– In which Dorn muses on gender lexico-politics.
One of my niblings wrote not too long ago that the word of the year was the singular “they”. They didn’t say if this was their own nomination, or if they were reporting on the designation by Merriam-Webster of “they”, used in the singular, gender-neutral sense, as its 2019 Word of the Year.
The American Dialect Society, which holds an annual popular vote for its Word of the Year, beat Merriam-Webster by several years, designating “they” as their Word of the Year in 2015 (link). According to the American Dialect society, singular “they” has been a part of the English language for hundreds of years:
This newer usage of “they”, to designate a person who identifies their gender as non-binary is, of course, why the word is currently famous. Prieviously, use of the singular “they” was mainly for when the gender of the person to which the pronoun referred was unknown or irrelevant.
A couple of decades ago I was writing regulations for EPA during a campaign to reduce the amount of bureaucrat-ese used in official writing intended for the public (I know, good luck with that). They had an official name for the plain English that was supposed to replace the bureaucrat-ese: “Plain English”. (Yes, it was treated as if it was capitalized, and a new invention of government management. Bureaucrats work that way.)
Singular “they” didn’t make the cut. Plain English said to replace “he/she” (the popular bureaucrat-ese gender neutral singular pronoun at the time) with the slightly longer but more conversational “he or she”, as in, “if an employee wishes, he or she may…”.
I can remember even further back in my career, when linguistically and politically it was acceptable, even mandatory, to use the pronoun “he” as the singular gender-nonspecific pronoun. The official reason was that the tacit “or she” was easily understood. The unofficial reason, which I never heard voiced but I’m sure was widespread, was that these business communications were probably going to be read almost entirely by men anyway, so the “she” was unnecessary.
Back then, such assumptions about the gender of anyone involved in certain lines of work were so universal that they weren’t even recognized as assumptions—that was just the way the world was. Back then, not just pronouns, but the nouns themselves that described professions, were highly genderized: seamstress, stewardess, actress, governess, empress, professoressa, influenceress.
And this wasn’t just a linguistic reality—jobs themselves, and the expected qualifications and characteristics of job candidates, each had a default gender. I am old enough to remember when job vacancy announcements were segregated by sex. “Male” jobs required competence and ambition, “female” jobs called for attractiveness and congeniality.
The New Republic had a recent thought piece that described some of the more egregious sexist liberties taken with job announcements in the past: Help wanted—female. My sister Lona provided her perspective on gender-based job expectations in a blog post that is more efficient and eloquent than I can match.
This type of workplace discrimination continues today. After all, many of today’s business and government decision makers are as old as I am, and grew up with the same influences. But at least most people now know that this type of pigeonholing people into certain occupations based on their gender is wrong (or if not that, at least they know that it is CONSIDERED wrong, and if they do it, they have to hide their intentions).
Today’s battleground involves attempts to pigeonhole people’s social, interpersonal, or sexual tastes and behaviors based on their biological gender. While not all of society has recognized the errors of doing this, I’m encouraged that at least there is now an open public debate as to whether this kind of pigeonholing is acceptable. The public prominence of the singular “they” is evidence of this.
Will tolerance of personal behavior choices outside of a gender-based norm become generally accepted, as tolerance of choice of career has? Time will tell, and maybe before that, science fiction will.
Science fiction is well known to push forward the boundaries of the status quo. The best science fiction imagines a situation, sometimes separated from our own by time or vast distances of space, where different rules of reality (physical, technological, biological, or social) apply, and explores the personal and societal responses to that reality by human or human-like characters.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1969 classic sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness explored these questions beautifully. The story imagines a world like ours in many ways, but where the inhabitants had no fixed gender, but flowed regularly between male and female personas. The protagonist of the book was a human male who had come to the planet as an envoy, and the story concerns his struggles to understand the inhabitants. His attitudes were much like those of American males in 1969; for example, he spoke and thought of these gender-fluid people as all “he”s.
At the time the book was written, the hero might have been intended to reflect the reading audience in general. Today, though, he comes off as sexist, even misogynistic. Still, it’s a good, thought-provoking book, providing even more things to think about now that it has aged 50 years.
I just finished a space opera trilogy by Ann Leckie that starts with Ancillary Justice (2013). It had a completely different treatment of the issue of gender identification: in this imagined universe, a person’s gender has become so irrelevant to their work, social, or sexual expectations that gender-specific pronouns have dropped completely from the language.
The author uses “she” as the gender-neutral pronoun for all the characters. They still fall in love, have sex, and engage in sexual politics, but you don’t know if they are straight, gay, gender-fluid, or if binary, what sex they are.
I spent a lot of time trying to guess the genders of the characters, until I accepted that it wasn’t relevant to the narrative, just as it wasn’t relevant in the universe of the story itself. It’s a stimulating concept to think about, even though it had very little to do with the plot. Good books!
I tried to mimic the conceit in Ancillary Justice by not giving the name of the nibling who started the conversation about gender pronouns at the beginning of the post, or any clues to their gender. Did you notice? Did knowing, guessing, or not knowing their gender indentification make any difference to you in how you read the post? There you go!
Thanks,
Dorn
1/4/2020