Linguistic Drift Is An Inevitable Result Of Majority Groups Adopting Language Developed By Minority Groups.

Linguistic drift is an inevitable result of majority groups adopting language developed by minority groups. To give a silly example: when I first heard the phrase "theydies and gentlethems", it was legitimately funny. It was taking a traditional greeting that excludes nonbinary people and making it all about nonbinary people. What happened next is that the phrase spread and found its way to the cis majority where it started to take on connotations of "greetings to nonbinary people of both sexes" and instead of being a subversion of something else it became a reference to itself, and a tool cis people could use to sort nonbinary people into "really men" and "really women". A similar thing happened with "afab" and "amab". Their coinage by trans and intersex people originally served to make visible the act of gender assignation itself, instead of sweeping it under the rug with terms like "mtf" or "born female". Then cis people got a hold of them and used them mostly to talk about other cis people and the words started to take on connotations of "men and people I think of as men" and "women and people I think of as women".

I don't think there's an easy solution to this problem. I do however think that being aware of it is half the battle. When you recognize that language shifts fast, you can be more accepting of people who use language you think of as outdated. When you see that the connotations of words are not fixed, it's less tempting to sort them into "objectively problematic" and "objectively unproblematic" and to sort people into good and evil by which words they use.