Reading Response: Week of 3/14/11

Steering The Craft

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ch.2: Punctuation

I experienced an unusually charged response not to the subject matter in question but to her tangent at the end of the chapter, regarding the use of “he” or “they” when the gender of the person in question is unknown. I completely agreed with her sentiment but wished she had brought up the option of gender neutral pronouns, since it seemed like the perfect place and time for it. That our English language doesn’t allow for anything but inanimate gender neutrality has long been a serious interest of mine, because I feel as frustrated and even offended as her that in the absence of verification, the default must then be male. I feel equally frustrated that users of the English language have, by and large, taken to using grammatically incorrect pronouns to side-step the issue to the point that it is a non-issue. Because I have to respectfully disagree with her on that point: it is grammatically incorrect and certainly mathematically incorrect, to use plural and singular pronouns together. Why isn't there a gender neutral pronoun in English to use in place of the inanimate "it" and the undetermined "he/she"? Not to mention the validity of such a pronoun for people who don't fall into either of those gender categories? I don't understand why the greater debate in our country isn't what pronoun to create/use, but whether transgendered people even exist to begin with. We're constantly behind the rest of the world in matters like this, but I'm not sure on this particular point how other languages handle it. I know Japanese, with how it is structured, allows for pronouns to be implied rather than directly expressed. "広島に行きました" = "[SUBJECT] went to Hiroshima," is the same sentence whether it is a man going, a woman going or someone of unspecified gender going, or even freight cargo (an inanimate object). The subject is implied by name in the context of whatever conversation is taking place, and the rest of the conversation follows accordingly, almost entirely free of subject in most sentence structures. English is driven by noun and pronoun, though, and seems religiously married to two and only two gender categories, excluding "it." It's something that pisses me off and frustrates me and one of the major reasons why linguistic anthropology is such a huge passion of mine: why and how gender and culture and language intertwine, and to what effect.