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During our class last Thursday when we were talking about category making and terminology used for sex and gender I mentioned a language I had heard of called e-prime.  I wanted to explain what e-prime is and how it's relevant to what we've been talking about here.  I think it's useful to refer back to our discussion with Paul Grobstein about science as a way to understand and apply this idea.  E-prime is a reconstruction of the English language that does not use the verb 'to be'.  We talked about thinking of science as the process of making observations and creating stories from those observations. Someone used the example of observing green grass and concluding, "the grass is green. " When writing or speaking in e-prime we might instead say "the grass appears green" or "that grass looks green". This is an example of language forcing you to carefully choose verbs and meanings to create a real story. The verb 'to be' has limiting connotations that make us define things unrealistically. By claiming, "the grass is green" we imagine uniformly green grass, but if we claim that "the grass appears green" then there is still room for variation, there could likely be one or more blade of yellow grass in the field that we didn't notice.  What I'm trying to explain is that e-prime is trying to account for variation by avoiding definitions with an ultimatum and leading us to find more wholistic perceptions of our world.
What does this have to do with gender and sexuality?  We've been talking about how we categorize and label people (including ourselves) with gender binary terms, and expressions of sexuality.  An important thing to realize about e-prime is that is it intended to change not only the way we speak and write but also the way we think. When I'm thinking about my own identity I find it difficult to describe myself in terms of "I am..." because I'm always a little nervous of claiming to be something I'm not.  I think other people share this reluctance as well. For example it might be more difficult to claim, "I am a lesbian" than it is to say "I prefer relationships with women".  The first statement feels like you are categorizing yourself as a certain 'type' of person and the second statement is simply stating a preference you have, it is a lot less loaded with connotations.  A typical reaction to this statement may be "does that mean you are only attracted to women?" but this kind of question abuses 'to be' by asking the person to respond with either "yes I am, no I'm not, or actually I am..." all of which are defining statements.   I think e-prime, or maybe some other kind of language reconstruction could give us the freedom to define ourselves on our own terms, not someone else's.  Eventually this elimination of 'to be' could go deeper by considering things like pronouns and their connotations/roots with 'to be'. She: the person who is female, or he: the person who is male.  
 
While researching e-prime I came across some interesting videos you might want to check out.  Robert Anton Wilson, a famous scientific philosopher, made this first video “E-prime”.  At about 1:15 into the video he talks about how as children we are taught to "put on this mask and act like everyone else." And then as 3:03 he begins talking about e-prime saying, "we're trapped in linguistic constructs, all it is is metaphor... "  I think this is an interesting way of looking at these concepts of 'defining' language, as metaphor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwUoFlbNLYE
 
I also found a video that shows a conversation between Urban Sout and Willem Larsen (who is the person who came to my theory of knowledge class in high school and discussed e-prime) about the difficulties of writing in e-prime and discussing its practicality. At 7:05 Willem says, "Language is a weapon. It's [e-prime] a loss of a weapon that this country has used to destroy the world." I like this quote because it makes us see how much our language influences every experience and that we have and that we can make the kind of changes we want to see through language.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od1k4aHcffU
For more information about e-prime check out this site:  http://litemind.com/e-prime/