings, if we’re going to discuss status, let’s discuss them as undocumented people, or just people in general who we’re trying to help out here. Because I really, really want us as a Commonwealth to get away from using stigmatizing language about people who are just trying to get about with their lives.”
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