by Doctor Science
Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber says my brain needs to know your sex:
I find it difficult (at quite an unconscious level, it seems) to correspond with someone I’ve never met without attributing a sex to that person, whereas I don’t think this holds for ‘race’, age, disability or something else.There's a pretty good discussion in comments, covering the gamut of explanations: evo-psycho, linguistic gender, privilege, etc.
...
Do you recognize this phenomenon? And if my self-analysis is correct, then I wonder: why is it the case that my brain needs to know the sex of unknown correspondents, but doesn’t seem to have the same needs with other personal and bodily characteristics?
Here's my answer: it's difficult because you haven't practiced.
My first real internet fandom was for Star Trek in the olden dayes of USENET (you whippersnappers). We didn't have avatars or icons or visual aids, it was The Age of Slow Dialup, strictly text-based. I would guess a majority of people in the group "presented" as female, a minority as male -- but it turned out that not all the women were XX nor all the men XY. It was my first experience really getting to know transgender people, in a period where the T had barely gotten into LGBT.
And since it was a Star Trek group, not all the people in the group presented as *human*: there were a fair number of Vulcans and an occasional Klingon, not to mention the cats. And one of my very best e-friends presented as a genderless energy being, who preferred to be called "zie" to hir e-face.
So I got used, there, to not only using zie/hir as the indefinite singular pronoun, but to using it as the default, the one you use any time there's any doubt or ambiguity at all.
In Real Life, especially traditionally, a person's gender is emphasized and re-emphasized, underlined, italicized, and quotated. There are very few occasions to talk about a specific person of unknown gender, and so even though we could say e.g. "someone rang my doorbell at 3AM and when I catch hir there'll be trouble" we usually don't. We customarily force gender into situations -- even where it constitutes leaping to a conclusion -- so it seems inevitable.
For me, being in a community where gender-neutrality was expected and gender-ambiguity respected only took a little getting used to. That may partly be because in science it was (when I was in grad school, at least) customary to use only the last (family) name plus initials when citing someone: Einstein, A, or Hawking, SW. I tended to assume that most scientists were male, but it all had a kind of vague, impersonal quality, as though the specificity of gender had been removed along with the first name.
On the Internet, of course, there are lots of opportunities to get used to talking to and about specific people whose gender is presented playfully or not at all, so I've kept on being not-bothered by not being able to have a gender-specific picture in my head of the person I'm talking to. In my neck of the Internet, too, avatars or icons aren't usually personal photographs of the user, so the picture I mentally tag a person with is rarely "of them", but is just ... a picture. Look at the comments to this classic bit of Livejournal cinematic analysis to see the kind of range I'm used to:
... even though I'd be willing to bet that most of the people behind these icons are "really" female, the icons aren't tied closely enough to their physical bodies for my image of them to be very corporeal.
I don't know how much English grammar made it easy for me to get used to non-specific gender. My early Internet communities used "ze/hir" habitually, so it's become part of my natural way of speaking, as well as thinking. Have French, German, Spanish, or other gendered Indo-European languages developed any kind of pronoun for use in referring to a specific or known person of unknown or unspecified gender? The Wikipedia article seems to say not, but I may be mis-reading.
The situation in Japanese is distinctive and complex, because pronouns are unimportant but speakers of different ages and sexes are expected to have different speech. liberal japonicus may be able to tell us whether any customs are developing to permit Japanese people to write (online, especially) in an un-gender-marked way, to "perform" lack of gender.
To make it clear what I'm asking: I'm not talking about sentences where you're talking about "anyone" or "someone", whose gender is unspecified because it doesn't exist:
"When the driver comes up to the stop sign, ____ should stop."
I'm talking about sentences where you're talking about a specific individual, yet you don't know their gender. For instance, for a long time the political blogger digby had a public gender of "prefer not to say". So, how would you -- in English or another language -- fill in the following blank:
"Did you see digby's post today? As usual, ___ is [so completely right][so full of it]."Unfortunately, I can't think of any *current* high-profile prefer-not-to-says. Any suggestions or examples?
The white figure in the Böcklin picture always seemed to me like an angel, actually. When I look through pictures of angels I don't get the same "actually genderless" feeling, and now I wonder if that's because the pronoun used for angels is "he", when by logical rights it should be "ze". Is there any language that has a gender or noun class for supernatural beings?
In the case of he digby example it would be possible to simply drop the verb and pronoun: '[so completely right][so full of it], as usual.'
---
Interestingly over here angels, unless specified otherwise (like by giving the name), are intuitively perceived as female. At Christmas Santas-for-hire are often accompanied by angels, exclusively female.
---
On webfora/blogs/etc. I am often able to think gender-neutral. It only becomes a problem when I have to use a pronoun. If I have no way of finding out, I try to reformulate the sentence. A special case I have here on this very blog. I knew a lady in Texas named McKinney, so I have to remind myself regularly that 'our' McKinneyTexas is male (and not related).
Posted by: Hartmut | July 04, 2012 at 01:45 PM
Where did "zie/hir" come from anyway? The places I frequented, the usual gender-neutral pronoun was the Spivak pronoun ("ey/em" or "e/em").
Posted by: Sniffnoy | July 04, 2012 at 02:19 PM
Hartmut:
Yes, one can re-arrange the sentences to avoid having to pick a pronoun, but sometimes IME that's a horribly, ugly pain.
When you think of "Das Kind", are you imagining a boy or a girl? Or does it have a real gender-neutral quality?
angels, unless specified otherwise (like by giving the name), are intuitively perceived as female
I think that's probably very common for modern Christians, because we look at old pictures of angels and see feminine gender-markers, though they were originally (hundreds or even thousands of years ago) intended to appear gender-neutral.
As far as I know in English, only boys are given the names of specific angels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, etc.).
Posted by: Doctor Science | July 04, 2012 at 04:03 PM
I remember zie/hir from my old Usenet days. I thought they were dumb back then and my opinion of them hasn't changed much in the intervening two decades. They and their are perfectly good, gender-neutral pronouns. Using them in the singular is technically incorrect, but I much prefer that to making up words because you feel like it.
Of course it's not just gender that gets assumed/determined. I'm always building mental pictures of people I interact with on the interwebs which often turn out to be hilariously wrong.
Back when I used to read the old Tacitus blog, I assumed that Tac was some crusty, old patrician and I was shocked as hell to find out he was just some snot-nosed kid putting on airs.
Posted by: Chuchundra | July 04, 2012 at 04:35 PM
I think the bible thinks of angels as exclusively male. Those named definitely are and visiting angels in the OT are referred to as (young) men before their identity is revealed. The winged ones in Hesekiel's vision have no gender markers though.
---
As far as Das Kind is concerned, I tend to imagine a very young child where the gender is not immediately obvious. For me the word is indeed fully neutral.
---
I know that pronoun avoidance tends to look extremly awkward but personally I find it preferable to an embarrassing mistake most of the time (I am a bit of a Discworld dwarf there). What helps to cover for that is my known tendency towards deliberately stilted prose with high doses of irony (not on the Count's level).
Posted by: Hartmut | July 04, 2012 at 06:26 PM
For the sentences I would use "they" as the gender neutral pronoun. No idea where that came from - possibly usenet somewhere, possibly just a local usage - but that's not uncommon and doesn't sound wrong to me. Yeah it can be plural - but so can "you", and we cope with that OK.
Posted by: lsn | July 04, 2012 at 06:29 PM
Sweden just adopted a gender neutral pronoun. I quite like "hen" as a pronoun! No idea how common in actual usage it is of course, it'll probably take some time to come in. Incidentally I'd never heard of "hir/zie" until about two years ago - obviously the internet places I hang out are either more gendered, or just use "they" a lot.
Posted by: lsn | July 04, 2012 at 06:34 PM
I can't tell you much about chat based Japanese communities, the speed at which they move is a huge barrier (for me) to overcome. I also think that gender is woven into age and relative status in Japanese that even though, grammatically speaking, it is easier to separate it out than it is in English, even when it is not there, it is attended to. The example I gave at CT of how boys are given the -kun suffix and girls, the -san suffix is just one example of that.
A lot of this is related to Confucianism, which goes back to China. This paper on covert sexism in Mandarin is interesting in that regard, and the bibliography lists a number of the important early works about gender in English.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | July 04, 2012 at 06:49 PM
"Have French, German, Spanish, or other gendered Indo-European languages developed any kind of pronoun for use in referring to a specific or known person of unknown or unspecified gender?"
In French, you would say he (il) if you don't know the gender. Masculine always wins ;-)
Posted by: AdA | July 04, 2012 at 11:51 PM
As I'm coming from a language community where there are no gender-specific pronouns, the gender ambiguity causes no issue for me. On the other hand, for translators it is a true pain-giver. For example, the Song of Songs in the Bible needs to be translated with clear marks in front of the words: "Maid:" and "Youth:". In the original Hebrew language, the gender of the speaker and the addressee was clear but in the Finnish translation, it becomes totally ambiguous. A translator tried using an artificial female third person pronoun in his translation of Joyce's Ulysses published this spring, but he was criticised quite a lot for this innovation which, being unnatural, makes reading more difficult.
On the other hand, this means that most love poems in Finnish can be used by either sex. In Finnish vocal music, it is quite typical for male bands to play covers originally performed by female artists and vice versa, without any queer implications. Usually, no change in lyrics is needed.
In one relatively recent case, however, they changed the lyrics descriping a love scene "myrskyn alle jäin, olit vahva sylissäin" to "myrskyn alle jäit, olit vahaa sylissäin", meaning "I was caught in a storm, you were strong in my embrace" to "you were caught in a storm, you were wax in my embrace". Naturally, the original artist was a female, the cover artist male. For the meter used, the change works very well, although it reduces the mutuality of the original expression.
Posted by: Lurker | July 05, 2012 at 08:56 AM
Singular "they"! Good enough for William Shakespeare, good enough for Steven Pinker, good enough for me.
Posted by: chris y | July 05, 2012 at 09:13 AM
"For the sentences I would use "they" as the gender neutral pronoun. No idea where that came from - possibly usenet somewhere, possibly just a local usage"
Actually, it's extremely old, we find it in Shakespeare, and it is likely far older than that.
Posted by: Scott P. | July 05, 2012 at 10:03 AM
There is a nice scene in one of Weber's Honor Harrington books ... were two officers are discussing the probable actions of the Captain of an enemy ship ... the male officer refers to the unknown Captain as 'he' ... and the female calls her 'she'. Like you said ... one just needs practice
Posted by: Steve | July 05, 2012 at 01:20 PM