Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun

[Shana A]

Thursday, January 6th, 2011
He and She and You and Me

Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun
by Maria Bustillos on January 6th, 2011

http://www.theawl.com/2011/01/our-desperate-250-year-long-search-for-a-gender-neutral-pronoun

All of which brings us to the backstory of the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the thorny history of gender-neutral language in English.

Prescriptive grammarians have been calling for "he" as the gender-neutral pronoun of choice since at least 1745, when a British schoolmistress named Anne Fisher laid down the law in A New Grammar. This Anne Fisher was a terrific mensch, an entrepreneur who ran her own school, including night classes for women ("betwixt the hours of Five and Eight at Night")—this, in the 18th century.

Languages with gendered nouns require the development of an inbuilt, bone-deep sense of gender neutrality. In Spanish, for example, "table" is a feminine noun, but you don't really think of the table as being a girl at all; it's just a table. That brain-wired kind of gender neutrality is what Anglophones are meant to be apprehending in words like "mankind" or "citizens"; one is meant to be thinking "everyone," even though the word itself has got some gender to it, like "table" does in Spanish. The gender is supposed to evaporate right off such words according to the sense of what is being said. Or at least this was Anne Fisher's view, and if people didn't want to persist in being so horrible to one another, it would work just fine.

[Chastance]

I've heard people using they and them as singular gender neutral pronouns for a while now. It's odd to notice the slow change in language but it's needed and works. The majority of people in my area hear nothing wrong when someone talks about one person using they.

They're saying it's probably just a bowel blockage but the doctor wants to do more tests so they can be sure.

Everyone who hears that knows they is referring to the doctor; just don't tell that to the second semester English students. I'd like to say something about how language is evolving to include gender neutral terms but I'm terrified of giving any ammo for my friends who say "that's gay" and insist gay doesn't mean gay gay just bad gay.