As gender identity becomes more and more complex, numerous terms have arisen to refer to people based on this continuously evolving system. In English, such fluctuations in culture have led to the evolution of new third person pronouns to refer to people of different identities. In an effort to create more inclusive pronouns, the list has simply grown. While it’s important to respect peoples’ identities, the growing list presents a problem for people like me.

I have terrible memory. When it comes to names, it takes me forever to learn more than a handful. Having people on Facebook as friends helps because I see them all the time. But for a large part, if you think I know your name, I’m sorry. I probably don’t. It’s not because I don’t care to learn it. It’s simply because my memory is a bit wonky. It always has been. I’m not 100% sure why, but it could be related to the ASD or ADD.

There is some research on high functioning autism and pronoun use, but it’s limited to studying the production of pronouns rather than studying whether a person can distinguish between the types of third person pronouns. Moreover, the cause seems to relate to theory of mind rather than memory. Still, it’s an interesting study.

Regardless, I’m neurodivergent. And that neurodivergence leads to it being very difficult to memorize names. And really at the end of the day, a personal pronoun is part of the name. It’s sort of the equivalent of the top level domain (.com, .org, etc.) of names. That’s why it comes before the proper part of the name. So one could imagine that as these top level names become more and more diverse, it becomes harder and harder to remember them all, and who uses what. It simply becomes impossible over time.

It’s of course important to respect someone’s gender, and identity in general. And there’s really no standard for pronouns that are inclusive. That’s a problem. Saying the wrong pronoun can be offensive. And that’s not what I want at all. But at the same time, thinking that everyone can memorize everyone’s pronouns (even within one’s social circle) is assuming a lot. Perhaps most people can. But everyone is different. And demanding that everyone must memorize everyone’s pronouns is offensive too, because it is ableist.

The Solution to the Problem

This whole issue really only exists in certain languages. There are languages that rely so rarely on third person pronouns that they might as well not even exist. Japanese is one example. The topic marker is generally used instead. In Tagalog and other Filipino languages, third person pronouns tend to be gender neutral. Quantity is all that matters. For instance, in Tagalog, the third person singular pronoun is simply siya, and in its plural form it’s sila.

There’s an added benefit to reshaping English and other languages to avoid sex based pronouns. Whenever we use a third person pronoun in English, it automatically brings up gender. These pronouns are intimately tied to gender. We should just interact with people as people. Expressing one’s gender is good. Having others poke around at it is not. And having a single pronoun helps people recognize a person simply as a person.

We might already be going in this direction. Most if these new pronouns is an attempt to break away from the rigid male vs female markers. The English language is evolving. And when you have large scale changes in environment (in this case the recognition of the validity of trans identities) you often get a lot of highly dynamic and chaotic changes in culture. But over time, this dynamicism levels off to a steady state, and I’m rather confident that we’ll see the English language eventually find its steady state with third person pronouns.

It’s important that we don’t try to erase one’s gender identity, or otherwise undermine it. Gender non-conformity is real, and it must be respected. However, respect doesn’t mean bending over backwards. It simply means accepting someone for who they are. And at the end of the day, there is a compromise between wanting to affirm one’s gender identity, and recognizing that there are people out there who would have a lot of trouble being able to memorize all that information.

Response: Use of They

This article’s seem a fair amount of attention within the first few days of release, and a lot of people have commented on it. Some of those comments have been quite interesting and have led to fun conversations and an exchange of ideas.

A few points to add. Yes, there are gender neutral pronouns already. “They” has been used as a singular pronoun in English for around 700 years, and is only about 100 years younger than the plural “they (OED).” A few other gender neutral pronouns have been suggested in recent decades as well.

The issue with trying to create a standard to unify a variety of different options is that it doesn’t usually work. We see it in hardware all the time. Have 10 different options for a port? Try to create a standard and you now have 11 different options. However, in time, a standard usually wins out.

The same kind of dynamic occurs with changes in language. As English evolves, it will eventually find a local minimum where the population of speakers converge on a standard. However, this situation will only happen if we are okay with using any gender neutral pronoun for any person, without the push to memorize specific pronouns for any person.