Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Genderless/Gender-neutral pronouns, "he", "she", "them" and "they", and broader gender issues in language.

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

Now you're being deliberately obtuse. An epicine pronoun does not allow someone of non-binary gender alignment to express their identity - rather, it merely signifies that they are not a part of the traditional binary system. This isn't the same thing. They are not being signified as "something," but rather "not something."

In your opinion. And, without an epicene pronoun, there is not even the opportunity to step outside that binary system. Much as, before "Ms", there was no way to step outside the system in which women were identified as either maiden or married.

Where I can see a problem here is if the epicene is also used as "they" is used now, since our non-binary subject can feel pissed off that he/she/they/ze/ey/pickyourpronoun is being lumped in with the generic - see the footnotes page on the problem of "it". Which is an argument to keep "they".

Of course, the hardcore would point out that, since we seem to do OK without distinct masculine and feminine pronouns in the plural and every other person, the logical thing to do would be to replace "he" and "she" altogether. Which may well be true, especially as our as-yet-unestablished epicene pronoun may sound much better than either (just to forestall yet another chorus of "but it sounds silly" there). Might get a bit confusing, though. Don't suppose anyone's going to look at the height comparison?

No....the third-gendered person skinny-dipping at the party would be *obviously male*. Not *obviously a man*. Obviously, the third-gendered person is *not* a man, otherwise they/ze/ey/pickyourpronoun would not be a third-gendered person.

I'm talking specifically from the viewpoint of the other people in the pool here, for whom gender and biological sex are the same thing (ie: the bulk of the world's population). Most people will call a person with a penis "him" whether that person identifies as a man or not. This is why I expand the issue into deliberate extremes - if I identify as a tree, this does not make me a tree, and there is arguably no good reason why a tree pronoun should be created.

So, you believe that this member of the first nations is only a matter of degree from wanting to identify as a tree? This is interesting, because....well, someone who believes themselves to be a "man" or "woman" based purely on biology could be in the same boat. The biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling identified five separate chromosomal arrangements sufficiently distinct to be identified as different sexual setups in 1993, altohugh in 1999's Sexing the Body she argued that actually using these five categorisations would in itself be divisive. That's problem one with the assumption that sexual characteristics and gender map precisely (Jamie Lee Curtis, anyone?). Problem two is that you appear, with respect, to have tied yourslef in something of a knot here. You say that for most people gender and biological sex are the same thing (what you actually mean, I assume, is that biological sex provides an infallible guide to gender, as presumably a cow, with the biological sex of "female" would not be the same thing as a woman). You do not believe that there should be a pronoun representing genders other than "man" (he) and "woman" (her). Now, what if our skinny-dipper is an hermaphrodite (although I believe they prefer the term "intersexed" - the Intersexed Society of North America has a web page here?

The skinny dipper is thus neither male nor female, or if you prefer both male and female. However, as biological sex and gender are the same thing, his/her/their/hir/eir/pickyourpossessivepronoun gender must be the same as h/h/t/h/e/pypp sex. But no such pronoun exists, because according to the binary model of gender no such gender exists, and since gender and sex are the same thing therefore no such sex can exist. Therefore the hermaphrodite/Intersexed/American cannot exist. Assuming that h/h/t/z/e/pysp (and before anyone points out how clumsy this is - I am having fun with it) survives this cataclysmic realisation, we are still left with the problem of the pronoun. "They"? We will have to use it with a singular verb form, which will sound very odd indeed, unless we wish to communicate that there is more than one of h/h/t/h/e/pyop, which there amn't (really, there cannot be one, as we have discussed). Also, the hermaphrodite/Intersexed American might object to being lumped with a generic pronoun used to express people of indeterminate gender, rather than h/h/t/h/e/pypp own glorious profusion of very determinate gender. You could have asked the hermaphrodite which pronoun they would prefer if the concepts of man and woman were not tied to gender, which is the same as biological sex, we would be OK, because we coudl just ask the hermaphrodite what h/h/t/h/e/pysp wanted ot be used, but as it is that would not be an answerable question.

Basically, your statement is incoherent unless we assume either the separation of biological sex and gender or the non-existence of the Intersexed. Or that an epicene pronoun is a necessity (that epicene pronoun could, of course, be "they", but see the footnotes page or much of this thread for a summary of the problems both of singular and of plural "they"). The easiest link there is probably the statement "gender and biological sex are the same thing", because even the dictionaries would throw that one out of court, and they are usually deeply reactionary.

So, onto our third-sexed Native American. As far as hetcetera is concerned, hetcetera has the right elements, biological or otherwise, to be a member of the third gender. Obviously. Otherwise hetcetera would not belong to it. However, it is possible that some people outside hetcetera's people may not quite get it, or that hetcetera might be without some of the elements that make hetc.'s gender obvious. So, it is possible that some people, confused by the penis (a signifier of maleness that is often seen as a good reason for a human being to be classified as "a man", although as in the case of your or zerone's transvestite or drag queen friends not necessarily always the case), and thus call him "he". At which point he could, if he could be bothered, explain that, although hetc. was biologically male, this was only tangentially relevant to his gender, which was (insert name of third gender here). He could then tell them what the correct form of pronominal address would be. Which, unless one feels it would be better to use the form in hetc's native tongue within English, woudl be again where an epicene pronoun would come in handy (which could, again, be singular "they", but see footnotes page). I don't see the confusion. At best we're talking about mild social awkwardness, and probably nothing hetc. hasn't dealt with before. They're all naked, for heaven's sake. I imagine a bit of grammatical setting-straight wouldn't kill anyone.

Again, I'm not sure why the excision of a pronoun form which could approximate to this person and not result in hetc. being stubbornly and incorrectly referred to by a pronoun appropriate to a completely different gender in hetc.'s culture because of a mistaken understanding of the relationship between the physiological term "sex" and the grammatical term "gender" advances the sum of human understanding...

And, incidentally, "tree" is neither a sexual nor a gender classification, nor indeed a description of what a human being looks like naked (unless you are *very* lucky). Therefore you are performing a category error. There are tangents between gender modification and other forms of body modification by, say, people who identify as cats or lizards, but I believe that people who identify as cats and lizards generally do so with a pretty simple binary gender division. Therefore the whole "tree" thing is a red herring, but you may want to start a new thread on posthumanism, which could embrace gender relaignment, Harawayan cyborgism and other body modifications, or on body modifications, which could include tattoing, scarification and the above. But "tree" is here not an extreme but simply a misunderstanding; it is a physical object, genders are grammatical (and subsequently in the history of the word social and ideological) classifications, and biological sexes are ways of grouping physiological differences within a single species.

I'm honestly not being deliberately obtuse. But, and I hope nobody takes this the wrong way and gets upset, I have never had to discuss this starting this far back before. I hope the attention I am lavishing will be seen as a sign of good faith (a), and a good reason to reply comprehensively (b)

Zerone: Yes, I obviously didn't explain myself clearly. It is formal, and thus used when addressing, say, a stranger, a superior officer, or your father back in the good old days.

("hetcetera". Hah. I kill me)

Oh, for reference, by the way, there's a short article by Fausto-Sterling here, which may help to clear up the distinction betwen gender and sex.

A thread discussing inhumanism (identifying with trees and suchlike) started here, but did not get too far - there may be something here to inspire another thread.

For more on trans issues, why not have a look at this thread? It also includes discussion of epicene pronoun use...

And the thread on deceptive transvestites is here. Possibly Barbelith's finest hour...some serious discussion, some gibbering insanity, accusations of homo/heterophobia all over the shop, and some absolutely killer one-liners.

OK. Gender is a grammatical and cultural descriptor. Which means, as I said, that it is not a biological one.

This really is a pretty obvious statement, Lawrence. Gender is not a physical descriptor. Sex is. Grammarical and cultural decisions about gender are frequently based on the information provided by, among other things, the physical body. I made a number of points about this, both in terms of the universally self-defining nature of gender and the differences between the number of chromosomal structures available being rather more than two, which you have not addressed. I might add that your insistence that gender and sex are the same thing is rather undermined by your wilingness to call your "trannie" friends "she", although clearly they are not *physically* female.

As I say, look in a dictionary. You may have seen this as an insult, but is in fact a request, to save time. In fact, from dictionary.com:

Grammar.
A grammatical category used in the classification of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs that may be arbitrary or based on characteristics such as sex or animacy and that determines agreement with or selection of modifiers, referents, or grammatical forms.
One category of such a set.
The classification of a word or grammatical form in such a category.
The distinguishing form or forms used.
Sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture.

The condition of being female or male; sex.

Females or males considered as a group: expressions used by one gender.

Traditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neuter,” but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender. This usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. According to this rule, one would say The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient, but In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined. This distinction is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels.

That, incidentally, is why "tree" is a false trail. Because identifying as a tree has nothing to do with your gender, just as my identification as "tall" has nothing to do with gender.

Now, since we are in a thread discussing gender as a grammatical construct, we can hopefully say that using gender as a synonym for "sex" is not what we are doing, as otherwise we would not be discussing gender as a grammatical construct. So, we are looking at the first two definitions, basically. Which are not actually indistinguishable (see the Hijras, the Berdache, the fafafines, de Fiore - who is a perfect example of somebody victimised by the failure of the society of her time to acknowledge the existence of the possibility of gender roles other than "man" and "woman", since neither described her *sex*) from pheno- or genotypical sex. This is a statement I and others have made and demonstrated many times in many different ways, here and in, say, the "Genderfuck You" thread, but to continue - in the absence of another gender option in their culture, Fausto-Sterling (and, IIRC, the ISNA) believed that people who are born without a clear distinction of the biological characteristics of either *sex* should be raised as belonging to the most appropriate *gender*. If there were three genders and two biological sexes (as, of course, there *are* in the societies mentioned above), then people would have to be assigned to one of those three genders according to a set of criteria relating to matters other than biological sex, which would be in itself inadequate to decide gender - that is, whether that infant was referred to as "he", "she" or the third alternative. See the article above, where somebody was identified as a woman partly by their love of matching calico; that was a hundred plus years ago, and it was already not enough to say "penis - man" or "vagina - woman". They were looking for other gender identifiers.

As for "othering" - well, yes. That's what gender does. You are assuming that "man" and "woman" are not othering, because you are used to them, but it might be useful to think in grammatical terms again. The masculine gender (which is, lest we forget, used in inflected languages for things that are not biologically male) describes a set of rules, the feminine gender another, the neuter gender another. Il est beau. Elle est belle. Das ist gut. bonus, boan, bonum. Likewise, the cultural gender determinant "man" identifies what a person is, and what a person is not (a woman, most obviously. Whether "woman" does the same or merely describes the condition of not being a man is a question for another day). A term describing a third gender, such as "Ihamana" among the Zuni, serves the same function - it says "this person has this gender, and not either of the others". Because not all men are identical, and neither are all women, and so it strikes me as a bit odd to say that a different gender would have to be invented to describe every variation of biological or physiological construction, especially if your genders (like those of, say, the Zuni) are not dependent even on the obvious phenotypical manifestations of the sexual binary.

Now, it strikes me that this is no more othering, and a lot less alienating, than just telling people they have to be "he" or "she", depending on their "biological sex" (do you mean their chromosomal sex or the set of sexual characteristics they might possess after surgery and hormone treatment, btw?), with the "other" category of, say, "they" (which is, btw, an epicene pronoun, just not a very nice one). I agree with you completely that a better solution would probably be to remove gender from the third person singular pronoun altogether, since gender no longer effectively exists in the others because our language is no longer inflected that way (or not inflected that way very often, more precisely), and get the sense from the sentence. Gender can them be separated from that sticky bit of language and become far more enjoyable. This would remove the problem of the use of such a pronoun as a generic singular as well, of course.

(By contrast, for example, Latin very rarely uses subject pronouns at all, because the verb form and the gender of words describing the subject tell you the gender and number of that subject anyway. "iratus canem necavit" can only mean "the angry man (masculine singular) killed the dog, unless it is referring back to another masculine adjective in a previous sentence)

However, like you I believe that this is not currently within the art of the possible to abolish the gendered pronoun. So, I am looking for something that people who do not fit the current gender polarity, regardless of the sexual characteristics they possess - a look at the "Genderfuck you" and "Trans 101" threads might fill in some detail on this, also - can, if they choose, select as an identifying pronoun, so they (actually a plural here - yay!) do not feel shoehorned into "he"ness or "she"ness *against their will*. It is supposed to function (being realistic) as an option, not a panacea. Again, a quick look at lupus thingy's link will show that discussion of the problem of using one word for the generic and gender-variant pronouns, but if one's intention is to minimise structural alterations to the language then one can either adopt this as a course or look at some permutation of "they" as a generic. Again, this is not such an elegant solution as using an epicene pronoun universally, but it is a more swiftly realisable one.