It wasn’t until 1841 that an American, Francis A. Lo, the first French genderless pronoun, was coined in 1765 by Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve. Then he/she dressed himself.”įirst, a bit of history. As we see in the screencap, the pronoun transitions get tricky once you get to the reflexive himself: “The sound of trumpets died away, & Orlando stood for a moment in all his/her beauty, stark naked. Over the course of several sentences she shifts Orlando’s pronouns from he and his to he/she and his/her and finally to she and her. Woolf captures the moment of Orlando’s transition in her narrative, and in the rough draft she illustrates it grammatically as well. About a third of the way into the novel, Woolf describes the transition of her protagonist, Orlando, a thirty-year-old man (pronouns he/his/him) who falls into a deep and mysterious sleep and awakens some time later as a woman ( she/her). The next example is from my discussion of pronouns in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, which appeared in 1928. Sometimes you just have to use words like men and women. Only in the later 20th century did the concept of genderless pronouns expand to include trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid people along with the binary masculine and feminine. Early coiners, though they strove for gender inclusiveness, did not provide for anyone whose gender did not fit the traditional binary. 1874), heer (1911), hir (1920), and heesh (1930), typically included the two traditional genders, masculine and feminine, something that so-called generic he often failed to do. Singular they, used in English since the 14th century, and early coined pronouns like E (1841), thon (1858), se ( ca. But the claim I make in this paragraph is that common-gender pronouns in the 18th and 19th centuries (we call them gender-neutral or genderless pronouns today) were typically conceived as binary.
Word highlighted men and women, suggesting I replace them with a gender-neutral term like people to be more inclusive.
The following screencap comes from my book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond he and she (Liveright, 2020), which traces the history and politics of gendered and genderless pronouns. I unleashed Microsoft Woke, as its right-wing critics might call it, on some passages about gendered and genderless pronouns to see whether it could read for inclusivity better than a human can. The goal is to replace the sensitivity readers that some publishers use to vet manuscripts for conscious or unconscious bias and anything else that might offend an audience. If you check the appropriate boxes in the drop-down menu, Word will scan your writing for age and cultural bias, ethnic slurs, gender bias, gender-neutral pronouns, gender-specific language, racial bias, sexual orientation bias, and socioeconomic bias. Click the Spelling and Grammar option, then Grammar & Refinements. Microsoft has added a diversity checker to its Office 365 spelling and grammar tool (h/t Tony Thorne You can find it by going to Word’s Preferences menu.
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