Gender identification, the social construction of masculinity and femininity. In traditional societies, your gender would shape your work role in life and was not limited to male and female only, but included, and still includes, hijra (South Asia), khanith (Oman), fa'afafine (Polynesia), and kathoey (Thailand), to name just a few of the hundreds of gender categories found worldwide. In Nepal, Pakistan and India, hijras are a recognized third gender. Thailand is considering doing the same for kathoey. In the West, your role in society is less tied to your gender identification, which allows to people to use hundreds of creative expressions to identify their gender role and sexual orientation. Or to not identify (see below). Even the toy retailer, Toys "R" Us, has gone gender neutral online, doing away with categories labeled 'boys' and 'girls.'
BBC News has an interesting article looking into the linguistic challenges to gender and sexual non-identification. The full article is pasted below or you can read the original by clicking Beyond 'he' and 'she': The rise of non-binary pronouns.
From BBC News:
BBC News has an interesting article looking into the linguistic challenges to gender and sexual non-identification. The full article is pasted below or you can read the original by clicking Beyond 'he' and 'she': The rise of non-binary pronouns.
From BBC News:
In the English
language, the word "he" is used to refer to males and "she"
to refer to females. But some people identify as neither gender, or both -
which is why an increasing number of US universities are making it easier for
people to choose to be referred to by other pronouns.
Kit Wilson's
introduction when meeting other people is: "Hi, I'm Kit. I use they/them
pronouns." That means that when people refer to Kit in conversation, the
first-year student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would prefer them
to use "they" rather than "she" or "he".
As a child, Wilson
never felt entirely female or entirely male. They figured they were a
"tomboy" until the age of 16, but later began to identify as
"genderqueer".
"Neither end of
the [male/female] spectrum is a suitable way of expressing the gender I
am," Wilson says. "Sometimes I feel 'feminine' and 'masculine' at the
same time, and other times I reject the two terms entirely."
Earlier this year,
Wilson asked friends to call them "Kit," instead of the name they
(Wilson) had grown up with, and to use the pronoun "they" when talking
about them.
Glossary
Transgender:
Applies to a person whose gender is different from their "assigned"
sex at birth
Cisgender:
Applies to someone whose gender matches their "assigned" sex at birth
(ie someone who is not transgender)
Non-binary:
Applies to a person who does not identify as "male" or
"female"
Genderqueer:
Similar to "non-binary" - some people regard "queer" as
offensive, others embrace it
Genderfluid:
Applies to a person whose gender identity changes over time
See also: A guide to transgender terms
Sharing one's
pronouns and asking for others' pronouns when making introductions is a growing
trend in US colleges. For example, when new students attended orientation
sessions at American University in Washington DC a few months ago, they were
asked to introduce themselves with their name, hometown, and preferred gender
pronoun (sometimes abbreviated to PGP).
"We ask everyone
at orientation to state their pronouns," says Sara Bendoraitis, of the
university's Center for Diversity and Inclusion, "so that we are learning
more about each other rather than assuming."
A handful of
universities go further and allow students to register their preferred pronouns
in the university computer systems - and also a preferred name. At the University of Vermont, which has
led this movement, students can choose from "he," "she,"
"they," and "ze," as well as "name only" -
meaning they don't want to be referred to by any third-person pronoun, only their
name.
"It maximises
the student's ability to control their identity," says Keith Williams, the
university's registrar, who helped to launch the updated student information
system in 2009. Most people stick to the default option, "none", which
means they are not registering a pronoun - presumably because they are content
to let people decide whether they are a "he" or a "she".
Out of about 13,000
students currently enrolled, some 3,200 have entered preferred names in the
system, and about half of them have specified preferred pronouns, Williams
says. He adds that this doesn't necessarily mean they are transgender - they
could be non-transgender students specifying "he" and "she".
At Harvard University, which followed Vermont's example at the beginning of
this academic year, about half of the approximately 10,000 students registered
in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have specified preferred pronouns, and
slightly more than 1% of those - about 50 out of 5,000 - chose pronouns other
than "she" or "he", according to registrar Mike Burke.
At most other US
universities the growing use of "non-binary" pronouns remains less
formalised but is often encouraged in various ways. Signs and badges found
throughout campuses display slogans such as Pronouns Matter or Ask Me About My
Pronouns. Professors may be invited to training sessions at the start of each
year and are sometimes urged to include their pronouns in their email
signature, for example, "John Smith (he/him/his)".
A card developed by
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee LGBT Resource Center in 2011 has been
widely reproduced and distributed across the US.
One side of the card
lists eight pronouns, from "ey" to "zie," and illustrates
how they change depending on their role in a sentence. Instead of
"he/she," "him/her," "his/her,"
"his/hers," and "himself/herself" it would be:
- "ey," "em," "eir," "eirs," and "eirself", or
- "zie," "zim," "zir," "zirs," and "zirself"
The other side of the
card has fill-in-the-blank sentences to give people an opportunity to practise
using the unfamiliar pronouns.
"The intention
behind it was to ensure that the campus was fostering an inclusive
environment," says Jennifer Murray, the director of the resource center.
All the pronouns on
the card were already in use, Murray says, either among students or members of
Milwaukee's LGBT community. Although it might have been simpler to suggest just
one non-binary pronoun, she says the staff of the resource center didn't want
to "limit folks' choices".
The alternatives to
"he" and "she" are myriad. Wikipedia's gender-neutral
pronouns page lists 14 "non-traditional pronouns" in English, though
three are variants of "ze". Other online resources for the non-binary
community, however, offer
hundreds of options.
Image
copyright Alamy Image caption The First Grammar Book for Children (1900)
Some terms come from
foreign languages - such as the German-inspired "sie" - others from
fiction. For example, "ze" and "per" are the pronouns of a
future utopia Marge Piercy describes in her feminist sci-fi novel Woman on the
Edge of Time (1976). Some are drawn from the plant or animal worlds, or refer
to mythical beings with which the individual may identify.
It's is not the first
time people have tried to coin new pronouns. Writers have long been frustrated
by the lack of a neat way to refer to someone of unknown gender - "he or
she" is clunky, and if you use it several times in quick succession,
"your writing ends up looking like an explosion in a pedants'
factory", as Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan once put it.
A linguist at the
University of Illinois, Dennis Baron, has catalogued
dozens of proposed gender-neutral pronouns, many - including
"ip," "nis," and "hiser" - dating back to the
19th Century. Most of these made
little impact, though one - "thon", a contraction of "that
one" - got into two American dictionaries. Overall, though, Baron calls the gender-neutral pronoun an "epic fail"
and reckons that new pronouns such as "ze" may not survive. But both
he and Sally McConnell-Ginet, a Cornell University linguistics professor who
researches the link between gender, sexuality, and language, think the singular
"they" - as used for example by Kit Wilson - has a chance of success.
This use of
"they" annoys some grammarians. While it does feel natural for most
English speakers to say something like "Someone lost their wallet,"
critics argue that "they" should really only be used to refer to
plural nouns. And even those comfortable with "Someone lost their
wallet" may have doubts when "Someone" is replaced by a person's
name.
It's for this reason
that when the pronoun registration system was developed at the University of
Vermont in 2009, professors at first argued "ze" would be acceptable,
but "they" would not. "They" was only added as an option in
2014. But English has a precedent for a plural pronoun coming to be used in the
singular - the pronoun "you". Until the 17th Century a single person
was addressed with "thou" and "thee". Later "you"
became perfectly acceptable in both plural and singular. Neither
McConnell-Ginet nor Baron sees any reason why the same could not happen with
"they".
Last week Washington
Post copy editor Bill Walsh sent an email to the newsroom - probably the
most popular email he will ever send, as he put it - saying the singular
"they" was sometimes permissible, and "also useful in references
to people who identify as neither male nor female".
Non-binary in
the UK
Most students have
"some level of understanding about pronouns", which was not the case
a few years ago, says the National Union of Students' LGBT officer, Fran
Cowling. NUS name badges now include space for preferred pronouns. Cambridge University students started a
campaign called Make No Assumptions about a year ago. One of its badges (above)
prompts readers to ask about the wearer's pronouns. Another has empty spaces
for pronouns to be filled in.
Emrys Travis,
Cambridge University Student Union's LGBT+ campaigns officer, uses
"they," "them," and "their," but also
"ey," "em," and "eir" with trans friends. "A
lot of them mess up - repeatedly, often," Travis says. "As long as I
think they're trying, it doesn't bother me." Travis asked their director
of studies to email each of their (Travis's) lecturers with a request to use
"they" and "them" when referring to Travis and none
objected. "Cambridge, in general, is a great place to be trans," they
say.
However, learning to
use new pronouns or the singular "they" is not easy.
Like Harvard, Ohio
University gave students the option to register their preferred name and pronoun
this year, but not all professors were ready for it. Some thought
"they" was a typo on their student rosters, says LGBT centre director
delfin bautista (bautista writes their name without any capital letters).
Slip-ups with
preferred names are rarer than with preferred pronouns, bautista says, but can
happen too. Calling someone by their rejected birth name is termed
"deadnaming". More broadly, referring to a person in a way that does
not reflect their gender identity is called "misgendering".
When students suspect
that professors may not get the point of gender-neutral pronouns, they may play
it safe and stick with "he" or "she".
Sarah Grote, an Ohio
University student, uses "they/them" with close friends but hasn't
entered this in the student information system to avoid inconveniencing or
alienating professors. "I still need their recommendations… and this is
still south-eastern Ohio," Sarah says.
In another socially
conservative region, one university had to swiftly backtrack after tentatively
starting a discussion about pronouns this summer. Donna Braquet, director of
the Pride Center at the University of Tennessee posted an explanation of
gender-neutral pronouns on the university website in August and encouraged people
on campus to ask one another about their pronouns.
The goal was to make
the climate more trans-friendly, but it was widely mistaken for a change in
university policy. Some of the press coverage imagined that "he" and
"she" were being outlawed. One opinion column even used the headline
"New pronouns for the traveling freak show". State and federal
lawmakers complained to the university, and the post was removed the following
week.
It's not just in US
universities that gender-neutral language is advancing. Last year, Facebook
gave users the option to customize gender beyond male and female, and pick a
pronoun from "he", "she", and "they". This summer
the Oxford Dictionaries website added the honorific "Mx", defining it
as "a title used before a person's surname or full name by those who wish
to avoid specifying their gender or by those who prefer not to identify
themselves as male or female". Meanwhile, Caitlyn Jenner and the controversy
over Benedict Cumberbatch playing a non-binary character in the film Zoolander
2 have kept the subject of gender identity topical.
Universities,
however, remain the most fertile ground for new pronouns.
kat baus, a
non-binary student who graduated from Harvard this year - and who also writes
their name without capital letters - regrets that the university's computer
system was not introduced earlier. "It would have been a lot easier and
less awkward," baus says. baus sent emails or
visited professors during office hours to explain their gender identity and
pronouns. In smaller classes they (baus) brought it up when introducing
themself.
"I don't know a
single trans person who likes having that conversation," baus says.
Being able to do it
with the click of a mouse would have allowed them to get straight down to their
work in class, baus says - and would have allowed their classmates to get
straight down to theirs.
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