Gender neutral pronouns

[jack]

I'm sure you all know the history of Gender neutral pronouns. And most think the question is mostly settled, although not agree in favour of what :)

However, it occurs to me some reluctance might come from the fact that although I have a little voice in my head saying "Women and men are the same. Gender neutral is good" I have a great big klaxon blaring "ALL INFORMATION IS GOOD! LEARN THINGS! BE INFORMED! COMMUNICATE FULLY! INF. ORM. ATION. GOOD." :)

That is, apart from not being aesthetically fond of most of the choices of gender-neutral pronouns, I'm not fond that that word choice is deliberately less informative. If you're talking about a genuinely neutral (eg. hypothetical) or ambiguous person, or you don't know, there's no information lost, but I still only use the pronouns where I have good reason.

But today a friend made another reference to the concept of "Geek as gender" and something occurred to me so obvious I couldn't believe it hadn't before.

What if we had two or more pronouns that drew *different* demarcations? We already have special pronouns for royalty and gods. ("Her Royal Highness's" etc and "His" etc).

You could adopt the archaic second-person model and have "te" (pronounced with a long e), "tis" and "ter" and "ve", "vis" and "ver" for intimate acquaintances and others. Or for social acquiantances and work acquaintances.

Or have different pronouns for different groups people can adopt as whatever they feel like identifying as in a certain concept. (Of course, you shouldn't identify solely as one thing, but most people are happy to identify as one thing but others as well.) Perhaps two sets would be most common ("he" and "she" or some other division), but that someone would borrow the Sindarin or Quenya pronouns from Tolkien and use them when affectionately referring to people from the Tolkien society.

Of course, now we near the Chinese problem of having too many, and having to decide when meeting someone whether to use the very formal or the extremely formal version of their pronoun.

But on the other hand, it seems more positive, as choosing to use such a pronoun doesn't sound like "my gender isn't important to me" but "this other aspect of our acquaintance is more important". And if you have a good reason to use other pronouns, it's not so jarring when someone does.

I'm afraid I haven't thought this out in detail, but I thought it was a lovely idea.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Of course there are all sorts of things one uses as cues to determine whether someone is male or female, but people are generally quite good at this sort of thing and in most cases they determine right. I think claiming that these cues are `only partially correlated' with sex is a huge understatement. They're overwhelmingly correlated.

Not if you do most of your socialising online, or at least, not if you do so in the circles I move in.

Also, part of the point is, those cues are things people can choose to play with and see what fits for them in ways that don't need to have anything to do with their biological sex, so it seems kind of presumptuous to demand that they be hard-linked to biological sex. What you say about guessing wrong and being hideously embarrassed sounds worrisome to me, because I utterly fail to see what, if one were to have to guess and guessed wrong, is the inherent problem with this.

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

Not if you do most of your socialising online, or at least, not if you do so in the circles I move in.

Well, obviously you can't use physical cues when you're communicating with words. Duh.

I'm not demanding anything. Yes, you can go all Humpty-Dumpty and say that gender means whatever you want it to mean, but to 99.9% of the population it has a meaning which is male or female and which isn't yellow, English, geek, or scampi.

What you say about guessing wrong and being hideously embarrassed sounds worrisome to me, because I utterly fail to see what, if one were to have to guess and guessed wrong, is the inherent problem with this.

It's a social faux pas at best, and a road to a kicking at worst. I think we must live in very different worlds if you utterly fail to be aware of this.

(S)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Did you read the link? The idea sounds crazy at first, but when I read what was actually said (starting with "As a thought experiment...") it sounded a very interesting perspective (and not claiming male/female gender doesn't exist at the moment).

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The key word you don't seem to be registering there is "inherent". I have no doubt that there are people who have a problem with being read as the wrong gender; my point is, handling this in a hostile fashion is a courtesy and civility failure on their behalf.