Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Websters chose *they* as a singular pronoun for the 2019
Word of the Year. It brings to the forefront how language changes
over time to include changes in society. 
  

    
We have invited Emma Sue Harris from Haus of QUOTA to discuss the
changes in language and society. 

Emma Sue Harris is <lrph>’s adult child. Emma uses they/them
pronouns and uses words like ‘queer,’ ‘non-binary,’ and
‘genderqueer’ to describe their identity. They are an
actor/writer/theatre-maker. They coordinate outreach for Haus of
QUOTA - a South Florida organization dedicated to creating safer
spaces for the local queer community by prioritizing marginalized
voices and providing resources to local queer artists through their
drag house and artist collective. Emma, as a writer and word-lover,
is excited to participate in the discussion and provide some insight
into the changing nature of language in regards to identity, the
reclamation of certain words by the queer community, and the nuances
involved with incorporating new terms into our vocabularies. Tip #1
for conversing with Emma: question everything.
  

    
Leading the discussion from inside The WELL is Seanan Forbes. Seanan
is a self-described writer, storyteller, poet, photographer, and
teaching artist. Disabled, gender-queer, anti-Othering, allergic to
labels. Pronouns: they/them/their.

I'd like to welcome you both to this topic. Thank you for joining
us. 
  

    
hello friends! excited to hear your q's and talk about queering
language!
  

    
i'll start this off with my favorite way to introduce my pronouns in
conversation when it's unclear if the person i'm talking to has
encountered non-binary pronouns before:

person: what's your name?
me: I'm emma! I use they/them pronouns. so, when you talk about me
later, you'll say 'oh! I met emma! THEY'RE so cool!' 
  

    
That's great! "THEY'RE so cool!" makes it memorable, positive, and
upbeat: all sorts of good energy. 

I've been working as a teaching artist. During the first classes,
when I introduce myself, I tell the kids to skip the Ms/Mr thing,
and just call me Seanan*, and let them know that I don't identify as
male or female. I offer them Mx as an option, but acknowledge that
Mx can be awkward to say, so they're welcome to skip the formal bit.


Teachers have a harder time adapting to this than the students do.
Three months into an in-school residency at one school, the teachers
are still calling me Ms Seanan; the students cheerfully go for Mx or
nothing at all.  

One day last year, in an after-school class leading into a holiday
weekend, all but a few students were picked up early. A kid piped
up, "I'm the only girl here!" 

One of the boys said, "No. Seanan's here."

The girl tsked, and firmly said, "No. Seanan doesn't identify as a
boy or a girl, so I'm the only girl." 

She was seven. 





*It sounds like Shannon -- not that you need to know that in a typed
conversation, but since we're doing intros...
  

    
(I'm glad you told us. I've wondered. I think people silently call
me lerf.)
  

    
I promise, I have never thought of you as lerf. Spellcheck is happy
to present you to the world as "leaf", but that's a different story.


People silently call me many things. Aloud, they correct my
pronunciation of my name, and voice opinions about my pronouns, my
sexuality, and my gender identity. 
  

    
Full disclosure, I was not happy with Emma's choice of pronouns. It
took me time to understand, defend, and now actually prefer for my
child. 

I have critical empathy  of those who don't get it, yet. I am
hopeful that all people are deserving of a yet. 
  

    
I am an old linguistic conservative. Nonetheless, I am in the
process of grudgingly accepting "their" in place of his or hers. It
is usually always clear to whom that particular plural pronoun
refers and it seldom upsets the flow of the discussion or written
work.

But "they're" when referring to one person is less than clear and
does disrupt the flow. Why not "its"? (I suspect I know the answer
to this, i.e., it may well sound demeaning to the uninitiated, but
"they're" sounds pretty crazy to the uninitiated so either require
"initiation.")
  

    
Not sure I can sign on with that, Shannon. "It" is a non-starter because it
negates the humanity of the person.

We're already halfway there with "they" because it's already used a lot in
gender-vague situations.
  

    
Welcome to the wonky world of the well!

Chiming in as not-a-linguist, but a once-journalist and now-designer
working with a lot of people in various states of gender identity.

I earned a BA Journalism in the late 80s and we were taught to
(almost) always use "one/they" when talking about people when we
didn't know their gender of if it didn't matter.

That is:

"Dr. Smith said that they 'don't give a hoot about the Oxford Comma'."

Which, to be honest, is how I'm trying to talk about everyone.
One/they seems like a safe bet, grammar wise.

I have many friends going through gender transition and I can honestly
say I can't keep up with who wants to be called what.  (I need a
program for this opera or I'll forget who is what and where!)  At
least two of my friends were born with gender-neutral names and
switching gender has been more of my learning to self-correct when
talking about history.  Chris was female, is now male, but when I talk
about us being at a party three years before transition I have to
remember to rewrite history.

Likewise, I think having a name tag at an event that says "Bob
(he/him)" is a good idea.  However, I work on a campus with 30,000
students and several thousand faculty and staff and I'm doing good to
even remember someone's name or department in the first place, forget
all the other bits.  I do a lot of "sorry, I'm spacing on your name,
I've had a long day" introductions to work around this.  Maybe if we
all wore badges all the time?  That's how we handled security
clearance notificaiton when I worked for the feds, the color of your
badge indicated your citizenship and clearance status.

Offense-by-age is another new problem to me.  Last year I was sternly
lectured by a 20-something gender neutral person that "queer" was as
offensive as "nigger" or "kike" and that I should never use that word
again.  So I showed them them some photos of queer pride protests in
the bay area in the early 90s and we haven't talked since.

I can't begin to imagine how hard this is to deal with in languages
where gender is part of the grammar.
  

    
I like gender-specific words. They add color to the language. Plural
pronouns used for singular people sounds wrong to me and can even be
confusing. Mx and latinx is ok with me.

That said, I will use whatever pronoun a person asks me to use.
  

    
That's an interesting choice there: by "I like gender-specific words"
I assume you mean words like actress and waitress, which are feminized
versions of male-default job titles: actor, waiter.

But with "latinx is ok with me" you seem to recognize an inherent flaw
in referring to a whole people by the male default: Latino.
  

    
What happened to "zhe"? Is anyone still advocating for that pronoun
or has the community most engaged with this settled on "they" now?

I've wished that "they" were usable (without someone objecting about
the grammar) in formal writing for a long time now. It hasn't been
and still isn't, though it may just come to be. 

But one also can't go back and change all the stuff already out
there. One has to hope it will someday just ring quaint to
readjusted norms, like "thee," rather than clueless or worse.
  

    
Clarification:  When I'm talking about gender-specific words I'm not
talking about English, but languages like Spanish and Russian.  Nouns
have gender, conjugation and declension follow rules based on that
"gender".
  

    
I'm a professional copy editor who's paid to get things right. My job also
puts me in the middle of this transition in the language, and like most old-
timers, new practices strike me initially as awkward. But I tell myself that
this is a perennial thing. A lot of people must have thought Shakespeare was
a disruptive influence.

Simplicity is a principle that can be good or bad. A critical mass of young
people have decided that two genders is too simple and that a third,
nonbinary option is useful, and more power to them. I think they will have
to push for the rest of their lives before the new option is taken to heart
by all English speakers and is institutionalized in style manuals; that's
the struggle they've signed up for. To old-timer me, it feels a little like
working in French, where every single noun is either "masculine" or
"feminine" and you have to memorize them all. I tell myself this change
isn't so drastic really.

My only wish is that we will simplify our problematic verb "to be" to this
extent: the new "they", a singular, will take the verb "is" while the old
"they", a plural, will keep the verb "are". Or we could adopt the dialectic
practice that drops the verb entirely: "They coming to my party Friday."

We'll see. It's out of my hands.
  

    
Jane, in my experience, folks  choosing their own pronouns are
choosing a wide range of options. Zhe, per, hir, sie, ze...probably
more. They however, has made it into some version of Webster and my
guess is it is the most prevalent. 

(Hi Emma! Fun to see you here!)
One (said one referring to oneself) has seen Emma perform and they
were fabulous!
  

    
<seanan>, I understand from your post that you probably don't refer
to yourself as he or she, but what pronoun do you use when a pronoun
is unavoidable?
  

    
And (oemmasue), is the "they're so cool" in your earlier example in
wide use. Or maybe a better question is can you give examples of
groups or communities in which it has become common usage?
  

    
Jane, I think zhe is still a choice for some people. (oemmasue) will
be by later with a link (I hope) to the list of all the pronouns
people use other than he/she. Also, the thing about non-binary that
I'm beginning to understand is that it isn't a third gender at all.
It's the non-specified gender: the gender that doesn't have one name
because gender is a spectrum. So people who identify as non-binary
aren't homogenous in their gender identity, either.
  

    
My key problem with "they", which I also use, is rooted in my
relationships with people who have multiple personalities. Those
friends refer to the rest of us as "singletons", and they get to be
"they". 

The OED "traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the
medieval romance William and the Werewolf. Except for the old-style
language of that poem, its use of singular they to refer to an
unnamed person seems very modern. Here’s the Middle English version:
‘Hastely hiȝed eche  . . . þei neyȝþed so neiȝh . . .
þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere.’ In modern English,
that’s: ‘Each man hurried . . . till they drew near . . . where
William and his darling were lying together.’" 

Deliciously, to my mind's tongue, the OED editors go on to write "In
the eighteenth century, grammarians began warning that singular they
was an error because a plural pronoun can’t take a singular
antecedent. They clearly forgot that singular you was a plural
pronoun that had become singular as well." 

Plural/singular fluidity in all directions. 

https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

Merriam-Webster tracks "they" as a singular pronoun back to the
1300, framing it as old whilst acknowledging that its use as a
gender-neutral pronoun is new. 
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-nonbinary-they

Jane, "zhe" is still used. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
devoted a web page to pronouns: options, uses, grammatical notes,
what to do if you make a mistake... 
https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/

Unsurprisingly, the LGBTQ+ Resource Center also has a guide. 
https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/ 

Cited in an article in the BBC, Dr Emma Moore suggests that
gender-neutral pronouns such as "zee" have not become common usage
is that they are unfamiliar. Moore says that, whilst the concept of
gender-neutral pronouns is easy because they exist in other
languages, they "has the advantage of already being part of grammar
- there have been attempts to make new non binary pronouns, but they
haven't been as successful because they're not already embedded in
grammar."

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49754930

Certainly, for many in my circles, it is easier to use such
alternatives within communities. In the wider world, where "they"
enjoys the luxury of being a known word in different contexts, one
does not have to teach members of the hegemony how to spell and
pronounce a new word, as well as why they should learn it and apply
it to the person who's teaching it to them. These tasks become
arduous. In my case, it's only because I am doing it others, not
only myself, that I can be relentless in holding my gender-pronoun
ground. 
  

    
I use "they", Shannon. 

In schools, I tell the students that I'm not Mr or Ms, but Mx. I
know that's a tongue-tangler, so it's okay if they skip it all and
call me "Seanan". 

Honestly, I'm not afraid they're going to treat me with less respect
if they skip an honorific. In one school, a sign on a counsellor's
door is marked Mrs Dr ______. There are plenty of people demanding
honorifics. Just call me by my name. 

When I'm performing in groups, teaching adults, or hosting
professional development workshops, I use "they". I tell people it's
okay if they make a mistake, as long as they don't keep making the
same one. If they switch between "he" and "she" all day long,
they'll get it right some of the time. For me, it keeps changing, so
their terminology is bound to intersect with my reality at some
point. For people who are uncomfortable with it, that leeway can
make it easier. 

My gender identity shifts, but I'm going to be wearing the same
clothing on the same body all day; if the language shifts around me,
no harm done. If that opens a space for someone to approach me
during a break, and ask about gender -- fluidity, nonconformity,
queerness, whatever is in their minds -- then all the better. 

Short question + long answer = my brain's need for more caffeine. 
  

    <scribbled by jonl Wed 5 Feb 20 09:15>
  

    
Here's a short link for sharing this conversation far and wide:
http://bit.ly/they-them-their

If you're reading this conversation, but you're not a member of the
WELL, you can still add comments or questions by emailing them to
inkwell at well.com
  

    
Invented words seldom catch on with the general population. (Except
those based on product names .. eg Xerox, but now that it has market
leadership people have gone back to 'copy' or 'photocopy'.   Can I
have that Samsunged or Hewlett-Packarded or Brothered?)

The problem with singular "they" is the same as with plural "you"
... we'll need "They-all" etc.