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From: mlm@cs.brown.EDU (Moises Lejter)
Subject: Re: Gendered pronouns
Nntp-Posting-Host: zola.ics.uci.edu
Message-ID: <MLM.91May1204313@tahoe.cs.brown.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Reply-To: mlm@cs.brown.EDU
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Brown University
Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu
Lines: 65
Date: 2 May 91 04:13:33 GMT
References: <MUFFY.91May1140408@remarque.berkeley.edu>

In article <MUFFY.91May1140408@remarque.berkeley.edu> muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy) writes:

   From: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy)
   Newsgroups: soc.feminism
   Date: 1 May 91 21:30:55 GMT
   Organization: Natural Language Incorporated

   [...]

   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.

   [...]

   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?

I suspect there's two issues here - one of them is whether people will
assign gender to a person, lacking definite information about it; the
other one is whether this must be represented by language.  If the
first issue is true, then any neutral pronoun introduced may
eventually come to mean whatever the default gender happens to be.  If
the first issue is false, then a neutral pronoun would reflect a
"natural" class of people - those for whom no gender is known.

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

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

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

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

   [4] "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.)

In Spanish, all examples but [2] could be written/spoken in such a way
that no pronoun is needed in place of the "xx" (basically, pretend the
sentences are correct and mean what they do now even though there is
nothing where the "xx"s are).  People are still free to assign any
default gender they wish to, but one's assumption as to the gender of
the referent need not affect one`s audience.

							Moises
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