User:Bau Ur

Bau Ur is the user name of a "resident" of the virtual online environment Second Life.

Bau Ur is rather private about details of real life and has revealed little beyond the fact that zie (he or she) is trained as a botanist and anthropologist, has been a high school science teacher, works as a grant writer, and loses money as an artist.

Bau's Second LIfe profile contains the following statements or essays, somewhat rearranged here for coherence:

Whatever my form, please regard me as genderless, which my mind is -- and our minds are really here, right? Our bodies are elsewhere, our electronic forms are flickering dreams.

Gender is a lens through which we see one another and interpret words and actions. I think it is a poor lens that blurs and distorts at least as often as it focusses and clarifies. I prefer not to be seen through it and I prefer to see others without it too. If you feel you don't really know a person unless you know their gender...what does this say about your attention to the content of their character? And how much you value people as individuals rather than as occupants of roles? MIght be worth thinking about.

English used to have a pronoun "hae" that was not specific to gender. It was lost in medieval times, leaving us with only " he", "she", and " it". Let's recover the loss and enrich the language with modern epicene pronouns. They are perfect for SL. "He or she" is zie. "His or her" is hir. Nice, short, quick to type.

In fantasy as in reality, we shape our own natures. This is never trivial.

Kurt Vonnegut: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend..."

We can practice being many different things in this fantasy world. Worse, better, more heedless, wiser. What fantasy do you mean to become?