Have you ever read an email or seen an Instagram account in which people used something like [he/him/his], [she/her/her] or [they/them/their]? Do you know what it means? Do you know why you should pay close attention to it? Here you’ll find the answer to all these (and other) questions regarding gender neutral pronouns.
What Gender-Neutral Pronouns Are
When people learn English, be it as a first or an additional language, they learn a group of small words that they need to use when referring to someone or something. These words are called pronouns, and you can see them in the table below:
| SUBJECT PRONOUNS | OBJECT PRONOUNS | POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVES | POSSESSIVE PRONOUNS | REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS |
| I | me | my | mine | myself |
| you | you | your | yours | yourself |
| he | him | his | his | himself |
| she | her | her | hers | herself |
| it | it | its | its | itself |
| we | us | our | ours | ourselves |
| they | them | their | theirs | themself/themselves |
You’ve probably already noticed that when society wants to refer to a man, the triad he/him/his is used. On the other hand, when referring to a woman, she/her/her is used. That’s it. This fact has been accepted for a long, long time. But there’s a serious problem in this situation and people have been able to discuss it more openly only recently. What about people who are nonbinary? That is, people who don’t self-identify neither as male nor female.
Gender Nonconforming Community
The visibility of marginalized communities has increased lately. This is not to say that everything is perfect nowadays. There’s still much work to do. We can’t deny, however, that society has been a little bit more open to discuss questions related to gender than it was in the past. The feminist movement, issues concerning ethnicity, racism, etc. are among topics you can easily find being discussed in different spaces. The issues concerning the LGBTQIA+ community have been brought up as well.
Among countless important themes people can discuss with this community, we can highlight the issue of gender conformity. Traditionally, society always recognized two clear-cut genders, namely male and female. This has oppressed a multitude of people that don’t self-identify neither as a man nor as a woman. Nowadays, they are known as nonbinary or genderqueer.
These people face a lot of challenges in their everyday life, be it with their families, with the religious culture they live in, with the job market, and so on. They also face an important linguistic challenge. If traditionally society has only recognized the male and the female genders, and if language is a product of culture, it’s not hard to realize why we have only two (gendered!) pronouns to refer to a specific person: he and she. So what can be done in terms of language when we need to refer to nonbinary people? Most importantly, what can be done for these people to feel that they are respected when they are addressed?
Gender-Neutral Pronouns
To solve this problem, or at least minimize it, gender neutral pronouns have been brought up (again!). If you think the use of they/them/their to refer to a single person is something completely new, you’re wrong. Jane Austen in her novel Pride and Prejudice (1813), for example, used they as a gender neutral pronoun. Her use was a little bit different from ours, though.
It’s known that singular they was used centuries before. Only more recently, he took its place as a gender neutral pronoun, for example, instead of saying ‘if the student didn’t do their homework, they will have a low grade’, people started saying ‘if the student didn’t do his homework, he will have a low grade’, adopting he to refer to both men and women.
While grammarians complain about the use of singular they, studies have shown that the use of gender neutral pronoun reduces biases and boosts positive feelings towards women and the LGBTQIA+ community. So, an important question that remains is whether we want to be stuck in time and refuse to adopt it because some people say we shouldn’t or whether we’ll remember that language is alive and adapts to its sociocultural environment, thus adopt it and feel well because others feel well too. Important dictionaries have already updated their corpora to include singular they. In fact, Merriam-Webster, one of the most important English dictionaries in the U.S.A., chose they as the word of the year in 2019.
It’s important to point out that there are other pronouns (sie, hir, hir, hirs, hirself and zie, zir, zir, zirs, zirself, for example) that have been used as gender neutral as well. However, singular they is the most widespread one.
All of these facts have reinforced the widespread phenomenon we see on social media. That is the inclusion of the pronouns people want others to use when referring to them. So, if you see [he/him/his], [she/her/her] or [they/them/their], don’t be disrespectful, adopt them when talking to that person.
Also, when you get to know someone, don’t hesitate to ask them what pronouns they want you to use if you are not sure about it. Showing respect for the person’s identity will be a wonderful way to start a new relationship.
If you want to read more tips on vocabulary, click here!
