He, She, They, It or Ze/Zie/Ey: What Is Your Pronoun?

What’s the deal with preferred gender pronouns? Why are people so pronoun-conscious these days? Is it an assertion of one’s identity? Is it a new phenomenon of identity politics?

⚪ Contents

Introduction
Personal Preferences and Pronouns
The Singularity of They

Common Pronouns and Gender Inclusive Pronouns

Evolution and Nature of Using Preferred Gender Pronouns
Bottom Line

Takeaways
Related Articles on This Blog

List of Terms
Economic Inequality by Gender
Global Gender Gap Report 2021
The SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto by Valerie Solanas

Introduction

A few things set Instagram apart from other social media platforms. You get no prize for guessing what those are but one of them is the use of captions with ‘deep’ meanings. Often it would be a picture of someone taking a selfie and a completely irrelevant caption. Picture a bathroom selfie and the caption would read: ‘I like you a lottle. It’s like a little, except a lot.’ Or sample this: ‘I can’t do crazy stuff with basic people’.

Slightly better, but they are still in the bathroom! #WeAreGonnaTalkAboutPronounsSoon. Think about any of those cheesy, corny and silly statements that make you cringe or facepalm.

Well, we are not going to talk about cheesy lines or Instagram today. But we have one thing on Instagram that is directly related to our topic: an option for identification, which is in the profile section. We will see, specifically, how and why so many people have put up their preferred gender pronouns. Many social media platforms have added this section for obvious reason: their target audience is the youth, who are more informed about this preference and it is the most prominent on Instagram. Facebook also has it but you know, it is for old people!

In fact, in May 2021, Instagram had started including a Pronoun box in the profile section. It is already in use in some countries. Mine, I just checked it. It is yet to be updated. On its Help Center page, it says: ‘This feature isn’t currently available to everyone’. Nevertheless on Instagram, people mention their choice of pronouns manually.

Facebook gives you ten options of your preferred gender pronouns

Personal Preferences and Pronouns

From the day we are born, we are hardwired to notice differences. No wonder then, so many of us have not only a strong feeling of us and them but also are deeply conscious of the differences between us and them. Often, this also exceeds limits, and we have several issues in our society. Irrespective of the corner of the world we belong to, we have always been, for instance, facing sexism, racism, xenophobia and parochialism. All of these are a product of an us-versus-them mindset.

Well, we have a context here. With reference to sex and gender, the trend is on using preferred gender pronouns. But what lies beneath this seemingly irreproachable preference of what pronoun I want to use and want others to use it for me?

More than any other reason, it is a personal choice. It is also about humanity. Refer to me as 'it' and I will have no issues. It is all about respect and validation. It is also about our understanding that the world does not revolve only around the equality, emancipation and empowerment of men and women. Humans are a complex animal. It will be sheer inadequate to appreciate the world without this understanding. The first and foremost thing is the fact that we are human beings.

On the other side of the story, the use of specific pronouns helps provide space for people with different gender identities. It is all about inclusivity.

So far so good. Then, what’s the issue?

First, it’s the use of this four-letter word. No, it doesn’t start with an f; and it doesn’t even have an f in it. Let’s start with this.

The Singularity of They

A couple of years ago, the American Dialect Society announced they as the word of the decade. This is their definition:

they: gender-neutral singular pronoun for a known person, particularly as a nonbinary identifier (‘they,’ ‘them,’ ‘themself’)

Similarly, Merriam-Webster put out they as the Word of the Year in 2019. While explaining they mentioned:

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is determined by data: the word must have been a top lookup at Merriam-Webster.com in the past twelve months, and it must have seen a significant increase in lookups over the previous year.

Lookups for they increased by 313% in 2019 over the previous year. This curiosity is remarkable for a venerable old pronoun, but this is a special case, and a consequence of shifts in the way they is used.
English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone, someone, and anyone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.
More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as all over social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers.

Source: 'They' Is Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2019 | Merriam-Webster

In the same year, the American Psychological Association also announced that it will endorse the use of singular they. In Welcome, singular “they” on the APA Style Blog, Chelsea Lee wrote:

Writers should use the singular they in two main cases: (a) when referring to a generic person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant to the context and (b) when referring to a specific, known person who uses “they” as their pronoun.

For me it is a personal problem, because I feel it is grammatically confusing. I grew up in those days, at least in school when we were reading texts, gay was still referred to as being cheerful and it was used in conjunction with happy as in happy and gay; queer means literally strange; and there were separate masculine and feminine words such as actor and actress, poet and poetess, littérateur and littérateuse, and so on.

In our school days in the Nineties, it was also normal to use man everywhere: man is a political animal, no man is an island, the coat makes the man, authority shows the man and what not. But not anymore. After decades of academic pursuits and social movements marked by protests and marches, plus with the rise of the world wide web, we have reached this stage today.

Still, read these couple of sentences: They are a non-binary person. They argue he/his and she/her are grossly inadequate and sometimes can be misleading. Can you tell how many people are present here? A few style guides mention the verb will take the form of plural subject, so at least, that is taken care of. However, 1 ≠ 2.

Using they for an individual, in this context, is tantamount to an outburst of teenage angst. I’m not saying there is no problem but, let’s say that this use of wrong pronoun is a form of rebellion against norms and mores. But, can you be a bit logical? After all, it is a serious problem and we ought to sort it out without further damaging the things around us.

If you are non-binary, it makes perfect sense to use a neutral pronoun but again why a plural?

The social construction of gender is highly complex. To get rid of problematic social construction and linguistic shortcomings, as experts have pointed out, we need to use gender inclusive pronouns. This is unanimous. (See below: Common English pronouns and gender inclusive pronouns from the Washington University in St. Louis)

List: Common pronouns and gender inclusive pronouns

Common examples of pronouns in English and gender inclusive pronouns (Created with screengrabs of tables from Pronouns Information on the website of Washington University in St. Louis)

In my writing I had always been using s/he and her/his but obviously these need to be changed. I also know some people who use only she and her, when referring to a generic person. Now, both of these are not much different from using he/him.

We can also take the case of the Bugis people in Indonesia who socially identify five genders: makkunrai (~ cisgender women), oroané (cisgender men), bissu (androgynous or intersex), calabai (cis women), and calalai (cis men). As evident from the information from Washington University, there are always rooms to create specific pronouns, say, for all the five genders rather than taking a lazy shortcut to an existing pronoun.

The use of singular they is aggravated by the people who use it. Often, in my environment, the gender-assertive individuals are mostly college-going students who are from middle-class families. They are also mostly these Starbucks-loving people whose self-worth is measured from the number of likes they get on Instagram. Their lack of articulation on the topic has also given an impression that one reason of using a preferred gender pronoun is to go with the flow.

It is human nature to conform and comply. On the other hand, social media has also accentuated the concept of FOMO. Well, this is not to say that everyone is jumping on the bandwagon out of the growing trend to use the pronoun option on social media. A countless number of people are fighting at ground zero, not only for pronouns but also for gender rights and they practise gender nonconformity in real life. My point is that the people in my environment include those who still take permission from their parents before buying their own underwear. Making informed decisions on gender questions is too adult a thing for them.

Next, let us see the historical evolution of using personal pronouns.

Evolution and Nature of Using Preferred Gender Pronouns

Littérateurs often cite the examples of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1386) and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599) as some of the earliest cases of using singular they. Around the beginning of 18th century, people had started using male pronouns for non-specific gender in writing. Over the centuries, the quantity and technology of writing and printing had been changing and spreading gradually, and in them was the indelible stamp of patriarchy.

Fortunately, things are changing and the Internet is making it swifter. We still cannot ignore one important point here. As outlined in the concept of the New World Information and Communication Order, there has always been an uneven flow of communication. In other words, the developed countries have been setting the agenda, for reasons good and bad. And this is clearly visible in this whole issue of preferred gender pronouns too.

This implies it is a phenomenon originally of the West. The idea is theirs, and the medium is theirs. The West is directly responsible for the spread of pronoun consciousness. But how many people are aware about nonbinary gender issues in a society like ours? How much compatible are their ideas of gender-nonconforming people with ours? How much do we normalise the presence of a transgender amongst us? We are talking about a sociopolitical entity where, decades after decades, gender equality has remained a distant dream.

Above all, how do we address the many things that are still considered as socially unacceptable? In India, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code has been decriminalised albeit this does not imply that same-sex marriage is legal or the society is ready to accept homosexuality. Rather, so many people look down upon gays, lesbians and transgenders; and if not, there are stereotypes galore, that are clearly reflected in pop culture, especially in movies. Beyond simple clicking on the gender option on Instagram, there lies apparently a number of questions that are equally important as a gender identity.

Coming back, to understand the evolution of gender or personal pronouns is to understand the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements. These movements began in the Sixties, thanks to the emergence of social movements in liberal democracies that were spearheaded in the United States. The movements have as well also diversified into those of LGBTQ+ and LGBTTTQQIAA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, 2/Two-Spirit, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Ally. See Glossary below).

By the way, what’s the purpose of using the abbreviation such as LGBTTTQQIAA? The purpose of abbreviation is to abbreviate!

Here, the concept of preferred gender pronouns fits into the larger picture of identity politics. Ironically, identity politics has got some bad press, partly because ideally, people would identify themselves with humanity but now the trend is on seeking recognition on the basis of nationality, religion, race, ethnicity, and gender.

In an interview for The Washington Post, (Identity politics is undermining democracy) political scientist and economist Francis Fukuyama mentioned:

What we call identity politics grew out of the social movements of the 1960s, around the demands of African Americans, women, gays and lesbians and other marginalised groups for recognition of their dignity and concrete remedies to social disadvantages. These demands have evolved over the years to displace socioeconomic class as the traditional way that much of the left thinks about inequality.

Fukuyama added:

They reflect important grievances but in some cases, began to take on an exclusive character where people’s “lived experiences” determined who they were. This created obstacles to empathy and communication.

With reference to Fukuyama’s assertion, identity politics — which is considered as a demand for respect and dignity — is a product of globalisation in a dialectical manner. That is, the more streamlined the economies are, the more vocal are the demand for unique identities. Identity politics* has been implicated to mean parochial worldviews but marginalised people and societies in peripheries understand how it is essential to have our own voices.

(To understand identity politics in this context, refer to Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism. Book Summary: “The author asks why people do not forget their national identity. He suggests that in daily life nationalism is constantly flagged in the media through routine symbols and habits of language. Banal Nationalism is critical of orthodox theories in sociology, politics and social psychology for ignoring this core feature of national identity.”)

Even in the US, whenever there is a disingenuous War on Anything, which means invasion on another country, hundreds and thousands of people will join the military. That is also a question of its national identity. Recently, after two decades of occupation, they have left Afghanistan to its own devices but not many people would relate it to identity politics.

In our context today, from the Nineties, scholars also introduced the concept of intersectionality to study the phenomena of sex, gender and identity vis-à-vis other socioeconomic and political entities. It was also around the same time when queer theory was established to study sex and gender and normalise non-heterosexual mores. It is only a matter of time when we will see how much open the society is.

Comparatively, this topic is only as recent as three decades. As seen above, people started using the singular they a long time ago. Yet the conscious usage began not with the LGBT movements but only around the time when people started studying intersectionality. The credit should go to the scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who introduced this concept that analyse how ‘race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap’.

Most recently, it has gained more momentum with the explosion of social networking sites in the last 10 to 15 years.

Identity politics has been implicated to mean parochial worldviews but marginalised people and societies in peripheries understand how it is essential to have our own voices.

Bottom Line

Now and then, it becomes a bit hard to digest because of the over-sensitivity of the people these days. When trigger warnings, cancel culture, and trolling have become rules rather than exception, we know things are not how they used to be. Of course, trigger warnings are essential. My point is that these are used too many a time than it is necessary. This is why it is sometimes pestiferous to see some of the so-called woke Gen-Z people (remember these are the people who still take permission from their parent to buy their own underwear).

When we can use they for an individual, we should also have the guts to give up bottling up our feelings for the sake of being nice. And this is the main point here. I can make my own decisions but then there are also collective decisions of the society that are completely beyond my control and your control. What is important is to express our views to move the conversation forward. On the other hand, the lack of space for discussion only creates problems.

At the end of the day, the use of gender inclusive pronouns is essential. The caveat is that it should not be reduced to making a fashion statement on Instagram. Besides, we must learn to look at it critically and this, we can begin by taking into account the factors of identity politics, gender rights and humanity.

- Concluded.

Takeaways

Understand the importance of using preferred gender pronouns
Note the problem areas in using preferred gender pronouns
Above any other reason the usage is about humanity
Using s/he instead of the generic he is commendable but it’s no more enough
We have to be careful in applying the global concepts in local contexts
Only a tiny fraction of the urban youth in India is aware of the significance of gender and human rights
What’s your good PGP? This is one of the first things you are going to hear if you are in India in the near future. For a long time, people have been wondering what a good name is. It’s a convention, particularly in mainland India for people to ask your good name. Apparently, the name is not enough; and so, now it will be your good PGP as well!

List of Terms

Check: Economic Inequality by Gender

Above: In terms of the Gender Inequality Index from the Human Development Report, 2015, India is on the same level as Guyana (South America), Zambia (Africa), Iraq (West Asia) and Papua New Guinea (East Asia).

Source: Our World in Data

Read (PDF): Global Gender Gap Report 2021

Another generation of women will have to wait for gender parity, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021. As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be felt, closing the global gender gap has increased by a generation from 99.5 years to 135.6 years.