Pronouns

Let’s say that I’ve just seen the American actor Ezra Miller fleeing a crime scene. I don’t know that the person I’ve seen fleeing the scene is Ezra Miller; all I’ve seen is a human in jeans and a baseball cap running off in a certain direction. The police interview me about what I’ve witnessed. Ezra Miller uses they/them pronouns, but I don’t know that the person in question is Ezra Miller until after the interview. If I say They went that way, the police officer will wonder, justifiably, whether more than one person was involved. There is some ambiguity there. If I say He went that way or She went that way, I will have unwittingly and unintentionally misgendered Ezra Miller. I do not want to do this, even if, hypothetically, they have committed a crime.

Most other languages in the world do not have this problem. Most human languages have one third-person singular pronoun for referring to people, a pronoun that can be translated into English using ‘he’ or ‘she’ and sometimes also ‘it’ (or ‘they’). This is true of many of the languages I have worked on or studied:

Mandarin Chinese (spoken): tā
Malay/Indonesian: dia
Old Sundanese: siya
Persian: ⁧او⁩ (u)
Quechua: pay
Guarani: ha’e
Tupi or Tupinambá: a’e

There is no possibility of casually or intentionally misgendering someone in these languages; these words are not gendered at all, and the word for ‘he’ is the same as the word for ‘she’. At the same time, most of these languages do not usually conflate the third-person singular (‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’) with third-person plural (‘they’) pronouns. Chinese has tāmen ‘they’; Indonesian has mereka ‘they’; Quechua has paykuna ‘they’. These languages — and most of the human languages on the planet Earth — have separate non-gendered third-person singular and third-person plural pronouns.

This is the gold standard of gender-neutral language. You don’t need to know anything about someone and you can refer to them in the third-person without misgendering them — without even referring to their gender in any way. There’s also no possibility of mixing up plural and singular referents. It’s a perfect system.

The discourse surrounding gender and transgender people in English-speaking contexts has overwhelmingly involved discussion — if screaming fits of conservative rage count as ‘discussion’ — of the nature and use of pronouns. The idea of ‘pronouns’ has become a metonym of gender, to such an extent that transphobic loonies claim not to use ‘pronouns’ at all or that their pronouns are U, S, and A. This is because English doesn’t have a lot of remaining gendered lexis left. ‘Actress’ is still used at the Oscars, but most of the people nominated for the Best Actress award will refer to themselves as actors and not actresses. ‘Waiter’ and ‘waitress’ are still used, but they’ve been replaced to a large extent by the gender-neutral ‘server’. The only intractably gendered language remaining in English, the only common words that have no common gender-neutral equivalents, are the third-person singular pronouns for people: he, him, his; she, her, hers. That’s it.

Other languages, particularly European ones, have a harder time of it. Professions in Portuguese are always gendered; you are either a professor ‘(male) teacher’ or a professora ‘female teacher’. The male gender is unmarked, so a mixed-gender group of teachers would be referred to as professores ‘(male) teachers’. Portuguese has both gendered third-person singular pronouns (ele ‘he’, ela ‘she’) and gendered third-person plural pronouns (eles ‘they (male)’ and elas ‘they (female)’). Even singular ‘they’ would be gendered in Portuguese. French and German and other languages have similar issues. How do you even begin to de-gender languages like that? I don’t know, but I’m sure there are ways.

English only has to worry about ‘he’ and ‘she’ (and a few other words without gender-neutral equivalents like ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’, which aren’t really used in my variety of English anyway). And this is a good thing because, drum roll, pronouns aren’t very important words at all. Pronouns are placeholders. That’s all they do: they take the places of other nouns to avoid repetition.

Some languages even avoid using pronouns whenever possible. In Indonesian it’s quite normal to use a person’s name instead of a pronoun, even for ‘I/me’ (‘Alex wants water’, Alex/I might say). Portuguese is a ‘pro-drop’ language, meaning that pronouns are often dropped, with verb conjugation taking up the slack. You don’t need to say Ele era ‘he was’; you can just say Era ‘he/she/it was’. That’s sufficient in context — and it means that many Portuguese utterances are non-gendered in spite of the apparently pervasive gendering of the language. You can do this to a limited extent in English as well. In my Ezra Miller example, I could point in a certain direction and say to the police officer Went that way.

Pronouns probably shouldn’t be used to express identity because they just aren’t that important. Most of the time, when a third-person pronoun is used, the person using it doesn’t know or need to know very much about the person being referred to. Modern society is complex and people are everywhere. We often want to talk about people who aren’t present without our knowing much about them. If we want to avoid the possibility of misgendering our fellow humans then we need to adopt a single third-person singular pronoun set for people and animals of any and all genders. Which is to say, we need to do what most languages on Earth do.

Tailor-made neopronouns probably aren’t a good solution. Ze/hir would be fine, to my mind, if everyone adopted those terms to refer to absolutely everyone else in all cases — if these pronouns replaced he/him and she/her entirely. As it stands, you’ll usually encounter these pronouns in reference to lone individuals: My pronouns are ze/hir. I strongly approve of the spirit there, but this is trickier in practical terms. In order to refer to that person properly, one has to know who that person is, what a neopronoun is, and which neopronoun they prefer, and that represents a much greater investment of time and attention and a much higher cognitive load than just looking at someone’s hair or clothing or whatever and figuring out whether ‘he’ or ‘she’ is more appropriate to refer to the person who just jumped the queue at Disneyland. Newly invented pronouns are quite common in the languages of the world — the Indonesian formal ‘you’ pronoun, Anda, was invented in the twentieth century and is now a core part of the standard language, at least as it is taught to foreigners like me — and they could be useful here, but I think it’s either go big or go home. No half measures. We’ve got to replace he and she.

I have three proposals for solutions to the problem of gendered pronouns in English.

1.) We adopt a neopronoun set to refer to all people (and animals) everywhere. Ze/zir or e/em now refer to all living beings. Alex West is a teacher. Ze lives in Portugal with zir wife.

2.) We use pre-existing third-person singular pronouns to refer to all people and animals — but in a single jumbled gender-neutral set, like she / him / his / hers. Alex West is a teacher. She lives in Portugal with his wife. (I prefer this one because it’s inherently gender-bending and won’t offend the spell check in Microsoft Word.)

3.) We could give a new meaning to the phrase uses x/y pronouns. Instead of referring to a person’s third-person singular pronoun preference, it now means uses x/y pronouns in reference to everyone else. So you could say This magazine uses she/her pronouns, and in the magazine every single person or animal is referred to as she and her. Or: I use he/him pronouns = everyone is a he now. Michael Fassbender’s a he. Dolly Parton’s a he. Lassie’s a he. Hes everywhere.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on pronouns. I really don’t want to misgender anyone, but I think we can do a lot better than tailor-made individually specific I use they/them pronouns formulations. All we need to do is to follow the path marked by the majority of languages on this planet and adopt a single set of gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns. We can leave the remainder behind — as we already have with thou, thee, and thy.