Gendered pronouns

[jack]

In my recent post about a story of someone going to a job interview, I chose to use female pronouns for both the applicant and the boss, even though I think the original story I heard used "he".

FWIW, I don't remember where I heard the story, but it was presented as a parable, not a factual account, and the extent of the checking I did was to look on snopes, who didn't cite an original incident, so I assumed it was basically generic. At least one friend reckoned they DID have a citation for the original incident, in which case I should have used whichever gender was appropriate. But I was treating it as a generic "story about something that might have happened".

In fact, I don't know for sure the version I heard used "he". It might have used "they", or even named a specific person as the interviewer or the candidate. And I unfortunately probably wouldn't have remembered the difference.

But I make an effort to make generic stories using female characters if I can, because if I don't I end up using "he" all the time.

I hesitated a bit this time, because I wasn't sure if I'd accidentally send some _other_ message (would people think women less likely to be "one of the boys" at a job interview? more likely to be picky about some obscure point of etiquette?). But I always hesitate in case the connotations are wrong (eg. using a non-white-male as a villain or incompetent in a story), but decided that if I didn't do it every time I wasn't sure, I'd just be promoting "he" as the default, which is what I wanted to avoid.

And fortunately, the story seemed to come across exactly the same.

Using mixed or neutral gender pronouns is a small improvement, and something I feel bad that I decided to do, rather than something I always did automatically. But I know I don't notice when other people make small stylistic choices like that, so for once I thought I'd point it out.

Comments

[ptc24]

My instinct here is to use a random number generator, although there's a part of me that feels it's going to get shouted at. There's a certain spoiling-for-a-fight feeling about it; sooner or later you're going to generate something with unfortunate connotations, and people are going to impute motives to you, and are going to get even angrier when you tell them their imputations are demonstrably false because you used an RNG.

I had this idea of making something that would pick a random name based on a list of baby names. Unfortunately I think the risk of picking "Mohammed" at the wrong time is sufficiently high that the project may be a non-starter.

[naath]

I just visited a link with the title "how do I teach my grandmother about LateX" and my first instinct was "we maybe some people's grandmothers are fluent LaTeX users; why use 'grandmother' there"... and then it turned out that this wasn't "grandmother" as "insert clueless relative" it was "grandmother" as "my ACTUAL GRANDMOTHER"...

By which I mean, yes, I guess using the "wrong" (that is steryotype confirming) wossname can indeed provoke annoyance; but obviously there are times when you are talking about a specific person and so you need to do so. I think "this wasn't my unconcious prejudice it was my RNG" is a perfectly good defense; although not quite as good as "this was a story about a specific actual person who actually has this attribute".

On the topic of "people not noticing" an author whose blog I read once complained (sorry I forget who) of an angry reader ranting that her books were "promoting homosexuality"; turns out that sometimes when you write a woman thinking lustful thoughts about men some people fail to spot/properly internalise "this is a woman's thoughts we are seeing here" that they read that as gay.

[jack]

an angry reader ranting that her books were "promoting homosexuality"; turns out that sometimes when you write a woman thinking lustful thoughts about men some people fail to spot/properly internalise "this is a woman's thoughts we are seeing here" that they read that as gay.

Oh yes, I thought that was really interesting!

[jack]

going to get even angrier when you tell them their imputations are demonstrably false because you used an RNG.

LOL, that's awesome.

Although it's still hard to say for sure you're unbiased: it's possible that some combinations would be SO provocative you'd be unable to resist the urge to change them, so NOT doing so could be a small message, even if you haven't changed anything yet.

I decided random was overkill; my writing was sufficiently biased I could make it a lot better by using female generics as often as possible. I should probably make a further effort to be more multicultural: normal pronouns can be used for people from any culture, but there's still the problem that if you use a neutral pronoun, people will still imagine the sort of person they imagine as typical.

And yeah, names would be nice, but have the problems magnified :) Some friends have talked about this in real life, of choosing non-bland but non-provocative names for hypothetical situations in exam questions, etc.

[ptc24]

LOL, that's awesome.

Today's exercise in Rule Utilitarianism is to come up with reasons why that anger might even be justifiable.

There seems to be a school of thought on the web that seems to have "strict liability" standards for offense, that intention is entirely irrelevant. Personally I find this to be deeply vexatious, and makes me wonder whether these people are at all interesting in justice, although that may be me taking strongly-worded statements literally when they weren't... intended... that way, so I need to calm down and watch out for my own hypocrisy etc. Also, I can sort of see where they're coming from. Certainly I have a notion of "causing offense by negligence"; possibly someone could come up with a less legalistic phrasing.

[jack]

me taking strongly-worded statements literally when they weren't... intended... that way

I think there's a lot of that. I think the trouble is, accidentally causing offence should be rare, but is actually really, really, really common, either because people deliberately can't be bothered to learn better, or because people from different subgroups meet and genuinely don't know each others' norms. So if "I didn't mean it" was a defence, everyone would just go on doing the same thing, and ALWAYS say "I didn't mean it", glossing over whether or not they SHOULD have learned better.

So people who are constantly being insulted naturally develop the assumption that if someone didn't mean it, that's just because they're being wilfully negligent. And would accept that yes, when someone GENUINELY had no way to know, that's ok, but assume that's only a weird edge case, not something that actually happens.

[ptc24]

Hmmm, Adam Smith has something about this. Ah yes, here - search for II.III.23 - it's a long paragraph, so I won't quote it all here. Shame about the example in that paragraph - otherwise it's pretty good.

[gerald_duck]

Also, because some people are unreasonably ready to take offence.

(I'm hoping I can say that in the abstract without anyone perceiving it applies specifically to them or a demographic to which they belong…)

[ptc24]

it applies specifically to them or a demographic to which they belong…

Of course, in the latter case, some hypothetical person could say, or rather couldn't say, but could think, "yeah, tell me about it".

[naath]

If I drop an anvil on your head the maybe I was going "oh shit oh shit oh shit I'm going to drop this anvil" or maybe I was going "hahaha a ptc24! I shall kill him with this anvil!" but *either way* you are now going "OMG MY HEAD HURTS SO MUCH"; and I think some shouting about how much your head hurts is entirely reasonable.

I also think it is reasonable to respond to someone accidentally hurting me by saying "please try not to hurt me or other people again"; even when it was all entirely accidental. Also I think that since with verbally inflicted pain the excuse is often a genuine "I had no idea that would hurt you" it is more important to say "that hurt, please don't" because otherwise how would the hurter learn not to cause further hurt?

Also there is an argument for negligence. How many times do I say "please, that really hurts, don't do it" before you either stop doing it or admit that you are intentionally hurting me? And yes, sometimes it hurts to be told "you are hurting me"; but I am reasonably happy to inflict this pain as part of a process that leads to no-one hurting people.

[ptc24]

Expressions of pain and polite requests for changes to behaviour are of course entirely reasonable; furthermore in some cases impolite more-than-requests for changes could be considered fair, or at any rate people might fairly be expected to ignore the impoliteness. This of course implies that some impoliteness should be ignored.

Now expressions of blame - for example, anger directed at the person causally responsible for the offense, perhaps involving hurtful words themselves - are interesting. My first instinct is to get on my high horse and say this is entirely unjustifiable. However... well, I linked to an Adam Smith quote elsewhere in this discussion. The idea of moral luck, of blameworthiness that can be dropped on you from a great height, is one that I really dislike. But I find that the position up on my high horse is uncomfortable for various reasons, so it's something I'm trying to make sense of.

[naath]

I find the idea that I could express the extreme pain of (for example) having an anvil dropped on my head POLITELY is... well, I think it's a bit beyond me frankly. When I'm in pain I am not at my most polite!

Also it seems that sometimes it is simply impossible to tell someone "that thing you said hurt me" in a way that is both sufficiently polite that they themselves are not hurt and ALSO sufficiently clear that they understand that they hurt me.

Inflicting pain in response for pain might be a learning tool in some cases; although I'm not sure it is the BEST teaching tool at hand.

[ptc24]

Well if you'd had an anvil dropped on your head, then expressing anything at all, politely or impolitely, might be difficult; furthermore you'll see that my point about politeness wasn't about expressions of pain. I brought politeness up, because, well, in your non-anvil examples, you had people being very polite about things. Out of the four things you had the hurt person saying, three of them had the word "please" in them, and the other was fairly plain and factual. It is of course hard to argue against such polite and dignified responses, which is why I didn't.

[gerald_duck]

Me, by default I'd advocate avoiding referring the gender of the people involved. My general test is to see what happens if I substitute "they (gay)"/"they (straight)", "they (Irish)"/"they (British)" or whatever for "he"/"she"; usually, the result is completely unacceptable.

Avoiding gendered pronouns can make prose look very clunky, especially if done by a reluctant author, even more if done by an author trying to make a point about how clunky their avoidance makes prose look. But it's fairly easy to get an unobtrusive result. For example, David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language avoids gendered pronouns for generic individuals throughout and you wouldn't notice, but for it being pointed out in the chapter discussing the issue. (-8

[gerald_duck]

…though, as an addendum, I'll note that fiction thrives on detail.

In your case, you were writing a purportedly factual account for pedagogical purposes. If, however, you'd been trying to write a novel about someone who tries to get a job, you might reasonably include their gender identity when fleshing out the character, as well as what actual dish they ordered, which restaurant it was, what the job was, which radio station the taxi driver had been playing, etc. (-8

[jack]

Hm. On the one hand, I agree with you, the gender SHOULD be as irrelevant as everything else.

On the other hand, I think maybe more hypothetical examples SHOULD have people of explicitly different shapes, sizes, sexes, orientations, nationalities, ethnicities, religions, politics, etc, etc so everyone is exposed to a range, and break people out of the assumption that every unspecified sex is "he", etc.

[gerald_duck]

Mmm. And the difference, of course, is that gender has a special position in English grammar enjoyed by nothing else except number. (And now I'm wondering what effect it would have had on your story had there been multiple interviewers and/or multiple candidates!)

I take the view that English shouldn't have special grammar to distinguish gender. In just a handful of circumstances one is talking about two people, one of whom can be put in box A and the other in box B, such that we say "they-A like them-B" as a disambiguated variant on "they like them", but if we really value that it might be nice to have "party of the first part" and "party of the second part" pronouns that are more generally useful and less generally objectionable.

We should use singular "they" more. "Thou" has already atrophied in favour of singular "you", and even singular "we" is well attested. (When people argue against singular "they" on specious grammatical grounds, my mischievous response is "Oh, think we're a grammarian, do we?")

Ideally, we would use "they" instead of "he" and "she" almost exclusively. But usage shifts slowly and I've no interest in fighting that sloth. For now, I use "they" consistently about abstract individuals, almost invariably about specific individuals where few details are given and only "he" or "she" about specific well-identified individuals who actually want those pronouns.

For a concrete example, contrast "Suppose someone is playing a game. They…", "I was playing a game with someone and they…" and "I was playing a game with jack and he…"

[jack]

Good point. I agree gender shouldn't be the unique thing singled out by pronoun, and with the proposed pattern of usage.

I'm interested you agree that "they" is more acceptable for an abstract person. I always thought that usage was more common, even if "they" would be better for specific people of known gender as well, but I've been comprehensively shouted at for even considering using singular they and not automatically using it for everything.

I've tongue-in-cheek suggested that even if we can't get people to convey less information with their pronouns, we might be able to achieve the same effect by diluting "gender" as the unique pronoun information: go wild creating extra pronouns for "scot" and "geek" and "jerk" and so on, and give people a reason to use gender-ambiguous pronouns other than politeness. I don't think that's practical, but I keep wishing something like that was :)

[ptc24]

The other approach is to go down the German route and have all sorts of genders for all sorts of things - and have the argument about whether "das Mädchen" is "sie" or "es". Or follow some other language where the genders are masculine, feminine, neuter and vegetable (where, for example, erriplen (aeroplane) is vegetable because canoes are made of wood and any other form of transport has the same gender as a canoe).

Incidentally, there's some interesting research on Sapir-Whorf effects in languages that have ubiquitous gender like that; they're quite subtle, but they do seem to be there. Imagine a talking fork. What sort of voice does it have? It turns out that German speakers imagine it speaking in a female voice; "the fork" translates to "die Gabel".

[naath]

I rarely have to argue about "And when we have hired a cleaner they will..." (cleaner of gender unknown until a cleaner has been selected); sometimes about "And I was playing a game with someone and they ..." (player of gender probably known to me, if this is an account of a time I was actually playing a game); a whole lot about "I was playing a game with Alex and they ..." (where Alex prefers "they" to either "he" or "she"); and with myself about "/me thinks they should go to lunch now" (where I prefer "they" and am referring to myself in the third person).

In relation to the 2nd case many people will also press for details such as names, ages, relation-to-me, ethnicity, etc. to, I guess, flesh out there idea of who this mysterious player is when the anecdote was ABOUT THE GAME.

In relation to the 1st case I think there is more argument when someone thinks the gender is "obvious" ("when someone gives birth they ...").

I think singular-they is working its way into the language gradually. "They" as an ungendered pronoun is lagging far far behind.

[gerald_duck]

It's already in the language. As Wikipedia points out there's "Arise; one knocks. / … / Hark, how they knock!" in Romeo and Juliet.

It's also in Deuteronomy 17:5 — Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die. — allegedly in the original Hebrew as well as English translations, and attributed to God.

To at least some people, that ought to be incontrovertibly conclusive. (-8

People who say singular they isn't in the language are plain wrong. People who say singular they shouldn't be in the language ought, for consistency, to abandon singular you. The only matter I accept as subject to legitimate debate is how widespread its use should become.

I have to admit that I'd prefer to use singular "they" about myself but, without making any grand announcement about non-binary gender identity, in practice it confuses people utterly. So I don't. Yet. Give it another twenty-five years.

[naath]

I meant "language which is in common use".