I parsed your comment as: “using genderless pronouns reduces sexism; but using genderless language does not reduce sexism”.
Then I imagined a graph where x-axis is how large part of the language is gendered, and y-axis is how much this makes people sexist. So at the beginning the curve starts going down (because this is what you believe), and at the end it jumps back right to the original level (to catch the new data point). Sounds ad-hoc to me.
Or let me put it in different words: If you think that language structure has an effect on sexism, how exactly would you structure the language to produce minimum sexism possible (ideally zero)? For some reason, removing gramatical genders completely seems not optimal. -- So if you would start with a language that does not have gramatical genders, would you actually add them to the language to make it less sexist?
Note: You have an option to defy my data, because I actually don’t have a proof that Hungarians are not less sexist. It honestly seems to me so, but that is not completely reliable.
Another option is to say that the influence of language on sexism is not strictly f(language), but more like f(language.today, language.yesterday), so it is not precisely the absence of single-gendered pronouns, but rather their recent (or ongoing) removal that reduces sexism. (They I would say that it is backwards: non-sexism removes pronouns, pronouns don’t remove sexism.)
I previously believed that removing some amount of mentions of gender in language (e.g. replacing “he or she” with “they”) would reduce sexism. If I met a society where white people were referred to as “whe” and black people as “ble”, I would think “Wow, that society is pretty racist”. By analogy, I think our society is pretty sexist. There are reasons why removing some gendered language, like pronouns, or all grammatical gender, would make people less sexist; for example, they would not be constantly primed to think of gender and thus act in gender-dependent ways. Hungary disproves this (no need to defy your data, I believe you).
However, I still believe that removing unbalanced mentions of gender (e.g. replacing epicene “he” with “he or she”) reduces sexism. (In the aforementioned society, there’s a proverb that goes “An Englishwhite’s house is whis castle”, and if asked everyone tells you that it also applies to blacks and other races.) They don’t just constantly remind people that gender exists, they also remind them that there is a default gender for people to be and anything else is a special quirk. As efforts to remove these mentions usually come from people who fight sexism in general, it’s very hard to test whether there is any causation flowing this way rather than the other one.
I also believe that having a pronoun applicable to genderqueers helps, because it contributes to making it a recognizable category (wearing black, not wearing a clown suit). This is probably swamped by other ways to make the existence of more than two genders noticeable.
While I was offline, I realized that there are two aspects of this situation. First, whether gendered words exist in given language or not. Second, whether they are used correctly or incorrectly (such as using male pronoun “he” in situations where female person is also possible). These are partially independent (even in a language without gramatical genders it is possible to use constructs such as “director-man” and “director-woman”, and then incorrectly use the word “director-man” in situations not limited to male persons).
Now in your comment I see the third aspect; whether there is a gender-neutral pronoun for people who don’t identify as “he” or “she”. Construct “he or she” is bad, because even when it tries to describe a superset, does it by enumerating subsets. I don’t see any problem with singular “they”, but I am not a native English speaker.
I am afraid that inventing a new pronoun specifically for genderqueers would lead to infinite discussions… such as whether the same pronoun should be used for all kinds of genderqueers, or whether there should be different pronouns for different groups, and everyone would accuse everyone of insensitivity because they use last-year pronouns instead of the most current update. (Evidence: there is still not consensus on the gender-neutral pronoun, and that should be much easier task.)
Yup, those are the three aspects I’m talking about.
I’ve never seen anyone demand a pronoun that didn’t cover binary people, only gender-neutral ones. Having to make do with “he”, “she” and combinations thereof is insufficient.
I parsed your comment as: “using genderless pronouns reduces sexism; but using genderless language does not reduce sexism”.
Then I imagined a graph where x-axis is how large part of the language is gendered, and y-axis is how much this makes people sexist. So at the beginning the curve starts going down (because this is what you believe), and at the end it jumps back right to the original level (to catch the new data point). Sounds ad-hoc to me.
Or let me put it in different words: If you think that language structure has an effect on sexism, how exactly would you structure the language to produce minimum sexism possible (ideally zero)? For some reason, removing gramatical genders completely seems not optimal. -- So if you would start with a language that does not have gramatical genders, would you actually add them to the language to make it less sexist?
Note: You have an option to defy my data, because I actually don’t have a proof that Hungarians are not less sexist. It honestly seems to me so, but that is not completely reliable.
Another option is to say that the influence of language on sexism is not strictly f(language), but more like f(language.today, language.yesterday), so it is not precisely the absence of single-gendered pronouns, but rather their recent (or ongoing) removal that reduces sexism. (They I would say that it is backwards: non-sexism removes pronouns, pronouns don’t remove sexism.)
That’s not what I said. Let me rephrase:
I previously believed that removing some amount of mentions of gender in language (e.g. replacing “he or she” with “they”) would reduce sexism. If I met a society where white people were referred to as “whe” and black people as “ble”, I would think “Wow, that society is pretty racist”. By analogy, I think our society is pretty sexist. There are reasons why removing some gendered language, like pronouns, or all grammatical gender, would make people less sexist; for example, they would not be constantly primed to think of gender and thus act in gender-dependent ways. Hungary disproves this (no need to defy your data, I believe you).
However, I still believe that removing unbalanced mentions of gender (e.g. replacing epicene “he” with “he or she”) reduces sexism. (In the aforementioned society, there’s a proverb that goes “An Englishwhite’s house is whis castle”, and if asked everyone tells you that it also applies to blacks and other races.) They don’t just constantly remind people that gender exists, they also remind them that there is a default gender for people to be and anything else is a special quirk. As efforts to remove these mentions usually come from people who fight sexism in general, it’s very hard to test whether there is any causation flowing this way rather than the other one.
I also believe that having a pronoun applicable to genderqueers helps, because it contributes to making it a recognizable category (wearing black, not wearing a clown suit). This is probably swamped by other ways to make the existence of more than two genders noticeable.
While I was offline, I realized that there are two aspects of this situation. First, whether gendered words exist in given language or not. Second, whether they are used correctly or incorrectly (such as using male pronoun “he” in situations where female person is also possible). These are partially independent (even in a language without gramatical genders it is possible to use constructs such as “director-man” and “director-woman”, and then incorrectly use the word “director-man” in situations not limited to male persons).
Now in your comment I see the third aspect; whether there is a gender-neutral pronoun for people who don’t identify as “he” or “she”. Construct “he or she” is bad, because even when it tries to describe a superset, does it by enumerating subsets. I don’t see any problem with singular “they”, but I am not a native English speaker.
I am afraid that inventing a new pronoun specifically for genderqueers would lead to infinite discussions… such as whether the same pronoun should be used for all kinds of genderqueers, or whether there should be different pronouns for different groups, and everyone would accuse everyone of insensitivity because they use last-year pronouns instead of the most current update. (Evidence: there is still not consensus on the gender-neutral pronoun, and that should be much easier task.)
Yup, those are the three aspects I’m talking about.
I’ve never seen anyone demand a pronoun that didn’t cover binary people, only gender-neutral ones. Having to make do with “he”, “she” and combinations thereof is insufficient.