I recently received an email. It had a signature below which read “Preferred pronouns: He, Him, His.” It was the first time I found myself confronted by gender identity linguistics. I’d heard of it, of course. It all began when gender issues came to the fore. With trans people becoming more visible and more vocal, their particular sensitivities are being addressed. So, it should be of little surprise that pronoun use is among the salient issues on some trans people’s minds.
One can easily understand how irksome it is to be called by the wrong pronoun. Professionals, like health care givers and law enforcement officers, are often the culprits. But even friends and sundry strangers could be guilty of the offense. I always go by anatomical and other visual cues. However, with today’s trends of gender fluidity, it’s not quite so simple.
So I Googled “gender pronouns” and found a UW-Milwaukee LGBT Resource Center webpage with handy lists of 30 newly created pronouns as well as a helpful “How to” guide. In addition to the familiar he and she, with their respective objective, possessive and reflexive forms, were half a dozen others. They look like Dutch actually. The nominatives include zie, sie, ey, ve, tey and e. There wasn’t a pronunciation guide and none were defined as to whom they might refer. I asked a trans acquaintance to clarify. Apparently, pronoun choice is random and left up to the individual to decide which suits them at any given time. That’s why asking someone their preferred pronoun is so important. The website even proscribes etiquette for apologizing if you accidently use the wrong one. In fact, that act of apologizing itself is susceptible to inadvertently insulting the subject since it calls impolite attention to the person’s pronoun preference and could make them feel dysphoric. Caveat: Apologize at your own risk. Oh, cisgender? If you identify with the gender you are assigned at birth, you are cis. Cis is the Latinate prefix meaning “on this side of.” Its antonym trans means “on the other side of.” (I thought it was an abbreviation in the German manner for some longer word or phrase like “congenitally inherited sexuality” or something.) Anyway, non-cissy types now get to pick their own pronoun.
Speaking of German, I also looked up the German solution to the pronoun problem. The obstacle in German is its masculine, feminine and neuter forms for everything (Read Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language”). Beyond the pronouns, articles and suffixes are gender specific and, of course, everything has to agree. Adding pronouns is the last thing on their minds. In fact, German linguists are trying to reduce it all. That’s usually how language development works—grammar and spelling get less complicated over time. That helps increase literacy and gender equality.
Meanwhile, I saw an instructional cartoon showing a seemingly innocent remark a cis person might say to zim, sir, em, ver or ter and what zie, sie, ey, ve or tey really hear. “It’s so hard to switch pronouns,” said cis. “Trans people are an inconvenience to me,” they heard.
