May I offer the solution employed by the Addams Family when they couldn’t tell what gender the hand was that rose up from the box with all the answers? “Thing.”
^ Are you serious? Even as a joke, that is one of the more offensive statements on this thread. And there were several.
How old are you, makennacompton? 12?
Romani, I don’t think it is a matter of convenience; obviously it doesn’t cost me anything to take a second to clarify my gender pronoun. To me, there’s just something frankly Orwellian about acting as if gender designation is, as a rule, so fluid that one can’t possibly make rational assumptions about someone’s identity from widely recognized cues like name, manner of dress, etc. Perhaps someday, culture will develop in such a way that it is necessary to default to a presumption of ignorance when it comes to gender. Until then, asking seems intellectually dishonest to me.
The old lady who works behind the counter at my favorite sandwich shop just addresses everyone gender-neutrally with, “what you want, baby?”
Old lady? You need some reeducation…
A number of people have mentioned the gender-neutral singular they. I’d just like to add a note that it’s not even new to the English language—I mean, it appears in the Canterbury Tales! It always strikes me as odd when people start debating what to do with the language when it’s a problem that English speakers actually solved centuries ago.
Being asked ‘which pronoun do you prefer’ made my daughter very uncomfortable. She was 16 at the time, doing an overnight visit at a women’s college that, at the time, did not admit those born male but identifying as female. I guess it was not that case that those born female but identifying as male were also excluded.
My daughter really felt it was not okay to say ‘I’m a girl’, that there was pressure to give a different answer, a more complicated answer like that, after exploring all choices, she’s decided she’s female for now but open to new experiences. The truth is that she was 16, had never even thought of being anything other than female, and isn’t interested in exploring other options. Smith came off her list very quickly for this reason. It came off my list because there was no effort made to include the family in any discussions about the school, financial, academic or otherwise. I would not not recommend the school to anyone who is young (very young in my daughter’s case). I really found it to be for much older or at least more mature women.
The gerontologically advanced, female, customer-service agent who works behind the counter at my favorite…
People can’t always tell from visual clues what gender someone is even if it might seem obvious. Our daughter who is a gay cis-female has had trouble with people assuming she was a boy and caller her that (or my DH’s son) since she was little. Her hair is now short but even when she had a long braid (no “mun” or hippy kid gender indeterminate hair) somehow people assumed she was a boy because activities which were often those that society has assigned to boys such as fishing and baseball. She could be looking female yet be assumed and called male when she was doing those things with her dad. Now she has short hair and dresses in a gender neutral leaning towards menswear style (think Ellen) but has an hourglass athletic but curvy body. She is about 5’6" and has feminine facial features as well. Still, in a somewhat fitted shirt with girlparts up top people use masculine pronouns. I don’t know if they are confused then just decide on one or they actually think she isn’t female by appearance but it wouldn’t be a bad thing if they felt comfortable asking or at something neutral to go with. She is exceedingly gracious about it but I imagine it gets old having to alway correct people or just let it go and have them assume you are a boy for the entire interaction.
49: I think that hairstyles are, for adults, a lot of it. When I (male, including stubble that grows pretty quickly after I shave) had long hair I regularly got addressed with feminine terms, and when my wife (who clearly looks like what one would expect a female person to look like) had short hair she regularly got addressed with masculine terms. Now that I have short hair and she has long hair, we never get either of those.
For children it’s a bit different—there’s some research that shows that when there’s any doubt in someone’s mind, Americans tend to default to masculine terms. (This may be changing recently, but it’s too early to tell.)
“She is exceedingly gracious about it but I imagine it gets old having to always correct people or just let it go and have them assume you are a boy for the entire interaction.”
If it were really that much of a problem for her, wouldn’t she then choose to alter her presentation so her female-ness was more evident? I’m not suggesting she should or shouldn’t - that’s up to her - but it’s certainly an option. I mean, no girl who is “mistaken” for a man doesn’t know how to put on some earrings and lip gloss.
Another thought: pronouns are gendered but English is relatively genderless compared to many others: Spanish, French, German, etc. all gender nearly every word. And I thought about a guy I’ve known for years whose husband sometimes like to be referred to as “she” or “her” but it depends on the context; if it’s people they’re comfortable with, then she works for them and more he elsewhere. It seems to work and I’m honestly unsure if the husband would prefer she all the time or not (though I think not).
For me, the more I think about this, there are three ideas being jammed together inappropriately:
- Gender usage in language generally. It's absurd that we default to all he or all she when, for example, someone writes about God: I see no reason to be consistent with gender usage about something that's beyond gender. And when people use examples, like I went to "the car salesman and he said" and it's abstract not an actual he then I a) don't see why the choice of pronoun matters or b) why it has to be consistent he or she as long as it's clear which person the pronoun refers to. In writing as opposed to spoken, it's often possible to avoid the pronoun without getting wordy. But as I hope I've made clear, a main issue is the need we have to be consistent about usage when the real issue is being clear. I'm all for clarity. I absolutely don't see language becoming genderless at the expense of clarity.
- Gender choice usage. You want to be her or him. Fine.
- A new category. This is what bothers me. Sure, some people in the LBGT community may want a special word, but to be told, "Hey, from now on because you're not like 'us', we're going to impose on you this special word that sounds like Martian rather than let you choose to be her or him," is awful. If you want to be a zir, go ahead though I doubt many people will use the word. But if you tell people that they can't use "her" though they've worked hard for years to see themselves as female, then that's repression and it's a fundamental denial of the reality of how a person self-identifies. (Note that I solved the gender issue in that sentence by using the plural. This isn't difficult.)
I think you need to give people the opportunity to be gracious. I think many of these issues arise because people are relying on what they see (hair, clothing etc.) and they have no reason to suspect that they might be insulting someone by speaking as they customarily do. How could they know? Once corrected, then I think someone has the right to be indignant about being addressed in a manner they have already objected to. But I do not agree with putting the onus on others to “ask” every new acquaintance first. Nor do I agree that there should be “indignation” prior to the speaker being informed of the person’s preferences.
So true. My own S had long hair for a while and it was getting to a point where I was urging him to get a haircut. He resisted (“snowboarders have long hair mom.”) But then he was lying in a prep room waiting for the anesthesiologist to come in before wrist surgery from a hockey injury. His head was down on the pillow when she came in and his hair was spilled around him. The anesthesiologist opened the curtain and said “whoops wrong patient I am looking for a boy.” He got a haircut two days later of his own volition.
Here’s my modest proposal: do away with all of these pronouns except for he, him, his, and declare that this is now the non-gendered pronoun in English. It’s kind of like when Captain Janeway is addressed as “sir.” Advantages: it’s already appropriate in English to use these pronouns for singular persons of indeterminate gender. Also, it eliminates the need to introduce new words. Indeed, it simplifies the language. The only disadvantage I can see is that these pronouns are historically masculine. But so is “doctor.”
“Being asked ‘which pronoun do you prefer’ made my daughter very uncomfortable. She was 16 at the time, doing an overnight visit at a women’s college that, at the time, did not admit those born male but identifying as female. I guess it was not that case that those born female but identifying as male were also excluded.”
I am very, very glad that Wellesley explicitly came out and said - we are a women’s college. We will use the language of sisterhood, and refer to our students collectively as “she” and as “women.” We will recognize that there are some females here who are transitioning to live as males, and good for them, and they will be welcome guests on our campus, but we are not going to compromise our identity as a women’s college by defaulting to “they” or “siblinghood” or “students” instead of “she,” “sisterhood” or “women.”
I find it more than a little ironic that there are some people who can only deal with their own identity by asking other people / institutions to compromise theirs.
I, too, am not going to start proactively asking people what gender pronoun they prefer. If they desire another one, they can bring that to my attention and I’ll respect it. And maybe let’s deal with some REAL issues in the world - such as gay or transgender people being violently threatened by ignorant people – rather than with the “oppression” of a well-meaning person calling Mike “he” not knowing that Mike floats between genders because he can’t pick a side.
Frankly, I can at least conceptually understand the concept of trans gender far better than I can understand this amorphous, I just pick and choose what I want on any given day.
Hunt: sometimes I have great difficulty figuring out whether you are being deliberately provocative.
The clue is in my use of the term “modest proposal.”
My son attends a SUNY, so it’s the only current frame of reference I have. He said all of his freshman classes are ~30 students and none of his professors took roll call. They announced the name and section of the class and asked if everyone belonged there (in one class there were 3 or 4 people who apparently didn’t), but they didn’t take a roll call.
Someone mentioned languages that have grammatical gender (e.g., Spanish, German) upthread—in my observation, this issue may be less of a big deal in those languages precisely because gender clearly has no clear relationship to what’s sometimes (problematically, but just to have a word) called “biological” gender. In German, for example, sure, Mann ‘man’ is masculine and Frau ‘woman’ is feminine, but Ofen ‘oven’ and Frühling ‘spring [the season]’ are also masculine gender while Steuer ‘tax’ and Erdbeere ‘strawberry’ are also feminine gender—and Ventil ‘valve’, Geheimnis ‘secret’, and—famously—Mädchen ‘girl’ are neutral gender.
That’s because in grammatical gender languages, gender is simply a grammatical category a noun gets placed in. (Which is where the word gender comes from, anyway—it was built from the Late Latin gens ‘sort, type’.) Old English had the same system, but as Middle English developed, that was replaced by “biological” gender, and that’s given us the mess we’re in now.
One more historical linguistic note: If English hadn’t borrowed the word she, probably from the Vikings, the sound changes that have occurred over the past millennium would have brought us from the Old English hē/hēo/hit ‘he/she/it’ to Modern English he/it ‘he [meaning non-neutral, containing the meanings of both he and she]/it’. I’ve long wondered about how different the conversation would be nowadays had that been the way linguistic history had run.