"I was in pain all day. My knees were swollen. Whenever I walked or bent down, it felt like something was granting inside. Doctors told me that this was arthritis. They gave me painkillers, but they made me drowsy and I could not work. I went to a doctor in my city, not a small clinic, mind you, a specialist who was highly recommended. When we went into the office the doctor did not even examine my knees properly. I tried telling him how much pain I am in. He cut me mid-sentence: Bibi, this is what happens in this disease. You will have to bear it. The way he said bibi was so dismissive, my heart broke."
My grandmother is an exceptionally strong person. She is the first woman in her family to get a Master's degree, she raised her siblings alone after the death of her brother, had three children, and did this all while battling osteoporosis and arthritis, diseases which ate away at her bones and leave her in pain every moment of her life. So I was shocked that this story, which took place 20 years ago, could affect my grandmother enough that she still carried the hurt of the word 'Bibi'.
Thus began my interest in the phenomenology of gendered language. I began to wonder in that moment how many other words, words that are considered normal and a part of society's ordinary vocabulary, can be used as a tool to hurt people of all gendered.
That language is gendered is not a new idea. Research shows that language shapes how we see men and women, and their roles, without consciously realizing it. Linguists have also shown that languages with strong grammatical gender, like Urdu, Hindi, French, and Arabic, tend to be linked to societies with wider gaps between men's and women's roles and opportunities, compared to countries whose languages are more gender-neutral.
But this is just one part of the story. The other half still remains invisible. What happens to the people when they hear this language? How can a word become a weight that one carries through life, a reminder of helplessness, rejection, and pain?
Linguist Robin Lakoff argued that language is not a reflection of our place in society; rather, it teaches us from childhood how to speak and be spoken to, actively reflecting and enforcing it. And Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performative, something produced through repeated acts rather than an innate essence, can explain why ordinary words are so important. They produce the terms through which gender is constructed and how we must inhabit it.
Taken together, these theorists suggest that the pain in my grandmother's voice, twenty years on, was not an overreaction to a small word. It was the accumulated weight of a lifetime spent inside a language that had already decided, before she ever opened her mouth, what a woman was allowed to be.
That's what Zuban Daraz aims to fight against. We want you to share your stories with language. If gendered language is learned through repetition, then it can also be unlearned the same way: every word is a story, and each word questioned is a story that can be rewritten.