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< | The Paradox of Progress in Pronouns | >
> | The Linguistic Push for Gender Inclusion | | | -- By AndyZheng - 23 Feb 2024 | |
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< | The Duality of Language | >
> | Problem | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | Lia Thomas decided to quit swimming because of the pressure she faced from the public. A significant part of her decision is in response to public sentiment that she should not participate in female athletics. To express this sentiment, countless hateful messages ridicule her gender, using he/him/his pronouns to describe her and justify her win in a NCAA competition as a result of her trans status. The question at the core of the backlash against her is whether society rejects trans women as a category or tarns women competing in women’s sports. However, this is not the question I wish to address. I am interested in how linguistic and social changes interact if we envision a world where people like Lia Thomas would feel safe participating in professional sports that most identify with their gender identity. | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | Struggle between Linguistic Change and Social Change | | | | |
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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.
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> | On one hand, it seems natural that linguistic changes are merely a reflection of social changes. One example is in the decreased usage of the N-word by people who are not Black. The shift in this linguistic change follows a complex history with Black folks that will not be explored here. However, whatever the nature of that social change is merely reflected, and not propelled by the change in the N-word being less utilized. The meaning of the N-word going from a derogatory slur when used by white folks turned into an empowering word used by Black folks in the social movement to reclaim language. | | | | |
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< | Section II: Language in the context of Pronouns | >
> | However, linguistic changes could also prompt social change. The language we use already shape the way we conceptualize the world. Many ancient civilizations lack the word for blue. Not only does this influence the way they describe the world, but they also physically see the world with less blue. Studies conducted demonstrate individuals who speak one of these languages have a harder time distinguishing green from blue than other people. Here, the very difference in the languages people chose to identify colors shape the way they see the world. | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | Case for Linguistic Change Pushing Social Changes in Attitude Towards Gender Non-conforming Folks | | | | |
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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?
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> | In the context of pronouns, there is an opportunity for the change in linguistic conventions to move social change, even though it would be a glacial and nonlinear shift. One reason that social change affects linguistic change is the very “rightness” of adapting language to action. Similarly, de jure changes more naturally follow de facto shifts. The primary source of legitimacy of the law comes from the buy-in from the people. And that buy-in is often reflected in the zeitgeist of morality and social expectations. The problem with linguistic movements affecting social change is rooted in the idea that language merely reflects, not dictate the individual psyche and, more broadly, social attitudes. | | | | |
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> | However, the proposal for linguistic change pushing social change can be rooted in analogy to de jure change moving de facto change. In the Civil Rights Era, the white majority was heavily opposed to a world with integrated schools. Even in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, many people vocally oppose desegregation. This reflected a de jure change attempting to push for de facto shift in social attitudes. However, at the core of the controversy, there is a fundamental and underlying appeal to morality that couples the de jure ruling to forbid school segregation. Although without threat of violence through the law, this force is insufficient to surface social change to desegregate on its own, the legal desegregation forced society to grapple with this moral qualm. | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | Similarly, at the core of the controversy around individuals not respecting others’ pronouns, linguistic change could begin a dialogue to push for social change. Each person has a preferred set of pronouns they feel most comfortable using. A cis-gender man would most likely feel comfortable with the pronouns he/him/his. For Lia Thomas, she prefers people to use she/her/hers pronouns. However, the harm is done when many hostile individuals who deny her personhood insist on using he/him/his pronouns while expressing their disapproval in Lia’s participation in women’s swimming. | | | | |
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< | Section III: Moving Forward | >
> | Linguistic changes that people are making could lead the efforts to respect the gender identity of people like Lia. Like in the de jure desegregation movement during the Civil Rights Era, advocating for the change in the language we use to refer to someone’s preferred pronouns reflect the fundamental desire to be recognized as human. When Lia asks for people to use she/her/hers pronouns, she is implicitly asking for the public to recognize that her way of expressing her gender is just as valid as a cis-gender person’s gender expression. At the root of the linguistic push to urge social change is a similarly fundamental moral demand that individuals who do not conform to society’s gender expectations be equally recognized. | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | Current efforts to correct individuals who misgender others reflect an example of a push for linguistic change that could prompt a broader social change. Just like the prohibition of de jure segregation after Brown, reminding individuals who misgender others that their misgendering is harmful would bring the topic of gender to the forefront. By demanding this linguistic shift to use the proper set of pronouns for individuals who do not conform to their gender identities, I hope to see a world where our conception of gender and sexuality broadens to a complex spectrum of identities rather than a strict binary. | | | | |
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< | 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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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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