The Paradox of Progress in Pronouns

-- By AndyZheng - 23 Feb 2024

The Duality of Language

Language is expansive and enables precise communication. Part of language is synthesizing an individual’s essence into a noun. When we say “Beyoncé,” we summon a general image of a pop star in the collective psyche of individuals we are communicating with. Rather than describing all of someone’s essence, a name stands in the place for their accomplishments, personality, and history. While the specific details about Beyoncé that each person knows may differ, there is a collective image associated with the name that fulfills the purpose of communication. This is helpful to convey large amounts of information in a short period of time. Series of carefully chosen words can be strung together to deliver ideas and thoughts that would be difficult to express without language. Thus, language is a useful tool for expressing complex thoughts and feelings using prescribed words that have concrete meanings.

Language is also restrictive. We use language to express our thoughts, but we are simultaneously confined by language in our expression. When we describe a person as “she,” we inherently trigger each individual’s understanding of what a “she” should be. Through internalizing a large volume of data, and being told how to label each person we see as “she” or “he,” we each develop a paradigm that quickly and mostly accurately identifies individuals into one of the two buckets. Over time, our understanding of language becomes solidified. Rather than being fed information, we begin to predict information from what we see. We start to predict that the individual of shorter stature, long hair, lack of facial hair, and larger pelvis would be labeled as “she.” The problem is that the label is not necessarily reflective of how others think about themselves.

If it is worth spending almost 300 words on this part of the essay, it is probably worth not making up one's linguistics and philosophy of language on the fly. These aren't self-evidently true statements, and it would be worth learning what the people who also think hard about these matters think. Whether words correspond to objects, in the way you suggest is so obvious as not to require discussion, has been much discussed since St. Augustine at least. I'm not sure you actually want this to be an essay about the philosophy of language, however, so perhaps it could be edited away.

Section II: Language in the context of Pronouns

This restrictive understanding of pronouns rob an individual’s ability and opportunity to identify themselves. For many people, pronouns are words that ascribe various external characteristics onto individuals. For someone to be described as “she,” she likely has various feminine features like a softer jawline or the lack of facial hair. However, this exteriority takes away the ability for individuals to express their humanity and interiority. When individuals incorrectly assume someone’s pronouns, it is considered “misgendering.” However, more than a mismatch in label, misgendering someone forces a label on them for the presumed rationale of the convenience of language. In exchange for the convenience of language, society has erased the ability for pronouns to describe the interiority, which causes a key aspect of someone’s life to be ignored.

I don't know what this means. English has lost almost all its inflections; our nouns do not have case endings, except for a mechanical pluralization. English pronouns still have vestigial cases: in addition to gender and number, they inflect between nominative and accusative forms. The cases are vestigial, however, and we continue to lose them. (Most spoken language ignores the difference between accusative and nominative cases: speakers confuse "I" and "me" in most contexts, and almost no one correctly uses "who" and "whom." I doubt we will still inflect pronouns at all in another couple of generations.) So as you say, language changes over time, and this is an evolving, not a determined, outcome. How we speak is not how we think, unless the loss of ability to detect that "It is I," is correct while "It's me" is wrong indicates a cognitive alteration. We appear to be in the process of adopting the third-person plural pronoun (which is ungendered) for use as a non-gendered singular pronoun. (If English, like some Slavic languages, had a "neutral" set of pronouns, no adaptation would be necessary. My girlfriend Jasna, whose mother tongue was Serbo-Croatian, assumed it was good English to say, for example, "Everyone should bring its own pencil." That's wrong, from the point of view of most English speakers, but nothing prevents us from being comprehensible if we say that.) In order to assert, as you implicitly do, that these changes represent changes in thought, we have to adopt a view of how language works that is, to say the least, contestable. Why not surface the issues directly, if this is a philosophical essay, or avoid them altogether, if it isn't?

Language does not and should not live in a vacuum. It changes over time with ideas and conventions. What people think about when someone says “fashion” is different today than the U.S. a century ago. What constitutes “fundamental right” of bodily autonomy to abortion is no longer the case today. Similarly, gender and sexuality has the capacity to change with language. Rather than assuming “she” refers to someone who is traditionally feminine, language can adapt to a more progressive understanding of pronouns as a respectful shorthand to refer to individuals and their interiority.

Section III: Moving Forward

One pathway to evolving our understanding of language is to create misunderstanding and encourage empathy. When individuals continue to be reaffirmed in their language that their prediction about someone’s gender identity is foolproof, their paradigm of pronouns will continue to solidify in opposition to exceptions to their rules. To do so, individuals must occasionally be shown that their initial presumption of someone’s pronouns are wrong. On one hand, it requires individuals to be bold enough to see the possibility of using pronouns that society may not automatically prescribe to them. On the other hand, people must also be receptive to the proposition that something that they’ve established as a paradigm can be wrong.

Progress is glacial and nonlinear. It would be unreasonable to expect that transgender and non-binary individuals will have their pronouns respected overnight. However, the requirements for progress is clear. We must simultaneously change the way we understand pronouns as well as broaden our underlying conception of gender and sexuality. Just as meanings of words evolve overtime, our conception of pronouns must be abstracted from its roots of strict classification of individuals in a binary. We also must broaden our conception of gender and sexuality to consist of a complex spectrum of identities. However, this ask is almost as impossible as uprooting the machineries of society today. All I can expect is a continuous tug of war between the status quo and progress. Hopefully, one day, our conceptions of pronouns will change and we can respect each other simply as human.

We do see one another simply as human. (Or less simply, if we are better at understanding humans.) This is really about how we speak, in the sense that our concerns are with how people hear one another (and feel about what they hear) rather than about how we read (possibly generations old) text on the page. But how we speak is not how we think. For most people, the process of speaking in public, to more than their intimates in groups larger than one or two, is a completely separate process from thinking. From a structuralist perspective, in which language speaks us, we could perhaps imagine that whether we use "it" or "they" or "he" to indicate an undeterminate singular human being in an abstract sentence indicates whether we regard human beings as persons or things, but—as I suggest above with respect to the English of a Serbo-Croatian speaker—that's a confusion between social convention and linguistic structure. Language speaks us only when we are not speaking.

What English will sound like in another couple of lifetimes I have no idea. How human beings will reflect upon and alter their social lives and public policies as the mutability of social gender and biological sex expand over those two lifetimes is also uncertain, at least to me. I'm sure there will be relationships among those changes, but that the linguistic ones will determine to any significant extent the social ones seems implausible to me. If the point of this essay is to take the opposite view, the next draft must more clearly explain why. I look forward to reading it.

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