On 'Em' as a Genderless Pronoun

Okay, so there's some folks online who use "em" instead of "he" or "she" or "him" or "her" to preserve the anonymity of the person they're talking about, by keeping the gender nonspecific. I dislike the convention (as does Madeline). I tried to write a comment about why to UCL, and while doing so I began to understand better why I don't like it. And since the comment got bounced, I thought I'd make a post out of it.

What bugs me about "em" is that it is a fake word designed for the single purpose of creating ambiguity for the reader. Which is so strange, and which doesn't work regarding gender. Remember the Saturday Night Live skits about the creepy genderless "Pat" and how everyone was uneasy and curious about whether Pat was a man or a woman? We notice gender right away, even if it's not important to the story, even if we wouldn't do anything with the knowledge once we had it. We just like to know. A word designed to hide it intrudes, and because it intrudes and interrupts it distracts from the narrative and the story you want to tell. Worse, it draws attention to itself -- it interrupts the reader in the middle of the story and says two things: "Hey, reader, you don't need to know if this is a man or a woman here" (which, given everyone's reaction to Pat, seems silly) and second, "Hey reader, remember I don't trust you enough to give you any details that might possibly identify me or the person I'm writing about, because you might use this identifying detail of gender to track me down and do something bad." I think that's a crappy thing to do to the reader. Just make a decision -- make the judge a woman, make the client a man, make the professor a man, who cares? I'd rather you just switch genders on me than that you constantly remind me that you don't trust me with this information. Especially because you've already made the editorial decision that the gender isn't important to the thrust of the anecdote. Get on with the story without these interruptions that contain a subtle insult to your readers.

Comments

[Autumn]

Does "em" refer to one specific person? Or is it a replacement for the generic "he/she" or "his/her", which is always annoying? Could it be a alternative to "them" or "they", which aren't grammatically correct if you are talking about one person, but are used often in place of the formal sounding "one"?

[UCL]

I'm unconvinced that masking genders is treating readers like "crap." You have a choice. One choice is to honestly tell the reader that you want to protect the gender of who you're talking about (which is the truth, and which is often strongly justified and the right thing to do). Your other choice is to lie. Use "he" when it's a "she", and vice versa.

What fails to convince me is that telling your readers the truth is treating them like "crap", while lying to them is not.

[mad]

As you might have guessed from my own post, I am of the same mind as Scheherazade on this. I would much prefer that you simply pick a gender (or, even better, use some fake names and an asterisk alerting us to the fact that names and identifying details have been changed, like they do in Cosmo) than play games with icky-sounding fake words.

[Liadnan]

My own preference is for singular they, which I don't agree is incorrect (see http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html#X1a for a summary of the argument)

[UCL]

So far my choice of language has been associated with "crap" and described as "icky." I think I'm going to continue using "em" for no reason other than spite.

[Hal O'Brien]

Another genderless pronoun I've seen on a semi-regular basis is "zie/zir" (As in, "What does zie do? Have you talked to zir?")

I see it, and "em", as aesthetically clunky, and mostly harmless in result. I also think it's analogous to the kind of atheist who spends a great deal of time proclaiming their disbelief. If gender is so unimportant there should be a separate neutral pronoun to level the field, why call so much attention to it?

In other words, if there really is a need for such a pronoun, I suppose one will catch on. If not, it'll die out. And while I can express a personal preference, it's not really in any individual's hands either way.

[Hal O'Brien]

UCL: You could do worse. The Macintosh exists mostly because Steve Jobs was trying to get Mike Markkula's goat. People forget the pirate flag on the original Macintosh building was aimed at the rest of Apple, not IBM. (The twenty year Jobs/Markkula feud is one of the great under-reported stories of computing.)

[Thomas]

There are times when an author does not actually know the gender of the individual she is writing about, or when she is referring to a generic person.

In the prior sentence, 'she' was an inappropriate choice of pronoun. 'He' is arguably also inappropriate, and 'it', our only gender-neutral phrase, is definitely inappropriate because it removes personhood. I am not referring to a woman. I am not referring to a man. I am referring to any author, male or female.

While there are usages of GNP that are kind of silly (like when an author knows the gender of a character and purposefully obscures it), that is not the situation that GNP was devised to handle.

[amin]

i like that

[Ahmed]

And there's plenty of languages with a genderless pronoun, an issue that some manga aficionados may have been made aware. I like the idea. I use 'er' in my own personal writings since I dislike "s/he" and the like, and don't want to think about indicating gender. Plus when talking about things like prehistoric man, you don't want to use "it". Thinking about gender in such times may raise useful points, but I think it ought to be a respectable option to take once you are aware of it.

[Anya]

I personally think we need a genderless pronoun if only for my own use. I have a genderless/genderchanging character in the story I am writing and using he or she just doesn't seem accurate and it doesn't cut it. I mean, this character is a person, not a piece of luggage.

[Sandra]

Grammar is not linguistics. If you can't deal with judgment(grammar), stop here.

The genderless pronoun is only problematical for the singular;"they" and "them" are correct only for the plural. If you can't rephrase (making things plural, using a noun rather than a pronoun, for example)I suggest you follow two simple rules: (1) Use the obvious gender when one is overwhelmingly probable, "Each patient in the maternity ward was given her own room." (2) If there is no obvious gender, use your own. For a great example of how this works read almost anything by David Weber in which a female admiral would say, "I never second guess the woman on the ground." while a male admiral would say, "I never ssecond guess the man on the ground."

[CuriousIrish]

What if the person has no gender? Are we really defined as people by either having a penis or vagina, rather than the structure of our mind, body and soul as a whole?