Blogger's Homophobic?! Nooooo....

So I wrote "Don't Just Read The Cues, Understand Them", used spellcheck, and then I wrote this. I sent it in as a quasi-letter-to-the-editor but don't expect anything to come of it. I'm not even sure I sent it to the right place, but it felt like something had to be said. And usually when I'm having that "something needs to be said but I don't know who to say it to" feeling, I just write it down. So here it is.

In the "About" section on blogger's official website, the wrap-up of their humble beginnings leaves off with a mission statement of sorts: "Now we're a small (but slightly bigger than before) team in Google focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world's information from the personal perspective. Which has pretty much always been our whole deal."

I have been a blogger and google user for many years. I jumped on the blog bandwagon relatively early and through this became one of the first gmail users, much to the chagrin of many of my computer science major friends! (That was back when we either had no invites at all, or as few as six. It was as if gmail invites became a new status ranking among friends.)

These are great services. One of the reasons I've enjoyed using blogger in particular all these years, is my ability to be honest on my blog. I think this openness and honesty is a common advantage for many in the blog world. Today while blogging however--on one of my three remaining blogs (I've had six altogether throughout the years)--I had the impulse to be lazy and simply click on the spellcheck icon instead of thoroughly reading through my post. To my shock and horror, besides forgetting yet again that "embarrassed" has both two "s"'s and two "r"'s, I saw that most of the common language used to describe a huge part of my identity wasn't even recognized in the spellcheck program. Even the basic "gay" was singled out as incorrect; spellcheck told me it must be some sort of proper noun I've never come across because it needed to be capitalized. Similarly, "dyke" was not recognized, even though it has at least three working definitions (a sort of mini-levy, a negative term/offensive slang used against lesbians and queer women, and a reclaimed identity used by many queer women today). Perhaps the most disturbing to me was that "homophobic" was so unrecognizable there wasn't even a suggested replacement.

In a society where so many people are so different, and so often opressed for their differences, I'm shocked that blogger, and by default google, have such an outdated spellcheck. I know it's only a small portion of the program, but can still imagine myself coming out not so many years ago and the many high school and college aged students I work with today feeling alienated and wrong from yet another facet of society. And this facet being a place where open expression of one's self should be reveled in, not certain aspects singled out as literally unrecognizable.

I can't imagine or believe that google or blogger are anything but LGBTQ friendly, but they need to update their software to match. How can "people have their own voice on the web and organiz[e] the world's information from [their] personal perspective" if they can't use today's common language to comment on it. If I could choose to not recognize the word and therefore have it no longer be a part of my life, I would, but I can't, and I'd like blogger to recognize homophobic tendenicies, if not openly in our larger society and world, then at least in their spellcheck program.