Get in-tune with gender-neutral terms
Moa Jamir
Morung Express News
Language changes with the times, and when it comes to our conceptions of gender, the times are most certainly changing, wrote John McWhorter in CNN.com last October, adding the idea that binary conceptions of gender are unnecessarily rigid and do not correspond to the self-image of a great many people.
In this new world, a bland opposition between "he" and "she" seems increasingly antique, and even insulting, to many but it feels natural to add them, he added. But such changes take time. Previous attempts to fashion gender-neutral pronouns haven't caught on, said McWhorter. “English speakers have been using ‘they’ in the singular for eons,” he added.
However, times are changing. In a first, the NALSAR Law University in Hyderabad has last year issued a gender-neutral graduation certificate to a student who did not wish to be identified with honorific Mr or Ms but with "Mx."
‘They’- Word of the year of 2015
Likewise ‘they’ as a singular word was declared as the Word of the Year for 2015 in January, 2016, by the American Dialect Society beating out enticing words like 'ammosexual,’ (firearm enthusiast) or 'ghost' (abruptly ending a relationship by cutting off communication, in person or online).
Here ‘they’ refer to a gender-neutral singular pronoun for a known person, gender-neutral singular pronoun for a known person, particularly as a non-binary identifier*.
This year (2015) marks a new language shift in how English speakers use pronouns, Gretchen McCulloch wrote in Quartz in December but argued that the usage of ‘they’ to refer to a single person isn’t new and written citation dates back to 1300s.
Even Chaucer (Pardoner’s Prologue), Shakespeare (Comedy of Errors) and Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice (1813) used the same, but late 18th Century grammarians with a serious case of “Latin-envy” decided that when you didn’t know the gender of someone you were referring to, the best option was to use “he,” McCulloch maintained. Although lots of well-regarded writers (Dickens, Eliot, Wilde, and many others) kept using singular “they,” the proposed alternative—ostensibly the un-gendered “he”—did become relatively common, he said.
Trends in Universities
In the United States, colleges and universities are introducing gender-neutral pronouns options like "ze" into their registrars instead of just "he" and "she".
As early as 2009, schools like the University of Vermont were letting students pick their gender pronouns where students can choose from "he," “she,” "they," and "ze," as well as "name only" - meaning they don't want to be referred to by any third-person pronoun, only their name, according to a BBC article.
But the trend gained most prominence when the prestigious Ivy League Institution, Harvard University made an official change in 2015 allowing its undergraduate students various gender-neutral terms during registration. The Boston Globe reported that time that Harvard for the first time is allowing students to choose their preferred gender pronoun from a list including such gender-neutral identifiers as “ze, hir, and hirs,” a move aimed at increasing inclusion in the campus. Students may also choose to be referred to as “they, them, or theirs,” officials told the Globe.
Harvard isn't the first college to embrace gender-neutral pronouns, but it is among a wave of major institutions that are widening their policies and pronouns to acknowledge those students, who do not identify as male or female, Associated Press reported. University of Missouri-Vanderbilt University, University of California, MIT, Cornell University, University of Wisconsin among others have similarly pushed for such moves.
In India, the progressive Jawaharlal Nehru University introduced an option of ‘third gender’ in the nomination forms of students’ union elections for 2014-15 session after the Supreme Court had acknowledged transgender as the ‘third gender.’
JNU had also introduced the transgender option in the gender column of its admission forms too and proposed that five extra points be awarded to the students seeking admission under the category from this year. "Deprivation points" are given to selected number of categories like females, Kashmiri migrants and applicants from the Defence category or backward quartile from a state during entrance tests.
The Delhi University also for the first time included “transgender” as a gender option alongside male and female in application forms this year for those applying for the post-graduate degree course and faculty positions.
The Telegraph Kolkata reported Jamia Millia would “soon” follow suit and Calcutta University and Jadavpur University hope to introduce the option next year. DU’s move came after a UGC notification to all universities to identify and accept transgender following the Supreme Court ruling. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in April 2015 had also directed all the banks to include ‘third gender’ in its application forms.
Gender Neutrality in Daily life
Greville G. Corbett of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in “The World Atlas of Language Structures Online” wrote that globally gender is evident in almost every phrase in some language, while in other languages it is absent.
In terms of numbers of speakers, he said the major gender family would be Indo-European, which includes English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, each with many millions of speakers. On the other, the non-gender side would be Sino-Tibetan, in which Mandarin and Cantonese alone account for a substantial proportion of the world’s population.
Writing in the Time Magazine, Katy Steinmetz argued that a gender-neutral word could replace ‘Mr’ and ‘Ms’ and this neutral honorific is in a new batch of words being added to Dictionary.com. If you don’t feel like labeling yourself a Mr. or a Ms. and would rather leave your gender unknown or undeclared, “Mx.” (pronounced like mix) is a gender-neutral option. The honorific-happy New York Times has started publishing stories that respected sources’ preference.
Apart from ushering inclusiveness, the drive towards gender neutral terms is seen as a move toward debunking stereotypes and doing away with outdated ‘male-centric’ terms or sexist language.
In Guardian and Observer Style Guide, Stella Gibbons argued that use of language reflects our values, as well as changes in society and advised readers to avoid terms such as businessmen, housewives, male nurse, woman driver, woman (lady!) doctor etc, which reinforce outdated stereotypes. Never say “his” to cover men and women: use his or her, or a different construction; in sentences such as “a teacher who beats his/her pupils is not fit to do the job”, there is usually a way round the problem – in this case, “teachers who beat their pupils ...” Gibbons stressed.
As early as 2007, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) came out with a manual in order to ensure justice and to the avoidance of discrimination in its fields of competence, notably in the area of education (See table) after representatives of Canada and the Nordic countries raised the issue of sexist language for the first time at the 24th session of the Geneva Conference (1987). The General Conference adopted a resolution in subsequent meetings dealing with this issue.
Gender-neutral language has gained support from major textbook publishers and professional and academic groups such as the American Psychological Association and the Associated Press. Newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal use gender-neutral language. Many law journals, psychology journals, and literature journals will only print articles or papers that use gender-inclusive language.
Are we ready to embrace gender neutrality?
* Non – Binary - Denoting or relating to a gender or sexual identity that is not defined in terms of traditional binary oppositions such as male and female or homosexual and heterosexual (Oxford)
