On gender neutral pronouns
Some writing pondering.
I had a conversation with somebody a while back that made me rethink the way I had been approaching this topic. English doesn't have a gender neutral pronoun, which makes it difficult to pick what you should call ungendered characters.
Except English DOES have a gender neutral pronoun. The problem is that the pronoun is "it." Actually, that's not really a problem at all, the problem is the cultural attitude toward use of that pronoun as applied to people. Calling a person "it" is calling them an object, a thing - it removes their "personhood."
English speakers have decided that to lack gender is to lack humanity, and thus calling somebody an "it" is seen as an insult, even if they are by choice genderless. This is why it seems like we need a NEW gender neutral pronoun to refer to people.
We don't, though. What we need to do is make "it" an acceptable thing to call people. To remove this idea that lacking a gender makes you an unperson.
Currently in Angel's Creed I've been using "ey" as the gender neutral pronoun that naga and elves use to refer to the ungendered members of their societies. But this has made me rethink that, and consider changing the pronoun used to "it."
Bugle pointed out that I need to consider my readers if I do this, but it would be only representatives of elven or naga culture who use it in this way, and the other cultures scattered about (of which there are a great many) would retain the hangup over "it" as a person-pronoun that the readers have. So its use would still get called out by people who weren't used to it, and it would be pretty obviously a cultural thing (especially since as far as narration goes I just avoid pronouns for those characters in general. Leads to some really interesting sentence structure with Zahn). So reader perspective is represented without being shrugged off, and characters who need it still get their pronoun, without making up any strange words in the process.
I had a conversation with somebody a while back that made me rethink the way I had been approaching this topic. English doesn't have a gender neutral pronoun, which makes it difficult to pick what you should call ungendered characters.
Except English DOES have a gender neutral pronoun. The problem is that the pronoun is "it." Actually, that's not really a problem at all, the problem is the cultural attitude toward use of that pronoun as applied to people. Calling a person "it" is calling them an object, a thing - it removes their "personhood."
English speakers have decided that to lack gender is to lack humanity, and thus calling somebody an "it" is seen as an insult, even if they are by choice genderless. This is why it seems like we need a NEW gender neutral pronoun to refer to people.
We don't, though. What we need to do is make "it" an acceptable thing to call people. To remove this idea that lacking a gender makes you an unperson.
Currently in Angel's Creed I've been using "ey" as the gender neutral pronoun that naga and elves use to refer to the ungendered members of their societies. But this has made me rethink that, and consider changing the pronoun used to "it."
Bugle pointed out that I need to consider my readers if I do this, but it would be only representatives of elven or naga culture who use it in this way, and the other cultures scattered about (of which there are a great many) would retain the hangup over "it" as a person-pronoun that the readers have. So its use would still get called out by people who weren't used to it, and it would be pretty obviously a cultural thing (especially since as far as narration goes I just avoid pronouns for those characters in general. Leads to some really interesting sentence structure with Zahn). So reader perspective is represented without being shrugged off, and characters who need it still get their pronoun, without making up any strange words in the process.