Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!news.mit.edu!ambar
From: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Gendered pronouns
Message-ID: <MUFFY.91May1140408@remarque.berkeley.edu>
Date: 1 May 91 21:30:55 GMT
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Organization: Natural Language Incorporated
Lines: 54
Approved: ambar@athena.mit.edu


I read somewhere (it may have been on the net or in the paper) recently
a discussion of how people feel a strong need, at the beginning of a
conversation about another person, to determine what the gender of that
person is.  It suddenly struck me that one reason we (now) have to do
this is because we do not have a pronoun which refers to a person of
indeterminate sex.  People can use "it" (which is considered to be
insulting) or "they" (which sounds strange because it is generally used
as a plural).  Anyway, I don't want to get into the debate of whether we
developed one pronoun for people of each gender because we just had to
know what the gender of people were, or whether we need to know gender
now so we can use the "correct" pronoun.  (Although if anyone has any
references on this, I wouldn't object to hearing about them.)

What this train of thought led me to, though, was a question of how
people would feel about and react to a genderless pronoun.  I do not
think that I feel any need to know what the gender of someone is.  I
have heard, though, that some (many?) people automatically assign gender
to their "mental image" of the person/people being discussed.  So, I was
wondering whether now we "need" to know what gender someone is.

It has been pointed out to me that it is useful, if you are discussing
one man and one woman, to have the separate pronouns, but since this is
such a specific case, I don't know that it's all that useful.

Does it make people uncomfortable if they do not know the gender of
someone being discussed?  Does it only matter in certain circumstances,
such as if an attraction or intimate relationship is being discussed?
Could "he" and "she" be eliminated altogether (theoretically, not
practically...*grin*) if we had a pronoun which didn't specify gender,
or would this somehow be taken (or come to be taken) as primarily
meaning male, as "men" has?

For example, how would people feel if "xx" was the genderless pronoun in
sentences like:

"My boss walked by my office today, and xx commented on how tight my
t-shirt was."

"I have this great resume on my desk.  I think we should talk to xx."

"I was out at a party last night and met this wonderful person.  Xx said
xx'd call me next week."

"I just talked to Pat and xx said xx'd have the last bug fixed by
tomorrow."

(In this last example, assume that the person is referencing themself,
not some other person who will be fixing the bug.)

Do you care about the gender of the speaker or the person being referred
to?  Why or why not?

Muffy