(Originally written in 2016)
Recently I read an article about the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Someone on staff at that state university had posted online about the need to use more neutral pronouns in daily life. Being as this was on the internet, a lot of people swiftly took offense. The administration responded that it was merely a suggestion, a partial how-to, rather than a directive.
The highly offended masses decried the stupidity and the arrogance of the submitter, including the family, friends and pets of same.
This was, of course, a throwaway article about what is essentially just more hissing background noise on the information superhighway.
I had, not so long ago, spent some brain cycles on this very subject.
As a professional, published, award winning writer, (don't laugh, I have the certificate and the check stubs to prove it. . . Seriously, stop laughing!) I think about grammar. I can't NOT think about grammar. I don't always get it right, but it is something, like speed limits, stop signs and remembering that a plastic bag is not a toy, that I get right most of the time, but certainly not all the time.
I have theories about grammar and spelling rules and why they are so befuddling, convoluted, seemingly arbitrary and rife with boxes full of 'exceptions'. Primarily, that the rules were written and voted on after the fact, reverse engineered. We've clumsily tried to create a rule set to accommodate or rationalize already commonly accepted words and phrases.
If you were going to design a language today, especially since women have now brutally forced their oppressive equality upon us, we'd probably not bother with many gender specific pronouns at all. We certainly would not have gender tagging to nouns (objects) that don't even have an apparent gender, as is often found in French, Spanish, etc.
In Spanish, all nouns seem to have a gender, i.e.: El libro (book, male) La revista (magazine, female), El miedo (fear, male), La libertad ( liberty, female), la perra (female dog), el perro (male dog)
See? It all seems really, really silly, complex, arbitrary and certainly, inefficient.
How about this:
"Pat Tucker called the auto repair shop to ask when his car would be ready."
What is the value of the word 'his' in that sentence?
"Pat Tucker called the auto repair shop to ask when her car would be ready."
What changed? Oh, Lee is a female's name now!
But what difference does it really make? A person made a phone call to ask about the status of a car repair. What does gender specificity have to do with any of that?
Of course there are tons of inconsistencies. The words I, us, you, me, they, etc., are also personal pronouns, but do not declare biological reproductive roles.
"Lynn and I went to the market. I bought five apples and a magazine. She bought a can of hairspray and a sandwich."
Pop quiz:
1. Is the person speaking male or female?
2. What about 'Lynn?'
3. Why does it even matter at this early point in the story?
Some languages have attempted to be more efficient. Russian is almost totally devoid of 'articles' as we English speakers know them. Thus, when translating word for word we end up with a choppy, blunt sounding sentence: Our "A tree fell in the woods." becomes:" дерево упало в лесу" (Tree fell in woods)
Just about any rookie actor in Hollywood knows/learns that dropping articles is one sure-fire way to magically sound Russian. Listen for it . . .
But back to the gender issue.
We understand Actor/Actress, certainly. But what do you call female vs.male dancers? We struggle with Comedian vs. Comedienne, but why do we even bother when they are pronounced almost exactly the same anyhow? . . . Actors and Actresses do the same job, Comedians and Comediennes, likewise. But with doctors, painters teachers, writers, butchers and candlestick makers, we don't bother punctuating the profession with information about that person's genital mechanics. Why not?
More questions:
Why do we have 'nurses' and 'male nurses'?
The issue with 'male nurse' is the fact that for several reasons, not all of them sexist or stupid, we equate 'nurse' with female. This is even more complicated since we also call feeding a baby in 'the natural method', 'nursing'. Whereas the medical professional title 'nurse' really has very little to do, for the last hundred or so years, with suckling babies.
Of course, this line of thinking, of qualifying things with unnecessary modifiers, eventually spirals toward racism.
If I read you a short story and the opening line was "Two white men entered the liquor store." or "Three Hispanic teens raced toward the bus stop.", would you not assume that race was somehow a significant factor in the story to follow? What if it really wasn't?
But I'll skip that whole mess for now.
"The puppy was beautiful. It had short, but very soft and fragrant, fawn colored fur. It's bright blue eyes had just peeled open for the first time, taking in a kaleidoscopic universe. From the mutt's mouth came a whimper, a squeak and its whole body jerked and twitched with a tiny, but snotty sneeze."
Awwwww.
But wait, is the puppy a male or a female?
Again I ask, does it matter? Does your mental image of the little dog change without that information?
"The child was beautiful. It had messy, short blond hair, bright pink cheeks and a face that seemed to always be smiling. Its eyes were as bright green as the sign on the Irish Pub beneath the rented room it and its happy family called home. It had a thick flock of freckles, the entire family's curse or blessing. It loudly skipped down the sidewalk as if it didn't have a care in the world."
Why does that sound wrong? Actually, it sounds wrong because in English, 'it', used to indicate the thing we are talking about, as has been taught for many generations, is simply not good enough to indicate something when that something is human. Some books say that 'it' properly refers to an inanimate object. Well, that may be the intent, but no one yelled at me when I used 'it' to refer to the puppy.
For reasons unknown, perhaps lost to time, if we are indicating individual people, we immediately default to gender identifiers. Even now we struggle with it in everyday speech and writing. We have to gesticulate to untangle things to be non-gender specific.
Fill in the blank:
"If a customer wants more information, the sales associate should offer ______ a free brochure."
Did you fill in with "them"? (Sorry, 'them' is historically, a pluralization of 'it'.) "Him/or her"? "Him/her?" Clunky, especially when you are writing.
Or did you reword the sentence to make it flow better?
"If customers ask for more information, the sales associate should offer free brochures."
So this is less a question of right vs. wrong, politically correct or incorrect, it's an archaic legacy issue of our contrived and convoluted language itself. The 'sexism' is front-loaded, nearly mandatory gender identification has been around since very, very early in the cobbled together and ever-evolving architecture of our language.
Still don't believe me?
Exercise:
Create a simple paragraph of at least four sentences about individuals on an assembly line or at an art museum, at the grocery store or at a flea market. Have at least some interaction among the individuals, even if it is passive interaction and dialog free. No need to tell a whole story, just a simple paragraph. Don't overthink it.
How long before you are essentially forced to gender identify any of them?
I'm currently reading a series of crime fiction novels by Icelandic author Arnaldur Indriðason. Don't bother trying to pronounce that, you'll shred your tongue and knock loose a couple of back teeth.
One of the characters in the outstanding 'Detective Erlendur Sveinsson' series is named Marion Briem. Marion, whose name even in Icelandic is gender ambiguous, is never identified as male or female. It's a running theme in the series. Other characters in the books even mention from time to time that they don't know Marion's gender. I'm reading the English translations of these novels, even there, or especially there, trying to stumble around giving Marion's gender away reads clunky. I imagine that in patronymic-heavy Iceland, it is just as hard, if not more so. Almost all the other Icelandic characters and their authors, have dead give-aways in their very names: Sviens 'son', Indriða 'son'.
Another author I follow from that country, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and her lead character, Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, are both someone's dóttir.
So it's not just English, Spanish French and Italian that are to this day, still pointlessly, needlessly ,sexist in places that there is simply no reason to be.
To take it even further (and more ridiculous) the still occasionally used, Mr. and Mrs. To use these correctly in correspondence, you need not only to know the addressee's gender, but as for the latter, her marital status, which is in this day and age, awkward, intrusive and absurd, especially in the context of someone for whom it doesn't actually matter, say in some official capacity like a bureaucrat or corporate executive, school principal, etc.
I was in a conversation with my brother a few days ago. My younger brother is about the only person on the planet that I will discuss politics with anymore. He drags me into it, relentlessly. Though I'd already told him that at this early stage of the Presidential season that I was not really paying close attention to either the circus nor to the occupants of the clown cars in it, he asked me this:
"So who will it be?"
"I don't know, my guy hasn't announced his candidacy yet."
"And who is that?" He dug.
"I don't know, just no one currently running." I answered, thinking this would put an end to it, but no. . .
"But you are saying it will be a man?"
Of course, that's not what I meant. . . if I'd made the intent clear and gender-free though, it would have sounded like the overwritten dialog from a cheap, irritating infomercial, or an extract of nearly every legal document.
"The person for whom I might eventually vote is not among the currently declared contenders. . ."
It is my hope that someday we will simply tire of the awkward and archaic gender-biased pronouns. There are already a few that have crumbled among the youngsters, used interchangeably, between the lasses and the lads. . . 'Guys' as in the 'HEY YOU GUYS!!!" opening line from the old PBS series "Electric Company"
