What they said
This is a wordy one, about words.
Pronouns, in particular. The gendered pronouns that comprise so much of language. He and she: we use them all the time, even though in most cases it ought not matter whether the person in question is a man or a woman. Sure it’s useful, plotwise, to know if we’re talking about Romeo or Juliet, but not whether Romeo is male or female.
Unless of course, it is?
In Romeo and Juliet’s time (late 16th century) the cultural gap between men and women was far greater than it is today. That little he communicated a lot about what this person, Romeo, was able to do in the world. For readers (or rather, theatre-goers) at the time, the use of he and she would have matched how they saw the (very gender-segregated) world.
The same could be said of the use of man to denote “any person”, which is still common but must less common today (at least, in English; in Danish, man is still the pronoun used for the English one, and it’s not just the queen that uses it).
The man who writes or reads man doesn’t seem to think about it. Women readers back in the day might not have thought about it either, because they too lived in a world where men were people and women were others.
But when I read something like…
If man no longer finds any meaning in his life, it makes no difference whether he wastes away under a communist or a capitalist regime. Only if he can use his freedom to create something meaningful is it relevant that he should be free.
— C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols
… despite agreeing with the point, I automatically assume that it doesn’t really concern me because it doesn’t use the pronoun people use for me.
The use of man (at least in this example) is not only a conceited attempt to speak on behalf of all people, it also presents only half of all people as people. It would have been more honest of Carl to replace man/he with I, so readers could choose for themselves whether or not to relate. But he was merely a man of his time, doing what man does.
Just as I am a gender-frustrated woman-thing of my time, who grew up reading about the adventures of brilliant boys and men, unable to overlook the fact that none of them were girls or women.
I have always longed for genderless storytelling. Both in books and in everyday life.
And I may be in luck.
Because it does seem that gender is undergoing quite a speedy transition of late. As if we’ve been slowly edging through history, towards a point where we no longer need to distinguish so much between men and women. And our language, the language people (especially young people, a.k.a. the future) want to use about themselves and each other, is now changing to reflect that.
Consider the following sentences:
She is eating a packet of crisps.
His trousers were made of gold.
Does a 21st century-reader really need to know whether the crisp-eater or the gold-trouser-wearer is a woman or a man?
Sure, he and she can help to differentiate between people in situations where there are only a man and women present…
She accidentally spilled some of the crisps she was eating on his gold trousers so he shouted at her.
… but as soon as you’re writing about any other combination of people and/or genders, it becomes nonsense:
She accidentally spilled some of the crisps she was eating on her gold trousers so she shouted at her.
This might also be why, once upon a time, we invented names.
Before humans began to identify as individuals, perhaps names weren’t as important. We were just a bunch of indistinguishable hes and shes, theys and wes (aka tribes), all kind of doing the same stuff (mating, birthing, fighting over resources, etc.), kind of like how we describe (wild) animals today. Perhaps the pronouns came first, then the names?
Either way, at some point in human (pre)history, we must have been so focussed on differences in sex and/or gender, that it made sense for men and women to have different pronouns.
That is, in English.
Plenty of other languages, including Finnish, Estonian and (spoken) Chinese, contain no he or she, only hän, tema/ta and tā. And, as I mentioned in It’s a girl!, Sweden have made several attempts to introduce the gender neutral hen.
Enter, they.
Initially, they annoys me. I love the gender-neutralness of it, but I can’t figure out how we’re going to differentiate between singular and plural they, when we no longer have the singular he and she.
They accidentally spilled some of the crisps they were eating on their gold trousers so they shouted at them.
How will we know if it’s a group of people or a singular person spilling the crisps and doing the shouting?
Sure, we could use (gender neutral) names to make things clearer, but what about when we don’t know the name(s) of the person/people involved?
We need a new pronoun, I think!
Something like this?
3rd person, singular, femaleshe / her / her / hers / herself3rd person, singular, malehe / him / his / his / himself
3rd person, singular
se / sem / ser / sers / semself
Turns out I’m not the first one to suggest this. You might have heard of zie, sie, ey, ve, tey and e, but probably not, because these pronouns haven’t exactly made it into mainstream parlance. Perhaps because it is simply too difficult to replace such a fundamental part of a language with something entirely new. Easier to use an existing pronoun.
If she and he are ever going to be fully replaced, they’re probably going to become they. Øv!
But it’s not such a big deal In fact, this kind of pronoun merging has happened before in English. Once upon a time, we used you to address a group of people and thou for a singular person. However, you was also the pronoun used to address someone superior (a teacher, a boss or someone above you in status), like the French vous. The reason that thou slowly fizzled out of the language was because class became more fluid around that time (17th century). This made it harder to guess another person’s class, so people started using the formal you more often, for fear of offending someone with a casual thou.
At the time of the shift, some people (probably writers) were annoyed about this for the same reasons they annoys me. “How will we specify whether we are talking to a plural you or a singular thou?!” they must have cried.
If you (ho ho) speak another language than English, you can probably relate to this.
Evidently, the distinction wasn’t important enough to stick around. And, someday, we might also get to the point where he and she simply aren’t important factors anymore either.
Because even in those few instances where biological sex is important, it would be made obvious by the context:
They are pregnant!
They have been diagnosed with testicular cancer.
Which is all well and good and perhaps it’ll happen, in our lifetimes or in the ones after (it took around a century for you to replace thou, and some people in Northern England still use thou), perhaps not. But, you might be thinking, why bother?
Why make all this effort to replace he and she with something else?
Does it really matter?
It might. It also might not.
I think it’s worth bothering with they, not because I’m on a mission to deny biological sex, but because I’m curious what would happen if humans were able to grow up in a genderless world. However, until we eliminate the baggage of gender—which is so tightly woven into language—we’ll never know if girls prefer pink and boys prefer guns because of biology, or because culture has taught them to prefer those things.
In much the same way I think that Tinder (and similar) ought to be gender neutral. When made a Tinder account in 2015, I could choose to be a man or a woman, interested in men, women or both. The default gender was to be one or the other; the default sexuality was to be straight.
And I’m not saying I’m not that, but let’s say I’d grown up as a they, having never heard of straight or gay or any of the others and all I knew was that it was equally likely and possible to be sexually attracted to absolutely anyone? The apps would be genderless and pansexual. And we’d find out how fluid our genders and sexualities really are.
If they are.
It’s equally possible that we’d end up exactly where we started, with a dominant cisgender, hetrosexual demographic, because (maybe) biology. My point is that if we don’t attempt to remove some of culture, we’ll never know.
Optional toppings
⛄️ The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by Ursula Le Guin in which there are no such things as men and women, but all humans enter “kemmer” once a month, where the biological sex a person’s body takes is dependent on the other humans present—for example, if you were in kemmer with someone who was feeling particularly penetrative at the time, your genitals would become female and theirs male, which also means that anyone can get pregnant, hurrah!
📼 Cassetteboy vs. David Attenborough is an audio mashup of things David Attenborough has said about (male and female) animals, about people
🧲 Language around gender and identity evolves (and always has), a TED talk by Archie Crowley, gives some perspective to how pronouns have evolved over time, including the great shift from thou to you
👾 Is she biased? Are you? presents some interesting (though hardly surprising) results of how Google Translate translates the Finnish hän to the English she or he
🤓 @susie_dent on Twitter
Congratulations if thou made it this far through all the words!
— H. E.