Pronouns and LBGTQ rights. Sort of.

Let's get this straight: I'm studying to be a linguist. It's one of my majors, and it's something that I take a very keen interest in. The construction of language, especially English, is something I find fascinating, but also something I'm very strict about. I believe the words 'Grammar Nazi' might apply, in the loosest sense of the term, meaning I'm not just anal about grammar, but also syntax, verb construction, gender as an indicative, and a whole bunch of other things that probably make absolutely no sense to people who haven't studied them. English is defined as a language by a lot of things, but there are a few that I find crucial, based on comparisons to others.

First: English is insane. It's a bastard language, (yes, that is a technical term), and it's proud of it. There's a reason we have both a huge lexicon and spelling tests until we're practically out of school. Side effects include spelling rules from enormously varied language groups, some of which contradict each other completely (i before e except after c, except when it's any one of a long list of words? Vowel combinations that can sound like practically anything, depending on the word?), more verb tenses than we really need in some places, and too few in others, and no gender. He, she, his, hers, him, her are the only words that actually have a gender in the language. You'll note how short that list is. You'll also note that it pretty much eats up the entirity of the list of pronouns in general. The others are: I, you, they, theirs, mine, yours, our, ours, us, it, its, one, and one's. English is a language that prefers to use two or more words to say something that other languages can say in one, in most cases.

Second: English lacks an informal tense.

Third: English lacks neuter pronouns.

To be specific, it, its, one and one's are our neuter pronouns. It and its are reserved for animals and inanimate objects. One and one's are considered haughty and are not commonly used, outside of a few, obvious exceptions. You'll note that when you wish to speak of, or about, a person whose gender you don't know, you generally use they, or, if you're very picky, like I am, he or she. Not it. Not one.

This reflects across the whole of the language. We do not assign genders to our nouns. We do not modify our adjectives to reflect our genders. Things such as beautiful being used to only describe women, or handsome being used only to describe men is a strictly colloquial thing; one could use either to describe any person, place, or thing perfectly correctly.

Second bit of background information: My little sister is an activist, focusing mostly on the LBGTQ community. This means she goes to a lot of events focusing on topics important to that community, and meets a lot of people of varying and indiscriminate genders. Current vogue, for people who identify as neuter, is to use the nonexistent pronouns zhe, eir, and eirs. At least, I think that's how they're spelled. Spell check obviously doesn't know.

This would be fine, but: They don't fit. By assigning something neuter gender, you are forcing other things into either the masculine or the feminine. English can't accommodate for that any more, given that it lacks gender everywhere but six words in the entire language (there is a possibility that I'm forgetting some. Please inform me if you know any I've missed).

Languages adapt, and we lost our original neuter pronouns centuries ago. Up until a few decades ago, this was also fine; English cannibalized he, his, and him to serve as neuter pronouns as well. But then feminism happened, and people started being 'politically correct'. (I am not, for the record trying to bash either the feminist movement, or people who do not identify as either masculine or feminine. This is just about the language. Move this topic into French, which has both neuter pronouns and widespread gender, (and goodness analysis of what English did to deal with that when it adopted a good third of the lexicon is fun) and I won't have a problem, because the language is already adapted to work with it.)

Nowadays, if one were to use masculine pronouns to refer to someone whose gender was either unknown or neuter, it's an opening for everything from flame wars to actual knock drown drag out fights to gentle reminders that not everyone is a man.

That's fine, but: English does not have neuter pronouns. The invented ones are, at best, clumsy slang.

I will not use them, not because I have a problem with the idea of neuter gender, but because they don't fit in the language. It would be easier, for me, at least, to get rid of the six words in the language that actually have gender, rather than trying to shove a third gender in the middle.

(Asian languages can do it; they indicate gender mostly by context. And there are languages out there that have as many as a hundred genders, based on any number of things.)

I am perfectly willing to use proper nouns; I am, in fact, delighted to use proper nouns. Just as I don't necessarily pay attention to what your body looks like for what gender you are, I am happy, if informed, to simply refer to you by whatever name you go by in everything pertaining to and about you. I am happy, as well, to speak to you only in French, which I, first and most importantly, speak, and, second, has a neuter gender. (Sorry, no Mandarin or Dutch) But I'm not going to attempt to shove three words into a language that has no place and no use for them just because you feel awkward when I use the pronouns that didn't fall out of disuse, just as I don't use thee and thou and thine with my close friends and family. (Shakespeare, for one, gains whole new levels of meaning when the distinction between you and thou is understood. Fascinating stuff.)

I am aware I speak from a position of cisgender privilege. I identify as female, always have, and probably always will. I also understand that this entire explaination is probably going to offend a lot of people, and that the potential fallout from this is huge. But I'm sick of having this row with my sister, so I thought I'd get all my ducks in a row and put my thoughts out there. so that next time I can just point her over here and she can stop whining at me. People are not going to agree with me, and they're probably going to come out with all sorts of evidence that I'm wrong, or that I should change my mind. The likelihood that I will is very slim, and it has everything to do with over a millennium of linguistic influences on the language I speak the most and absolutely nothing to do with the people it offends.

Grrr. Ah, well.

EDIT: A final thing. It's come to my attention that words like King and Queen, Mare and Stallion, and so on technically have gender. Well, technically they don't, because what they're actually describing is a set of responsibilities and/or attributes that happen to belong to a single gender. Most professional versions of this (i.e. King and Queen) which now are considered to be the gender specific of a single role are actually holdovers from when they represented two roles. In this case, the king ruled the country, saw to the army, and generally worked with the people of the realm, while the Queen saw to the land and the household. A modern day example of this is Nurse and Doctor, which we don't consider 'gendered', though they both refer to professions in health care.