Grammar

Handling The Growing Gender Pronoun Problem

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Last Updated on April 17, 2023

Long before Caitlyn Jenner’s debut on the cover of Vanity Fair, we were already in the midst of a growing gender pronoun problem.

The gender pronoun problem did not begin with the transgender community. It may be easy to place the “blame” on them. But we’ve fought over the right gender terms longer than that. The equal rights movement for women saw females objecting to using single masculine pronouns to group males and females.

Some objected to courtesy titles Miss and Mrs. They viewed those as an attempt to define them by their marital status. So they opted for the generic Ms. instead. They also objected to gender-specific titles like councilman, preferring generics like councilperson instead.

In modern practice, however, it seems there is still a huge gray area. I heard a prominent actress recently refer to herself as an “actor” during a speech. I often see titles written with the male version if it’s a male and the generic version if it’s a female or a person with one of those names that could belong to a male or female.

Recently, a self-proclaimed social media expert complained about my headline that read, “How Does a Blogger Find His Writer’s Voice?”

Yes, I could have used the cumbersome double pronoun construction. I could have written, “How Does a Blogger Find His or Her Writer’s Voice?”

Even easier, I could have just used a plural noun and pronoun: “How Do Bloggers Find Their Writers’ Voices?”

I didn’t. Why? Perhaps it’s that in the grand scheme of things, the gender pronoun debate doesn’t jump off the screen at me every time. Apparently did jump off the screen as the aforementioned complainer. She admitted that without even reading the article first, she wanted to ask if my post also applied to a blogger looking to find her voice.

I’m not an idiot. And I’m pretty good at catching snideness when I see it, but I tried to be tongue in cheek about it, suggesting that I felt it would apply to any possible variation on the gender theme.

Not satisfied with my attempt to diffuse the situation, this person switched from her business account to her personal one to lecture me on word choice, informing me that my word choices dictate who I might be writing for, implying I should consider who my audience is. When I dared point out to her that my audience, at least on Twitter, from which I receive the most referrals, is two-thirds male, she pulled the classic strategy associated with being knocked a step backward in a debate: pulling out the tired old strawman-like remark that she “didn’t know what that had to do with the price of tea in China.”

Well, it didn’t have anything whatsoever to do with that particular commodity’s cost in China or anywhere else. That wasn’t the topic of the conversation, after all. She had just lectured me on the assumption that A) I was trying to intentionally limit my audience, B) I didn’t take my audience into account, or C) I know my audience but intentionally chose to exclude.

None of those could be further from the truth.

The fact is that the longest-running readers here, as well as those who seem most likely to comment, happen to be women. I have some gay readers and some transgender readers as well. I respect each one of them. Despite that fact, like everyone else, from time to time, when it comes to constructing every sentence with only plural nouns so I can correctly use only plural pronouns, I misstep. Fortunately, my audience either seems to understand there’s no evil, sexist intent on my part or doesn’t notice the pronoun thing to begin with.

I’m betting this social media professional might just be the kind of person who, as part of her work, helps businesses learn how to respond to angry followers who behaved just the way she did. I’m also betting, based on an unrelated post I saw on her timeline, that she might have an issue with men in general. But if that suspicion is true, that’s her problem, not mine.

Singular nouns take singular pronouns.

The rule of grammar has long been that a singular pronoun takes a singular noun. So in this case, the word blogger, which is a singular noun, would require either a his or a her. It could also work with the his or her, but this gets cumbersome after a while.

Some writers fight this frustration when using a singular pronoun by varying the gender. I have done this myself at different points throughout this blog’s posts. Instead of using the male pronoun, I’ll once in a while mix in the female instead. When I do, no one ever seems to complain.

The rule of grammar has always prohibited the use of a plural pronoun with a singular verb. So I would never have used the headline, “How Does a Blogger Finds Their Voice?”

That brings us back to Caitlyn Jenner and the movement of inclusion for transgender, gender questioning and even gender uncertain people. The Associated Press advises reporters and editors to use whichever pronoun the individual prefers, which seems simple enough, right? As the Knoxville News-Sentinel points out, even that’s complicated for someone like Jenner. She now prefers a female pronoun: so much of Jenner’s recognized history involves a time when she was a he. If we use female pronouns now, do we use male pronouns to refer to her athletic accomplishments before?

Recently, Facebook rolled out a selection of 58 options for gender identity. Fifty-eight. It wasn’t that long ago that there was just “male” and “female.” Give me a sheet of paper and one hour in a quiet room, I might come up with about six. I looked at the master list and there are some terms I’ve never even heard of. Those who find themselves in those classifications face a reality every much as legitimate as mine. I can just click “male” and move on to the next question. We would do well to consider that such “simple”  questions are not always simple for everyone.

The movement advocating their even for singular seems to be a push to make sure all bases are covered. Grammar rules haven’t really caught up with this, yet.

To stay grammatical, the preferred way, for now, should be crafting the sentence to accommodate both a plural noun and plural pronoun, unless you intend to refer to one specific gender scenario.

Eventually, some authority may rewrite the rules of the writing road. I can’t imagine their with a singular noun feeling correct, even though people unthinkingly make the mistake in speech often.

I hope those of you who actually come here and read what I have to say will be patient. I’ll strive to stay as inclusive and grammatical as I can be. You’re all welcome here, because I think we all have a lot to learn from each other. I also think we’re better as a people when we understand each other better.

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.

5 Comments

  • It’s too bad that ze/zim/zir usage isn’t more common as that would solve this problem. Sadly, we can’t just start using words others might not be familiar with if we wish to be understood. It’s definitely a conundrum.

  • A good friend of mine is non-binary (considers themselves genderless, or at least not of either traditional gender). It is a concept that both fascinates me and one with which I struggle adjusting to. They prefer the third person pronoun “they”, which is easier to pick up than ze/zim/zir. I don’t really want to offend anyone with my writing, but I am not entirely sure it is worth going out of my way to placate the expectations of one person while nine others don’t know what language I am injecting into my English.

  • Then there are the gender neutral pronouns ze, zim, and zir. Also there are some people don’t even want to use those, instead they use “they.” It is not bad if “they” are in the room but if “they” are not in the room you don’t know if you are talking about one person or a number of people. (They left the room)

  • I didn’t even read that post because–and I’m NOT being snide–it was not addressed to me. I am in no way a “he.” The growing trend among language-users is to either use “them” as a singular form (which is perfectly acceptable and has been for 500 years)*, or reword the whole thing in the plural thusly: How Do Bloggers Find Their Writer’s Voice. In fact, personally, I’d write the head totally differently, but it’s not my blog.

    I’m over 50 and I’m bloody TIRED of being dismissed and/or unincluded by people who think that “man” and “he” are “inclusive.” They . Are . Not. You’d probably feel differently if every g.d. article you read referred only to women. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m just thin-skinned and irritable.

    *http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/he-or-she-versus-they

    • I’m sorry if you felt I was trying to “uninclude” you. A LOT of blogging-related articles — particularly from a group called BlogTrends — assume that every blogger must be female. I still read their articles about blogging when I find one because the advice they give isn’t gender-specific; they just write based on what they assume their audience must be.

      Once, during a live chat, when the organizer said, “Hello, ladies,” I did object, but only to ask if she intended only females should attend.

      But it feels to me very different when it’s a written post I can choose to read on my own regardless of what a headline says and a live conversation with others that addresses a specific group of people. Maybe, to everyone else, the two cases would feel identical.

      They didn’t to me.

      Going forward, I’ll try my best to use plurals, because using “they” with singular nouns feels like an error to me. If it one day grows on me after spending years correcting the mistake when it was made out of laziness rather than an attempt to be “inclusive,” I imagine that pet peeve will disappear. Until then, I can’t bring myself to embrace it as a “valid” option. But I’ll keep working on it.

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