There is no gender in toki pona.
toki pona, as an isolating language with no gendered pronouns, is grammatically gender-neutral. End of post.
Okay but actually…
[CW: Very brief references to sexuality; discussion of what gendered terms to use for people. This post assumes basic familiarity with toki pona. “There is no gender in toki pona. (non-tokiponist–friendly version)” also exists.]
There are certain pitfalls ubiquitous to learners of toki pona. One early one many of us run into is hypermodification. mi moku e telo lete pi kili suwi sike suli jelo loje. Eventually we realize we can just say mi moku e telo. The next big hurdle is understanding the things we can’t translate directly because they represent views that clash with toki pona’s philosophy. Trying to say that you want something but don’t need it? Too bad; you’re going to have to learn to express differing kinds of wile instead.
As we become more fluent, we internalize these pitfalls and learn to seamlessly navigate around them. This, in fact, is the essence of fluency. We learn to think not just how to translate the English words but instead the underlying, wordless concepts. But the toki-pona-incompatible worldviews closest to us are the ones that are hardest to let go of. And in my experience, the one I see toki pona speakers struggle with the most is the idea of gender. Discourse around gender in toki pona almost exclusively revolves around trying to twist the language to convey things that simply aren’t its nature to convey, any more than want-versus-need is.
Let’s start with this: There is no direct translation for “woman” and “man” in toki pona. “Hold on!”, you might say. “pu translates ‘woman’ as meli and ‘man’ as mije.” And yes, it does. But the translation doesn’t go both ways. If I say, “mi toki tawa mije“, do you know the gender of the person I’m referring to? If you think you do, o awen pu.
meli
noun woman, female, feminine person; wife
mijenoun man, male, masculine person; husband
The simplest form of this, that meli and mije do not refer exclusively to gender identity, can be proven pretty decisively. If I see someone in public with a funny joke on their T-shirt, and that person matches my local community’s definition of masculinity, I might say to my partner “o lukin e mije poka. len ona la sitelen li musi.” I am not attempting to convey to my partner, in that moment, any commentary on the stranger’s gender identity. For all I know the person is a woman and takes she/her pronouns. Rather, I am using mije to describe their appearance, which will helpfully eliminate ~50% of the nearby people I might have been referring to.
If you have ever used toki pona to talk about strangers, there is a good chance you have used meli and mije in this purely presentation-based way. But the divergence between these two toki pona words and their frequent English mistranslations goes farther than that. Consider this scenario: A lesbian is at a lesbian bar. She is exclusively interested in women, and the friend beside her knows this. The lesbian says to her friend, “ike la mi taso.” Her friend gestures to a fem at the end of the bar and says, “o toki tawa ona.” She shakes her head. “mi alasa e mije.” In this context, it is unlikely that the lesbian is trying to communicate that she has suddenly become interested in men. Much more likely, she is saying, “I’m looking for someone butch.” Because a butch lesbian is—sometimes, in some regards—a “masculine person,” and thus mije is an appropriate (not the appropriate) term.
A different person, looking to convey the same meaning, might have said “mi alasa e tonsi” (where, by the same logic as here, tonsi can refer to any kind of gender-nonconformity) or narrowed her scope by saying something like “mi alasa e meli pi nasin mije,” or set gender aside and specified what precise attributes she sought. Context-sensitivity and subjectivity don’t stop mattering in toki pona as soon as gender is involved.
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