This post isn’t totally about the culture war topic du jour. Not at first.
As with any other topic that soaks up angst like an ultra-absorbent sponge, I wonder how many have lost track of how we arrived here. Why are pronouns? Pronouns have always been meant to serve as a shortcut substitute reference for other nouns, and the efficiency they provide is starkly demonstrated through their boycott:
Abdulrahmanmustafa went to the store because Abdulrahmanmustafa wanted to buy groceries for Abdulrahmanmustafa’s dinner. When Abdulrahmanmustafa arrived, Abdulrahmanmustafa realized that Abdulrahmanmustafa had forgotten Abdulrahmanmustafa’s wallet, so Abdulrahmanmustafa had to return to Abdulrahmanmustafa’s house to get Abdulrahmanmustafa’s wallet.
So that’s definitely a mouthful, and using he/his in place of Abdulrahmanmustafa helps lubricate. Again, pronouns are nothing more than a shortcut referent. Zoom out a bit and consider all the other communication shortcuts we regularly use. We could say National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or we can take the first letter of each word and just concatenate it into NASA instead. We could append ‘dollars’ after a number, or we could just use $ instead.
The tradeoff with all of these shortcuts is precision. Depending on the context, NASA, for example, might also refer to the National Association of Students of Architecture in India, or some mountain in Sweden. Dollar signs typically refer to American dollars, but they’re also used to denote several other currency denominations. The same risk applies to pronouns. It’s not a problem when we’re dealing with only one subject, but notice what happens when we introduce another dude to the pile:
John told Mark that he should administer the medication immediately because he was in critical condition, but he refused.
Wait, who is in critical condition? Which one refused? Who’s supposed to be administering the meds? And administer to whom? Impossible to answer without additional context.
One way to deal with ambiguous referents is to just increase the number of possible referents. Abbreviations could have a higher level of fidelity if they took the first two letters of every word instead of just one, then no one would risk confusing NaAeSpAd with NaAsStAr. For full fidelity, abbreviations should use every letter of every word but then…obviously there’s an inherent tension between efficiency and accuracy with using any communication shortcut.
Same thing for pronouns. You need just enough of them to distinguish subjects, but not so much that they lose their intuitive meaning. When cops are interviewing witnesses about a suspect, they’ll glom onto easily observable and distinguishing physical traits. Was the suspect a man or a woman? White or black? Tall or short? Etc. Personal pronouns follow a similar template by cleaving ambiguity along well-understood axes, breaking down the population of potential subjects into distinct, intuitive segments. Pronouns can distinguish singular versus plural (I & we), between the cool and the uncool (me & you), and of course masculine versus feminine (he & she).
Much like double-checking a count to reduce the risk of error, pronouns carve language into rough divisions. The classic he/she cleave splits half the population in one step, significantly reducing the risk of confusion. Consider the repurposed example:
John told Maria that she should administer the medication immediately because he was in critical condition, but she refused.
A pronoun repertoire cannot eliminate all ambiguity, but ideally it narrows it enough for any remaining uncertainty to be manageable. The key lies in finding the balance: too few pronouns, and communication becomes vague and cumbersome; too many, and it gets over-complicated. It depends on the circumstances. There are scenarios where the ambiguity is never worth the efficiency gain, like in legal contracts. A properly written legal contract will never use pronouns, because no one wants to risk a protracted legal battle in the future over which he was responsible for insuring the widget shipments, just to save a few typing keystrokes.
I’m sorry if I come off as a patronizing kindergarten teacher for the above. Before jumping into any rumble arenas, I think it’s vital to emphatically establish the reason pronouns exist is for linguistic efficiency. If your pronoun use is not advancing that cause, it might be helpful to explain what it’s for.
So, onto the red meat. I’m not a singular they Truther; it definitely exists and, contrary to some consternations, its utilization is already ubiquitous and intuitive (e.g. “If anyone calls, make sure they leave a message.”). But there’s no denying that expanding the They franchise will necessarily increase ambiguity by slurring two well-worn axes of distinction (he/she & singular/plural). By no means would this be the end of the world, but it will require some compensating efforts in other areas to maintain clarity, perhaps by relying more on proper nouns and less on pronouns.
Consistent with my aversion of ambiguity, I’ve deliberately avoided using the g-word. I recognize some people have a strident attachment to the specific gender of the pronoun others use to refer to them (and yes, using a semi-ambiguous them in this sentence is intentional and thematically fitting, but you get it).
The most charitable framework I can posit on this issue is that gendered pronouns are an aesthetic designator, and either are, or should be, untethered from any biological anchor. So while she might conjure up female, its usage is not making any affirmative declarations about the pronoun subject’s ability to conceive and carry a pregnancy. This is uncontroversially true, such as when gendered pronouns are applied to inanimate objects. No one saying “she looks beautiful” about a sports car, is talking about vehicular gender archetypes, or about sexual reproduction roles — unless they’re somehow convinced the car improves their own odds in that department.
The problem, of course, is that my framework does not explain the handwringing. Anyone who harbors such an intense attachment to specific gendered pronoun preferences clearly sees it as much more than a superficial aesthetic designator. If their insistence is driven by the desire to be validated as embodying that specific gender then it’s not a gambit that will work, for the same reasons it does not work for the sports car.
On my end, I’m just going to carry on and use whatever pronouns, but only so long as their efficiency/clarity trade-off remains worth it. As inherently intended.
The structure of language kind of screwed us here. Picture literally any reasonable policy for discussing each other’s religious affiliation in the workplace. Now implement that policy, but your workers speak a language where the grammar only functions if you know whether each referent is a “True” christian.
Yes, and there were areas I could’ve gotten into in terms of how other languages rely on pronouns. One that I am most familiar with is French and its distinction between singular and plural ‘you’ (tu & vous), and vous also can be singular if used formally. So if anyone is translating from French, you have to make a judgment call regarding whether each vous is plural or formal singular. Some information is inevitably lost in the transfer.
Making up something analogous to Crocker’s rules but specifically for pronouns would probably be a good thing: a voluntary commitment to surrender any pronoun preferences (gender related or otherwise) in service of communication efficiency.
Now that I think about it, a literal and expansive reading of Crocker’s rules themselves includes such a surrender of the right to enforce pronoun preferences.
This makes you sound like a bit of a straw vulcan imo. All I have to do is imagine how jarring and upsetting it would be to have everyone start calling me “she” and it’s very obvious how, for almost all people, what pronoun others call them is deeply emotionally salient.
What would be upsetting about being called “she”? I don’t share your intuition. Whenever I imagine being misgendered (or am misgendered, e.g., on a voice call with a stranger), I don’t feel any strong emotional reaction. To the point that I generally will not correct them.
I could imagine it being very upsetting if I am misgendered by someone who should know me well enough not to misgender me, or if someone purposefully misgenders me. But the misgendering specifically is not the main offense in these two cases.
Perhaps myself and ymeskhout are less tied to our gender identity than most?
I feel complimented when people inadvertently misgender me on this website. It implies I have successfully modeled the Other.
If random strangers start calling you “she”, that implies you look feminine enough to be mistaken for a woman. I think most men would prefer to look masculine for many reasons: not being mistaken for a woman, being conventionally attractive, being assumed to have a ‘manly’ rather than ‘effeminate’ personality, looking your age, etc.
If you look obviously masculine, then being misgendered constantly would just be bewildering. Surely something is signaling that you use feminine pronouns.
If it’s just people online misgendering you based on your writing, then that’s less weird. But I think it still would bother some people for some of the reasons above.
That’s the thing, I generally present as very masculine and if anyone referred to me as ‘she’ I would find it more confusing than anything else. If I actually cared, maybe I’d look for what effeminate signals I gave off, but I can’t imagine a scenario where I would find it offensive or get mad at the person.
It is important to note that people have a wide range of attachment to their gender identity, ranging from willing to undergo extreme body modification in order to match their gender identity, to those who don’t care in the slightest.
The issue is that cisgender is the default, and if you don’t have a strong attachment to your gender identity, you have no reason to change the label. Hence, cisgendered people have a wide range of attachment to their gender identity, from strongly identifying with it to no attachment at all.
(There is also the group of agender, which includes those who have deeply examined their gender identity and decided that they don’t really care (and probably also want to signal their examination and non-caring of gender identity))
Someone who is transgender obviously has an attachment to their gender identity, and this is obviously from which the Pronoun Discourse stems. They have a strong preference for a gender, and a preference to be referred to with the appropriate pronouns, and thus being misgendered is upsetting, as their preferences are violated.
(Of course, most of this rests on the ability to communicate the preference, and accidental violations when the preference was not communicated are less egregious than deliberate violations.)
Otherwise misgendering can be upsetting if it is tied to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and attempting an insult based off those stereotypes.
I also don’t think it’s useful to try and learn much about pronouns qua pronouns social battles over them. Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
I don’t think everyone proxies it that way—I know there are some people who are just old-fashioned, or passionate about prescriptive grammar, or have essentialist beliefs about gender but are libertarian about others’ behavior. I think that if everyone had very high confidence that someone not using the pronouns they requested meant that at worst that person mildly disapproves of them but would still actively defend their civil + legal + human rights, there would probably be a lot less of the handwringing you mention, and we’d be able to learn a lot more about the fundamental intrinsic meaning of pronouns.
There’s an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.
I guess refusing to use someone’s preferred pronouns is weak Bayesian evidence for wanting to have them killed, but the conclusion is so unlikely it’s probably not appropriate to raise it to the level of serious consideration.
Depends on the context. There are definitely contexts where a white man says n***** and it gives me the sense that he at least fantasizes about killing African Americans. Similar contexts do occur with trans people and certain groups of white men. If you were occasionally the target of such veiled threats, it might start becoming hard not to lump less directly threatening instances of similar-ish behavior in with the truly threatening.
I believe the psychological perception of others by gender, and the ‘defaultness’ of the notion of gender in humans, cause(d) more bad than good (at least when discluding the evolutionary era). This motivated me to switch to using the non-gendering pronoun ‘they’ for almost[1] everyone.
I haven’t found my use of ‘they’ by default to require nontrivial compensation to maintain clarity. Any ambiguity introduced in a draft is removed by one of the simple checks I try to run across all of my writing for others:
if referent of a word (namely 'that', 'this', 'it', or 'they') is unclear : replace with direct referent word or rephrase to remove unclarity.Also, I think this helps match the reader’s interpretation to my intended meaning. Among humans, a being’s ‘gender’ has a lot of connotative meaning. I think not introducing those connotations is instrumental to eliminating unintended ways my text could be interpreted, which in my experience is the real difficulty with writing.
excepting beings who this would harm
and excepting some contexts where I expect some readers might be confused by singular they
I don’t think the sentence is actually as ambiguous as you’re saying. The first and third “he”s both have to refer to Mark, because you can only refuse to do something after being told you should do it. Only the second “he” could be either John or Mark.
No, because John could be speaking about himself administering the medication. It’s also possible to refuse to do something you’ve already acknowledged you should do, so the 3rd he could still be John regardless of who is being told what.