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The fact that meaning is created, assigned, and enforced through language has been well documented in modern academic writing, such as in Foucault's explanations of how scientific investigation and discussion (‘discourses’) of human nature and cultural activity emerge from societal agents engaged in processes of social control (‘power’). A generation of linguistic archæologists of various disciplines have begun the work of deconstructing the formation of language itself, aided and abetted by the second wave feminist movement, which in the early 1970's began the lobby against such sexist terminology as policeman and charwoman. Attempts to address gender inequity in the English language actually began much earlier, however, with the debate about the third person singular pronoun. Since at least 1668, and probably since Middle English evolved into non-gendered modern English and the word a lost this meaning,1 neologists have been suggesting gender-neutral pronouns, with little success.2 The lack of gender-neutral singular pronouns has for hundreds of years forced speakers of English to assign a gender to every person whom they wish to speak about, and is largely responsible for enforcing the artificial dichotomy which labels humans as ‘women’ or ‘men’. Worse, some grammarians have taught that the male pronoun is ‘inclusive’ and can be used to mean `he and/or she', which furthers the notion of women as de Beauvoir's second sex.
The insistence of classical grammarians on qualifying every reference to a person with a description of the presumed state of their genitalia is justified by the belief that women are in some sense less than men and not quite human. It is acceptable to refer to a particular member of a group comprised a hundred women and one man with the pronoun ‘he’, and only when their are no men to talk about may we use the feminine. Only when we are discussing a group comprised overwhelmingly of women, such as, say, the set of all people who have ever expressed milk from their breasts, may the speaker use a feminine pronoun. This indicates to the listener that one man is more worth mentioning than one hundred women. (It would be instructive to ask a patriarchal grammarian precisely how many women are required to be in a group which contains a sole male before the feminine pronoun can be used, and therefore obtain an index of their valuation of a woman's worth relative to a man's.) And of course, even if we allow the division humanity on the basis of biology, there is no reason to classify human genitalia simply dichotomously. According to the Intersex Society of North America, 1.7% of births are significantly intersexed to some degree and are neither male nor female in the usual sense of the word (although it is standard North American medical practice to surgically make such babies male or female in infanthood).3 It is language which has constructed this false dichotomy and thus implicitly proscribed a whole range of gender determined behaviour.
The evidence for sexism in language is difficult to quantify. Most studies have been circumstantial and anecdotal, but in the absence of the emergence of any arguments to the contrary, it can be assumed that “there is sexism in language, it does enhance the position of males, and males have had control over the production of cultural forms”.4 Until the late eighteenth century, virtually all commentators began accounts of the history of language with biblical fables of the garden of Eden and the building of the tower of Babel.5 Scholars often claimed that English, or Celtic, or some other contemporary tongue was the language spoken in Eden, and since it was handed down by God — who is described as being without gender but is always referred to as ‘he’ — it must have divine meaning, and thus was allowed to proscribe attitudes. One writer went so far as to claim that different letters referred to human anatomy and thus conferred gender on words — g indicated the testicles, f the erect penis, and so on.6 The etymology these scholars invented reinforced the practice of defining women solely in terms of and with respect to men, just as the biblical claim that Eve was “called ‘woman’, for she was taken out of man”7 assumes that the Hebrew for ‘woman’ is derived from the Hebrew word ‘man’ plus a feminine suffix, when in fact the words are now thought to have come from distinct and unrelated roots.8
The sexism inherent in language is particularly noticeable in the case of inanimate objects which are personified and assigned a gender. In 1795, the grammarian L. Murray wrote that it was proper to assign the masculine gender to nouns which are “conspicuous for the attributes of imparting or communicating, and which are by nature strong and efficacious”, and the feminine to those which refer to “containing or bringing forth, or which are peculiarly beautiful or amiable”.9 This personification is less common in contemporary English, and gender is often only assigned when the speaker is anthropomorphizing the object in question. Disasters are frequently personified as female. When the National Weather Service began to use male as well as female names to label hurricanes in 1979, weather reporters promptly began to refer to storms as ‘it’, and NOW reported that they no longer said that hurricanes “flirt[ed] with the Florida coast” and had tempers that “teased and threatened”.10
Contemporary grammarians claim that the pronouns he, his, and him are may refer to a hypothetical person of either sex. This is usually justified by claiming that this is “an ancient rule of English grammar long and faithfully followed by educated speakers and writers”, and that “everybody knows he includes she in generalizations”.11 Even ignoring the contradiction between these two (the first implies the use of he as a generic pronoun distinguishes the educated from the uneducated, and the second claims that even the uneducated use he as a generic), these claims are both demonstrably false.
First, although comprehensive formal grammars of modern English have been written since the sixteenth century, the claim that he included she was not encoded in any of these until the eighteenth century, and it was not widely taught until the nineteenth. It seems to have been invented by grammarians who objected to the use of they and their as singular pronouns. Admittedly, this can become awkward,12 although if an author is willing to reword a sentence instead of just blinding replacing he with they, many of these difficulties can be avoided. This approach has been used by authors throughout the history of modern English, including George Bernard Shaw, Jane Austen, and William Shakespeare, and despite being disallowed in elementary schools for two hundred years, is still commonly heard in speech. It is hard to think of any other characteristics necessary to make a usage considered genuine in English.
Secondly, despite the aforementioned efforts to make he serve as a generic pronoun, it is not true that native speakers of English interpret it as not conveying gender. For example, when Wendy Martyna asked groups of men and women to supply a pronoun for a sentence which was male- or female-related or neutral, she found that only 56% of women studied used he in a neutral situation, as compared to 74% of men. Tellingly, the women reported that they used he because they had been taught that it could be used as a gender-neutral pronoun, but the usually men said that they had simply put themselves into the hypothetical situation and used the male pronoun accordingly.13 She also found that even when he was intended as generic, it was not perceived that way by up to 40% of her subjects, as opposed to the truly generic he or she or they.14 So, people often do not use he to mean he or she, and they often do not hear he or she when people do say he.
Such authors as Miller & Swift have managed to write comprehensive grammar handbooks which explain how to avoid all traces of this problem. They advocate the use of they and their in most cases, but suggest using he or she and person, among other terms, where appropriate. Their pragmatic books show the well-meaning editor or author how to write perfectly acceptable English without reinforcing gender dichotomies. However, while a good starting point, this attitude does not so much deal with the underlying difficulties as avoid them.
There are situations in which none of the previously mentioned alternatives to using he as if it were a gender-neutral pronoun will do. The problem is that none of them actually create a gender-neutral pronoun, but there are situations which require one. It is perfectly correct to refer to a hypothetical member of a group of people with they or their, but what if I wish to write a novel without describing the gonads of my protagonist? Emma Bull's approach in her excellent SF novel Bone Dance was to tell us about her hero Sparrow in the first person, but this option is not always available. What pronoun would I use if I wanted to talk about SF author Raphael Carter, who labels eirself an androgyne and eschews both he and she?
I am not the first English speaker to notice this lack of a suitable gender-neutral pronoun. The earliest neologisms coined to correct this were part of new languages, which have invented by various philosophers from 1668 up to the present. Almost all of these allow gender-neutral references to one degree or another.15 In the nineteenth century, the lack of a gender-neutral pronoun became a popular topic of discussion in literary magazines. The most popular suggestion was coined in 1884 by American lawyer and hymn-writer Charles Converse. He suggested thon (an abbreviation of the one), which was listed in several standard dictionaries between 1898 and 1964, but never gained widespread used.16 There have been many other suggestions: between Baron and the Gender Neutral Pronoun FAQ, there are almost two hundred distinct sets of pronouns listed, and many of these have been proposed independently by different people at different times.
Baron's opinion of the attempts at a gender-neutral pronoun are best summarized by the fact that he discusses them in a chapter title “The Word That Failed”. Agreeing with feminist neologist Mary Daly's statement that “It is a mistake to fixate on the third person singular”17, he points out that time and again attempts to create such a pronoun have failed. Some neologists have suggested convening panels of linguists to select the best possible epicene pronoun, and then passing laws to ensure that the word is “written into prescriptive grammars, taught in our schools, and followed in our publishing systems so as to bring about a permanent change in the language”, but Baron understandably believes that new words cannot simply be “legislated into existence”.18 As a historian of grammar, he suggests that the best way to challenge the generic masculine is present “a set of alternatives already present in the language rather than an innovation which people must be coaxed or forced to used”.19 He suggests using the singular they, an occasional he or she, and otherwise rephrasing sentences to eliminate the need for a sex-indefinite pronoun.
But as I indicated earlier, there are people for whom rephrasing sentences is insufficient. There are already large communities on the internet who use neologisms as a daily matter of course. In many online text-based role-playing universes called MUDs or MOOs, people can choose to represent themselves using any of the terms he, she, it, he/she, they, or ey. This last, the default option, is one of a set of neologisms that has become popular in several places on the internet. It was popularized by the American mathematician Michael Spivak,20 who used them in his 1985 book The Joy of TEX. He writes:
Since TEX is a rather revolutionary approach to typesetting, I decided that a rather revolutionary approach to non-SEXist terminology would be appropriate in this manual… Just as ‘I’ is the first person singular pronoun, regardless of gender, so ‘E’ will be used in this book as the third person singular pronoun for both genders. Thus, ‘E’ is the singular of ‘they’. Accordingly, ‘Eir’ (pronounced to rhyme with ‘their’) will be the possessive, and ‘Em’ (rhyming with ‘them’) will stand for either ‘him’ or ‘her’.
Today, Spivak's pronouns are usually not capitalized, and the personal pronoun is often written ey to avoid it being inadvertently pronounced to rhyme with he. (See the Appendix for an example of these pronouns in prose.) Although they are just one of a number of possible neologisms, they seem to be slowly gaining acceptance in places where no conventional pronoun dares to tread.
A new pronoun, although it may not be widely used, shows the way to radical language and thus gender reform. The conservative suggestions of other scholars are excellent advice, but it is not enough to stop there. They allow us to not reinforce gender dichotomies in language, but only a neologism can truly remove them. Both are necessary, since it is not very useful to begin to use a new word when almost nobody you speak with will understand your meaning. On the other hand, it is sometimes necessary to actually break down barriers and give people the freedom to define their behaviour in ways unrelated to their genitalia. Clearly our current language, as it is commonly used, is restrictive and sexist. This will never change until people realize that it must be altered to describe all of humanity, and not merely mankind.
Using they or their as singular pronouns is perfectly fine when referring to a hypothetical person who will only be referred to a few times, but it does not suffice when we wish to refer to a specific person repeatedly, say, over the course of a novel or long conversation.
The following is an example of a paragraph in which it is awkward to replace he with they. It's taken from the Gender Neutral Pronoun FAQ (see References). First, the conventional version:
A man was down at the river bank withdrawing some polliwogs for his froggery, when he heard branches snapping nearby, and saw a creature creeping towards him from out of the forest. Its eyes had a gleam in them that made him think of all the fierceness of a salad, its nose resembled asparagus, its skin was white and bumpy like cauliflower. He fell backward in terror, and it stopped, a monstrous menacing mound of mobile vegetables. More crashings were heard from the forest, and two more creatures appeared above him on either side.
This is the plural-pronouns-as-singular version. He is replaced with they, him with them, his with their and theirs (for possessive adjective and pronoun), and himself with themselves.
A person was down at the river bank withdrawing some polliwogs for their froggery, when they heard branches snapping nearby, and saw a creature creeping towards them from out of the forest. Its eyes had a gleam in them that made them think of all the fierceness of a salad, its nose resembled asparagus, its skin was white and bumpy like cauliflower. They fell backward in terror, and it stopped, a monstrous menacing mound of mobile vegetables. More crashings were heard from the forest, and two more creatures appeared above them on either side.
This scans rather awkwardly in several places. The entire thing could be rewritten, but this would lose much of the flavour of the original. Using one or it for he has similar difficulties. Now, consider a version using Spivak's pronouns:
A person was down at the river bank withdrawing some polliwogs for eir froggery, when ey heard branches snapping nearby, and saw a creature creeping towards em from out of the forest. Its eyes had a gleam in them that made em think of all the fierceness of a salad, its nose resembled asparagus, its skin was white and bumpy like cauliflower. Ey fell backward in terror, and it stopped, a monstrous menacing mound of mobile vegetables. More crashings were heard from the forest, and two more creatures appeared above em on either side.
The unfamiliar words make this slow to read, but it flows much more smoothly than the they/their example.
Baron, Dennis. Grammar and gender, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The metaethics of radical feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.
`ISNA Frequently Asked Questions'. Intersex Society of North America. <http://www.isna.org/faq.htm>, Sep. 30 1999.
Martyna, Wendy. “The Psychology of the Generic Masculine” in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet et al. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980.
Miller, Casey and Kate Swift. The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing. New York: Lippincott and Crowell, 1980.
Spender, Dale. Man-Made Language. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Spivak, Michael. The Joy of TeX: A gourmet guide to typesetting technical text by computer. Providence: American Mathematical Society, 1985.
Williams, John. `Gender-Neutral Pronoun Frequently Asked Questions'.
<http://www.lumina.net/gnp/>, May 30 1999.