✎ Everybody's Alphabet
A project to bring inclusive language to historically marginalized and ignored non-binary, genderqueer and intersex people.
Written Into History
What if there was no word to describe you? That’s the reality for many genderqueer people in the world. Because many languages only have words for men and women. You’re “un doctor” in Spanish (masculine), or “l’ actrice” in French (feminine). Queer people have always existed and yet for centuries they’ve been excluded from history. We set out to change that.
A New Letter
By adding a single letter, æ, to gendered-language alphabets like Spanish, French, German, and Italian, we made it so anyone can write about anyone. A genderqueer doctor can go by “doctoræ” in Spanish if they want.
Here for good
We worked with Google to make æ available in Search and Docs, which encapsulate the widest form of written communication today. You can type æ by holding down your “a” key on any device, but we also gave it a permanent spot on a custom keyboard.
Let History Say Thæ Exist
And we sent that keyboard to genderqueer people across the globe and asked them, for once, to tell their stories. We put those stories onto the only poster in the world which is registered with the British Library as a magazine and uses this letter.
As if to say, queer people exist. Here’s proof for the record.
