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.

Gender Pronouns

Several years ago at a con session on the fantastic Pixar movie INSIDE OUT, starring personified emotions, someone in the audience asked why characters representing feelings had to be identified as male or female. Why did they need genders at all? The answer didn't occur to me until later: English doesn't have a neuter pronoun for a living, sapient creature. Since the characters of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust in the film couldn't be called "it," they had to be labeled either "he" or "she." French, Spanish, etc. classify all nouns as masculine or feminine, not just those that refer to living creatures, with pronouns to match. Some other languages such as German and Latin have masculine, feminine, and neuter. However, as I discovered more recently, this requirement to distinguish the sexes by grammatical gender isn't universal among Earth languages.

I was surprised to learn that many languages have no gender pronouns to identify male and female, e.g, Tagalog, Turkish, Estonian, and some Chinese dialects, among others. Some have grammatical gender categorized by traits other than biological sex, such as animate and inanimate. Here's the Wikipedia article on this topic:

Genderless Languages

The Wikipedia page on the broad subject of gender-neutral pronouns in languages with sex-linked gender distinctions, such as English:

Gender Neutrality in Languages with Gendered Pronouns

A detailed overview of grammatical gender, citing several examples that classify nouns according to criteria other than biological sex:

Grammatical Gender

An English speaker's mind is apt to be boggled by the vast number of personal pronouns in Japanese (mine certainly was upon my first exposure to this fact). Many are distinguished by degrees of formality. Not only third-person but first-person pronouns often have masculine or feminine connotations. Some are used predominantly by a particular sex but not always. And some are gender-neutral.

Japanese Pronouns

I don't hold with the Newspeak premise in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR that language controls thought. (And I don't think many professional linguists nowadays accept that position.) However, available vocabulary does make it easier or harder to talk about certain concepts. I do wonder how American society might be different if English had no gender-specific pronouns. Would people who identify as nonbinary have an easier time if they didn't have to choose invented pronouns or the awkward singular "they"? Would transgender people have it easier if relieved of one difficulty, persuading others to refer to them by their preferred pronouns instead of the "dead" ones? I wonder how language affects such issues in countries with gender-neutral personal pronouns.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Problem with "They"

Nowadays it's not uncommon to meet people who don't identify with either pole of the standard "he" and "she" binary. "It," our only singular neuter pronoun, doesn't work for sentient creatures. "They" is often used as a gender-neutral pronoun in these cases. My elementary school and high school teachers hammered into our heads (and your teachers probably did the same to you if you're close to my age) that singular "they" is ungrammatical and should never be spoken or written by literate persons. Those who hold the contrary position point out that singular "they" for subjects of unknown gender has been around for at least 600 years. I can grit my teeth, defy my early training, and accept that usage in a case like this:

"Somebody left their car keys in the lounge."

That sentence refers to a hypothetical or unidentified person. This example, however, seems fundamentally different to me:

"Lee left their car keys in the lounge."

A pronoun that's nominally plural applied to a single, known individual just sounds weird. The one exception that comes to mind, the "fusion" characters in the animated series STEVEN UNIVERSE (made up of two or three individuals temporarily fused into a composite person), isn't likely to be met in everyday life.

If we don't want to say "they" in place of "he" or "she," though, what do we do? (Well, aside from asking what pronoun a given person prefers, as the page linked below suggests.) The phrase "he or she" might work in writing but would be cumbersome in speech. Besides, as mentioned, some people don't identify with either one of those. We could repeat the proper name every time instead, as some church liturgies do to avoid assigning a sex to the Supreme Being (including the odd compound "Godself"). Madeleine L'Engle often refers to God by the ancient Hebrew word "El" instead of "He" or "She." In ordinary conversation, though, constantly repeating a person's name sounds awkward. What about inventing a neuter or inclusive pronoun, which has often been tried?

This page discusses gender-inclusive and gender-neutral pronouns, with a brief historical overview of these words and a chart of gender-neutral pronouns that have been coined and used in some speech communities:

Gender Pronouns

There's a surprising variety of neologisms proposed to solve this problem, and no consensus term has been adopted in popular speech. As linguistic scholars tell us, the basic building blocks of a language resist change. In the course of its development from Anglo-Saxon, English has freely adopted such parts of speech as verbs, nouns, and adjectives from Latin, Greek, French, and many other languages. A familiar joke declares, "English doesn't borrow from other languages. It mugs them in dark alleys, rummages through their pockets, and takes what it wants." Structural elements such as pronouns, however, are a different matter—with some little-known exceptions mentioned on the page cited above.

The languages of aliens with more than the two sexes displayed by typical Earth mammals would include other gender pronouns. Writers who create such aliens can invent words to match. Transforming languages actually spoken in our own cultures isn't so easy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt