The Need for a Gender-

Neutral Pronoun
 

What is a gender-neutral pronoun? What does English need a new pronoun for,
anyway? Many people have expressed the need for a singular gender-neutral third-person pronoun:
that is, a pronoun to use when someone’s gender is unknown or when the individual is neither male or
female. Such instances occur when addressing transgender and genderqueer people who don’t feel
comfortable being addressed with masculine or feminine pronouns, computers or robots with artificial
intelligence, sexless fictional creatures, angels, and the God of many monotheistic religions. “He,”
“she,” or “it” won’t do, “one” doesn’t work when speaking of a specific person, e.g. “Samus washed
one’s dishes,” and in some cases even a singular “they” just won’t work – specifically when a name is
used, e.g. “Charlie tied their shoes” or “Sam thought they were late to the party.” (For more
information, check out the comprehensive links page.)

Over the centuries, hundreds of new words, or neologisms, have been proposed, with the vast
majority being abandoned by all but their creators. There are a few exceptions: the pronoun “co” used
by residents of the Twin Oaks Intentional Community, “zie/hir” and its derivatives used by people in
the transgender/genderqueer community, and Spivak pronouns (ey/em/eir) used in the genderqueer
community as well as in some text-based online games and computer textbooks. There is some valid
argument by linguists that it’d be extremely difficult for the English language to pick up new pronouns
at all, but in the Internet age, sometimes your only clue toward someone’s gender is a username, and,
like the long-awaited adoption of the honorific “Ms.”, the need for a gender-free pronoun may
overcome the barrier of language limits. (I originally found the comparison of epicene pronouns and
“Ms.” in an essay by Jed Hartman.)

One of the biggest problems facing the adoption of a new gender-neutral pronoun is the lack of unity
and organization among supporters of the idea. People propose new pronouns without knowing about
the scores of previous ones, and people interested in using gender-neutral pronouns can’t find any
they like, or can’t figure out why they like or dislike certain forms. My aim is to compare and contrast
the most usable epicene pronouns, and also provide text with the pronouns inserted so those curious
can see each pronoun in action. My criteria were influenced by that of the two most in-depth
comparisons of gender-free pronouns I’ve found: one in the Evaluation page of the Gender-Neutral
Pronoun FAQ, and the other in the Pronouns article on the Footnotes site. I’ve included a couple
variations that neither of them explored, but their arguments were very influential to mine.

The title of each pronoun links to the first few pages (and concluding paragraph) of Lewis
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, available for free from Project Gutenberg. I did this not
because I think Alice should be made gender-neutral, but so that the readers have the opportunity to
see for themselves how each pronoun fits into a larger narrative, one many of them may already be
familiar with.

 
This table was taken and edited from this Wikipedia page.

Nominative Objective Possessive Possessive

  Reflexive
(subject) (object) determiner Pronoun
Traditional pronouns
His eyes
He He laughed I called him That is his He likes himself
gleam
Her eyes She
She She laughed I called her That is hers
gleam likes herself
It likes
It It laughed I called it Its eyes gleam That is its
itself
Their eyes That They
They They laughed I called them
gleam is theirs like themselves
Invented pronouns
Nir eyes Ne
Ne Ne laughed I called nem That is nirs
gleam likes nemself
Vis eyes
Ve Ve laughed I called ver That is vis Ve likes verself
gleam
Eir eyes Ey likes
Spivak Ey laughed I called em That is eirs
gleam emself
Ze (or zie) Hir eyes
Ze laughed I called hir That is hirs Ze likes hirself
and hir gleam
Ze (or zie) Zir eyes
Ze laughed I called zir That is zirs Ze likes zirself
and zir gleam
Xyr eyes
Xe Xe laughed I called xem That is xyrs Xe likes xemself
gleam

1. Ne/nem/nir/nirs/nemself

Ease of pronunciation: 4/5

Distinction from other pronouns: 4/5
Gender neutrality: 4.5/5

Although relatively obscure, this has become my favorite contender. It follows the formats of existing
pronouns while staying more gender-neutral than any but Spivak – you could call it gender-balanced.
“Ne” is n+(he or she), “nem” is n+her+him, “nir” is n+him+her. Because it has a different form for
each declension, it doesn’t lean towards following male or female patterns – patterns made very
obvious when you read works about obviously male characters with female-patterned pronoun forms.
The letter “n” itself can stand for “neutral” – a property we are searching for. A reader may be
uncertain how to pronounce “ne” at first glance, but pronunciation of the other forms is relatively
obvious. One problem when reading aloud is that the “n” sometimes blends with words ending in “n”
or “m,” but it didn’t occur as often and wasn’t as problematic as “zir” with words ending in an “s” or “z”
sound (see entry #4).

2. Ve/ver/vis/vis/verself
Ease of pronunciation: 4/5
Distinction from other pronouns: 4/5
Gender neutrality: 4/5

“Ve” is another good option, found in some science fiction, without a specific bias towards either
gender. The declension is again gender-balanced, being evenly split between forms that resemble “he”
and “she.” But it does feel a bit more gender-heavy than “ne” – since “ver” and “vis” directly derive
from “her” and “his,” readers are more easily reminded of the gendered forms.  There are some cases
where “ve” will bleed with words ending in “f” or “v” sounds, like “of” or “if,” but this wasn’t a problem
very often – maybe about as often as with “ne.”

3. Spivak (ey/em/eir/eirs/eirself)

Ease of pronunciation: 4/5

Distinction from other pronouns:2/5
Gender neutrality: 5/5

Spivak is the most gender-free pronoun that parses well in English (as opposed to “ta” or “thon,”
which are also gender-free but simply don’t work in the English language), since it derives from “they”
rather than from a mix of “he” and “she.” The problem is, not only does it remove the “th” from “they,”
it also changes its grammatical structure. Even ‘singular’ they is grammatically plural (i.e. you would
say “they were in the building” rather than “they was in the building”), while Spivak is grammatically
singular. The claim that the Spivak pronoun is “more natural” to say than other neologisms is undercut
by the fact that it doesn’t actually have the same structure as the already-existing forms.

Furthermore, when spoken aloud, not only does “em” sound like “him” in speech, but people already
write a plural “them” as em or ’em in informal writing, making the Spivak pronoun more ambiguous.

4. Ze/Hir and its derivatives

(ze/hir/hir/hirs/hirself) (zie/hir/hir/hirs/hirself)
(ze/zir/zir/zirs/zirself) (zie/zir/zir/zirs/zirself)

Ease of pronunciation: 3/5

Distinction from other pronouns: 2/5
Gender neutrality: 2.5/5

“Ze and hir” is the most popular form of gender-free pronoun in the online genderqueer community,
derived from the earlier “sie and hir,” which were considered too feminine/female-sounding since “sie”
is German for “she” (among other things), and “hir” was a feminine pronoun in Middle English. The
current forms are still leaning on feminine, by using the same declensions as “she.” “Hir,” although it’s
supposed to be pronounced “here,” is read as “her” by many people unfamiliar with the term, and the
less-gendered alternative, “zir,” along with “ze” itself, often runs into problems when it follows a word
ending in an “s” or “z” (or “th”) sound, sometimes sounding just like “her” and “he.” For example, read
this sentence aloud: “As ze looked up at the stars, ze realized that this was zir favorite moment of
them all.” This isn’t as much of a problem with “ze,” which doesn’t follow words ending in s/z terribly
often, but the problem occurs much more often with “zir” than it did with any of the declensions of
“ne” or “ve.”

 
5. Xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself

Ease of pronunciation: 2/5

Distinction from other pronouns: 2.5/5
Gender neutrality: 3/5

“Xe,” it turns out, is supposed to be pronounced the same as “ze” – apparently it was an aesthetic
change in order to distance the pronoun from its “sie/hir” roots one step further. It also balances the
genders in the way “ze” does not – but it runs into the same pronunciation problems when following
words ending in “s” or “z” sounds, and the pronunciation is much more difficult to guess at – I
assumed the “x” would be pronounced “sh” or “ks,” which would be either much too gendered or much
too unpronounceable to even be considered. All in all, it has slight advantages over zie/hir in its
gender-neutrality, but it keeps the same difficulties in pronunciation and is even more difficult to read
than the original.

Honorable Mention: Shklee (links to YouTube)

It’s nearly impossible to pronounce, but that’s kind of the point. Used in the Futurama film The Beast
With A Billion Backs, it was the pronoun used for Yivo, a planet-sized alien of indeterminate gender.
Years ago when I first started searching for and asking about gender-neutral pronouns, there were
cases when this was the only gender-neutral pronoun anyone was aware of.

What’s next?

This post and the list of comprehensive links is an attempt to consolidate information about gender-
neutral pronouns for people who are interested but simply didn’t know about them.

The next step will be convincing people who like the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun but don’t think
people would ever adopt one that it is possible. I’m not sure how to tackle this problem yet. There’s
two possibilities I’ve been able to think of: firstly, to look into people in the communities where a
gender-neutral pronoun has been adopted and ask them about difficulties they faced when
implementing the word, whether they got used to using it over time, and why or why not. Secondly
would be to form some sort of experiment where people who hadn’t used gender-neutral pronouns
before could try using them. It’d have to be in some sort of closed environment, since the effort of
teaching every single person you know about these pronouns just isn’t worth it in experimental
stages. Looking at the trouble transgender people have had trying to get others to use new pronouns
for them, it’s not worth the effort for anyone just interested in the general sense. If you start using the
pronoun in an environment where everyone knows what you’re talking about and you don’t have to
explain yourself to each new person, most of the tedium involved in experimenting with a new
pronoun disappears. I’m not sure how to go about something like that, though – maybe start an online
forum, or a group within an already-existing social network? Not just the “I support this” groups on
Facebook, but one where people could experiment conversing with these pronouns.

I’ll keep thinking about this, but if you have any ideas or insight, or know of anyone else already trying
something like this, drop me a line in the comments. I’d be delighted to hear about it.