my latest windmill to tilt at

[rone]

English already has perfectly useful gender-neutral pronouns: it, its. Use them. Do not use they, them for singular objects. Do not use the abhorrent, artificial 'hir', 'zie', 'blim', 'gur', or whatever. Yes, people can be called 'it'. Deal with it.

Comments

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

Yay! Someone else who agrees with me. I prefer 'they' to 'it', but...

hir and zie and the rest are abominations. They're ugly, they sound ugly, and argh!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I once read an essay (I think it was a reader contribution to one of those silly "People's Almanac" volumes) that attempted to introduce gender-neutral pronouns beginning with the Old English thorn. þe and þim, or something like that. Yes, this person decided that the correct way to do gender-neutral pronouns was to modify the alphabet. Talk about overengineering.

Greg Egan used ve/ver/vis in a couple of science-fiction novels that had many genderless individuals in them. They worked OK except that it appeared that the copyeditor had changed them back to standard third-person pronouns here and there.

Ursula Le Guin used male pronouns for Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness, then later decided that that had been a bad idea and did other things in subsequent stories about them.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Greg Egan used ve/ver/vis in a couple of science-fiction novels that had many genderless individuals in them.

This is perhaps of interest with inference to the very unusual case you mention: 'science fiction novels with many genderless individuals'. But in practice there are very few genderless individuals that one encounters. When you are writing instructions for equipment to be used by men or women, for instance, you do not assume that your audience is genderless.

As a clinical neurologist I am occasionally called on to visit the neonatal ward to evaluate newborns with developmental abnormalities. Some of these individuals, such as they are, possess no immediately identifiable gender. I can tell you that ve/ver/vis is not used in this case to refer to the baby in question. Rather, FISH chromosomal analysis is obtained on an emergency basis, and if this is also ambiguous, a gender is bestowed upon the child by joint parental/medical decree.

The moral: people don't like the genderless state or anything that presumes it. Trying to modify the language to incorporate this concept, then, is a silly idea. Or to quote Montaigne, "those who would combat usage with grammar make fools of themselves."

I note that Ron has removed his injunction that commenters to his LJ may not followup unless they are mocking him as strongly as possible, so I will stop here.

[jwgh]

The fact that English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun, and that the various workarounds to this are not always appropriate, really bugs some people, and the solutions proposed to it are almost always absurdly radical schemes that have a slim-to-none chance of catching on with the general populace.

The use of made-up gender-neutral pronouns in science fiction novels (or, really, any kind of writing, but science fiction is where I most often have seen it) tends to be a really big turn-off to me. In the Egan novel it was a big obstacle for me to overcome, although eventually I did accept it, since the pronouns were coined to describe an actual new gender, so there was a motivation to it. I'm not sure what pronoun Egan used, or would have used, to describe a generic being whose gender was unknown (not known if the being was male, female, or genderless), but I think it didn't arise.

I also vaguely recall reading a book where both 'he' and 'she' had been replaced by the gender-neutral 'e', which I thought was reasonably clever and actually possible under certain circumstances (if an english-speaking society became mostly illeterate it wouldn't surprise me too much if that's the direction it evolved in, given that there are already dialects where something like this occurs, maybe).

In some of Lois McMaster Bujold books hermaphrodites are somewhat common and the pronoun that is used for them is 'it'.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Iain Banks, whose culture novels contain a number of genderless characters (as well as one novel that contains a third gender called Apex), used it/its in both cases. At one point the topic came up and the book exposited that while everyone's talking in Marain (the language of The Culture) which has no gender pronouns, though there are ways of establishing someone's gender if necessary, it's quite possible that by the time you read the story in question, it will have been translated from the machine-perfected Marain language to the language of whatever backwater language the reader uses, and any gender conventions put in place after the fact.