Gender Pronouns in SF

This week T. Kingfisher's new horror novel, WHAT FEASTS AT NIGHT, was published. Sequel to WHAT MOVES THE DEAD (a retelling of "The Fall of the House of Usher"), it features the same narrator, "sworn soldier" Alex Easton. The language of Alex's homeland, Gallacia, a tiny imaginary country in central Europe, has at least six personal pronouns. In addition to the typical masculine and feminine, they have a pronoun for rocks (and inanimate objects in general, I assume) and one applied only to God. Pre-adolescent children go by a special non-gendered pronoun, which is also used by most priests and nuns. Someone learning the language who accidentally calls a child "he" or "she" must apologize profusely to avoid suspicion of being a pervert. Sworn soldiers adopt a nonbinary identity and the pronoun "ka" (subjective) or "kan" (objective and possessive).

The idea of having a unique pronoun for God appeals to me. It would avert controversy over whether the Supreme Being is masculine or feminine. In much of Madeleine L'Engle's nonfiction work, she uses the Hebrew word "El" as the divine pronoun for that very purpose.

The masculine, feminine, and neuter system familiar to us is far from universal in real-world languages. French, of course, has only masculine and feminine, no neuter. Even "they" is gendered. Recently I was surprised to learn that Mandarin has no gendered pronouns at all. Japanese, on the other hand, has a daunting variety of pronouns with diverse shades of meaning. There are first-person pronouns used primarily by men and others primarily by women. I've read that Japanese women in positions of authority face the double bind of either referring to themselves in the feminine style and appearing weak or using a male-type version of "I" and sounding masculinized.

A chart of Japanese personal pronouns:

Japanese Pronouns

Until the 19th century, their language didn't even include a term for "she." A word was adapted for that purpose to provide an equivalent for the same part of speech in European languages.

As far as imaginary foreign or extraterrestial languages in speculative fiction are concerned, some authors embrace the concept of inventing pronouns, while others actively dislike and avoid it. At the time of writing THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, Ursula Le Guin fell into the latter category.

Le Guin discusses the gendered language she used in THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, on pages 16 and following of this essay:

Is Gender Necessary? Redux

The italic passages on the right sides of the pages express her later, revised thoughts about the topics covered in the original essay.

She critiques her own refusal to invent new pronouns for the alien society in the novel: "I still dislike invented pronouns, but now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse; and which was an invention of male grammarians, for until the sixteenth century the English generic singular pronoun was they/them/their, as it still is in English and American colloquial speech."

This 2020 article by Ryan Yarber analyzes Le Guin's essay in depth, going into detail about the issue of personal pronouns:

Beyond Gender: Exploring Ursula K. Le Guin's Thought Experiment

As for this issue in real life, people have tried to introduce invented third-person pronouns in order to get away from the awkwardness of "he/she" or using "they" as singular. No such system has widely caught on. While languages freely borrow nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from each other, the basic structural components are far more stubbornly resistant to change.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

The Female of the Species

I've just read a recent book called BITCH: ON THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES, by British zoologist and documentary filmmaker Lucy Cooke. It's a fascinating survey of the long-neglected status of females in biologists' studies of the animal kingdom—or should that be "queendom"? (Unfortunately, I'd be embarrassed to recommend it aloud by the title, a word I've ever spoken only in connection with dog breeding.) As the author describes the state of the field until recent decades, zoologists regarded males as the unquestioned drivers of evolutionary change, with females dismissed as "passive" and boring. She takes on the mission of demonstrating how wrong those scientists were.

She begins at the microscopic level, with gametes, revealing errors in the image of the female's egg as passively floating around waiting to be penetrated by one of the active sperm cells. In fact, the ovum has ways of controlling which sperm will be allowed to fertilize it. Chapter One, "The Anarchy of Sex: What Is a Female?" covers the development of the embryo, what determines its sex, and many examples of ambiguous sex among animals. Cooke goes on in subsequent chapters to explore the "mysteries of mate choice," in which females are much more active than had been assumed in the past, the assertiveness and competitiveness of females of various species, female-dominated animal social groups, how mating patterns can be a competition between male and female, sexual behavior in supposedly monogamous species, nonreproductive sexual encounters, the complicated nature of maternal behaviors, females who devour their mates, "primate politics," parthenogenesis, and the vital importance of older females in the societies of animals such as elephants and orcas. The final chapter, "Beyond the Binary," discusses intersex phenomena, animal homosexuality, and creatures who change sex. Some species can switch back and forth, and one fish is known to change sex up to twenty times in a day for optimal reproductive efficiency. Dedicated science-fiction readers will be reminded of Le Guin's aliens in THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and the chieri in Bradley's Darkover series.

In 1981, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (yes, that's the correct spelling), whom Cooke often cites, published a book on a similar theme, THE WOMAN THAT NEVER EVOLVED. Her study, however, focuses more narrowly on primate and human females. Like Cooke after her, Hrdy's work emphasizes the masculine bias that led over a century of scientists to concentrate overwhelmingly on male animals' biology and behavior, treating females as mere footnotes to the main story. It's a bit mind-boggling that a wide-ranging study published in 2022 still has to start by clearing away that tangle of underbrush. Anyway, Cooke's entertaining and informative book illustrates that we don't have to seek very far on our own planet to find creatures whose biology and behavior may seem as alien as those of many fictional extraterrestrials.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt