Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996
Subject: COMMENT: Gender and Pronouns From: Karla Tonella

Gene Moser wrote:
I'm also aware of the misuse of "gender". People do not have "gender" - words do. Specifically "gender" refers to the masculine, feminine or neuder designation of pronouns (and a very few nouns) in English and in nouns, pronouns and articles in many foreign languages. It has some very strange inconsistencies - as an example the German word for "girl" is neuder.

People do indeed misuse the word gender. It is true that many languages assign nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs to masculine, feminine and neuter categories. However people also have gender ascribed to them.

In the cultural sense, "gender" refers to concepts (which vary from culture to culture) of "masculinity" and "femininity" assigned on the basis of apparent biological sex. Recognizing this allows one to challenge -- as many have done numerous times on H-Minerva -- received notions of what is proper or even possible for individuals to do or be.

The popular substitution (misuse) of the word "gender" for the word "sex" works in the service of biological determinism and conceals the social construction embedded in the sharp division of people into one or the other category. It works on behalf of biological determinism because it is not just a simple substitution.

When we opened up the discussion by highlighting the differences between "sex" and "gender" we also exposed the arbitrariness of assigning physical strength, football and combat to one sex and emotionality, Barbie dolls and nursing to the other. Covering over that cultural construction by conflating notions of gender and sex -- by merely substituting the word gender for sex -- makes it more difficult to be mindful of the difference between culture and biology.

One could argue that substituting the word gender for sex is to substitute one mental habit for another. Some may believe that by applying the word gender where the word sex was used we have recognized the social construction of masculinity and femininity. But what I observe in other cultural expressions contradicts any such hopeful interpretation. Certainly the arguments made for keeping all-male military academies depend on the fusion of maleness and masculinity.

Karla Tonella

Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996
From: Rosemarie Skaine

In 1977, Jim Skaine devised a set of gender neutral pronouns as follows:

hesh (for she or he)
hes (for her or his) (hers or his)
hem (for her or him)
The compound is hemself.

Jim is a professor of communication studies at the University of Northern Iowa. E-mail James.Skaine@uni.edu

Rosemarie Skaine

Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996
From: Val Eads

Yes, I've had the fun of learning languages with grammatical rather than natural gender. The German word for girl (or at least modern German; in the older forms of the language there were several other words in use) is neuter gender because it is a diminutive; the "chen" on the end of maedchen (maiden or little maid) is a diminutive ending. I agree that a human pronoun would simplify matters and tend to use s/he which is accurate as well as PC. But one cannot pronounce a / so I tend to use the plural when I speak; "they" is not ungrammatical if one simply uses a plural verb with it. I find very few instances where it doesn't work. Just takes a bit of practice.

My email account is being shut down in a few hours so bye y'all until I get back on line in a few weeks. Give 'em hell Linda! Val E.

Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996
From: Sara Rachel Lowes

I think James' Skaine's plan for gender-neutral pronouns is really interesting, not bad sounding in practice. Hesh has a lovely music in it. I am curious if anyone has ever read these in students' papers; has anyone just found tehmselves marking papers or reading around in journals and found themselves seeing these pronouns and thinking, "Well, now that is a word that connotes two sexes and plenty of similarities of experience and makes me aware and comfortable as a reader." That is very exciting. Now is the time for gender-neutral vocabulary to enter mainstream analytical writing, not just as a style ("progressive", which--like the label "PC"--accords ideas the force of simple faddishness) but as a convention.

I am curious about the emotional/aesthetic responses to Skaine's pronoun scheme. Does anyone in the group use it or something like it in their own work? When writing positions or small arguments in papers, I customarily use female pronouns in example cases where I am laying out experiences or concepts with which I identitfy as an individual and which convey my argument. I find it much more appealing, however, to use a neutral space as the identifiable experience or concept, rather than continuing to use the female pronoun as my default simply because I am woman writing analytically. Rather than highlight the individual, I would like to force people to acknowledge that we all have to agree on where to go next, if we are going to move anywhere. I am curious, however, if scholars on the whole still find it most useful, in terms of furthering feminist or equalitarian politics, to put forth the feminine pronoun, as a means of chiseling away the quanititative slant towards masculinity being the default experience/concept/analytical space in which we all seek intelligently to discuss things. If anyone can offer their personal experiences with trying to include the feminine or avoid alienating the masculine in their writing, I would find it enlightening. (I am interested in finding out what the agressive tactic is among those who are trying to practice what I will call, for lack of a more accurate term, "equalitarian" scholarship. As a young student, I have the habit of being leery of assigning anyone the contested nomer, "feminist." Anyone who wants to relieve me of this sensitivity should feel free to correct me.)

Sara Lowes

Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996
From: Dorothy H. Mackey

To Mr James Skaine,

Maybe it's me, let me see if I understand this neutral gender terms. The basic premise is that if genders were neutral then things between genders would be equal? If I have this right please let me know. But, if I am correct in assessing your premise to go neutral would improve gender issues, how would it change the attitudes of people. In my experience it was not the terms that received the unequal treatment it was the human beings. It is the attitude that must be changed, not the terms. And while I noticed your neutral terms, let me make an observation.As I read through your terms it seemed that even with your neutral terms the new term seemed masculine. Example: hesh, change the e to i, and remove the last h and you have his. I noticed throughout all of the neutral terms that one letter change would put a masculine spin on it. I applaud your attempt to begin a new area of fairness. But, if we really want to make them neutral go to one word for both genders. I personally do not truly see this as the issue. As noted in the Brown v. Board of Ed decision, separate is not equal, followed by the reverse discrimination decision using quotas. I don't feel it was the S. Courts intention to legislate through laws fairness, I believe it was an attempt to modify behavior thus attitude changes through "putting the shoe on the other foot". If the court for a moment in time could have place the traditional social class into experiencing the unfairness they placed on others maybe this group could see their own arbitrary discrimination was wrong. I feel the court tried what most civilized people would have recognized as a social deficiency. Unfortunately, the court may have hoped those traditionalists who were prejudiced against would right the wrongs of inappropriate thinking. The Court failed to anticipate that many citizens just didn't get it and that only financial loss seems to motivate many of these people. There was a saying in the military, "you never see an ugly generals aide". The same rules apply throughout our society.

Dorothy Mackey

Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996
From: W. L. Salvatore

As a young student, I have the habit of being leery of assigning anyone the contested nomer, "feminist." Anyone who wants to relieve me of this sensitivity should feel free to correct me.

Sara Lowes
first time through. i mis-read "nomer" as "normer".

here is a motto stitched into a sampler on the wall of the main living room at Twin Oaks, the Walden-Two Commune in Louisa County, Virginia, as i remember it from the time i went there to visit the mother of an old affectionee of mine:

"To co according to co's needs;
From co according to co's abilities."

they had also tried playing chess with three people as follows: Person 1- White move 1;
Person 2 -- Black move 1;
Person 3 -- White move 2;
Person 1 -- Black move 2;
Person 2 -- White move 3;
Person 3 -- Black move 3; and so forth.
that hadn't proven self-perpetuating as an activity

W. L. Salvatore

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996
From: Trudy Last

"Well, now that is a
word that connotes two sexes and plenty of similarities of experience and makes me aware and comfortable as a reader." That is very exciting.

In general people don't feel comfort but get very angry at not knowing for sure the gender/sex of a person or subject in writing. While you experience comfort at not having a subject defined as he or she, most people experience extreme angst.

When a baby is born the very first thing the parents ask is "Is it a boy or a girl"--not does it have all its fingers, is it healthy? etc. They need to know the sex of the baby FIRST so that they will know how to TALK about the baby. Until the sex is known not much will be said. Think of how uncomfortable you feel (perhaps you don't...but I admit I do) when you see a friend with a baby or child and you don't know whether it is a boy or a girl. Or even someone's pet--is it male or female? Gender affects what we say, how we interact with, play with and hold babies and people. And that is the beginning of that story. (To me "gender" is what culture makes out of biological "sex".)

I know I'll ever go back to using the "gender neutral he" in writing. I use "he/she" (I guess)...but mostly write using plurals. What's really crappy about this pronoun topic is that NO MATTER what we do, some kind of "accommodation" has to be made to include women--and an "accommodation" is never completely satisfactory. There is no way to know what language (or history) would be like if women had been included in the first place. Now we are "inserting" ourselves into a language that doesn't really want us there. It will never feel good. I've stopped thinking about it; but then again, I'm not writing much either.

Trudy Last.

Date: 96-07-04
From: Rosemarie Skaine

The pronouns I (Jim) put together were not designed to replace the use of the feminine and masculine pronouns. They have still much use. They are to be used in cases where the person being referred to may be either female or male.

For example, a doctor should keep hes patients well informed; that is, hesh should read the medical journals available to hem. If a woman is being referred to, then use the she, her and her. If a man, he, his, him.

As to the statement that the pronouns have a "masculine bias," they are devised so that "hesh" has all letters of "he" and "she," "hes" has two letters of "her" and two letters of "his," and "hem" has two letters of "her" and two letters of "him." So linguistically they have no bias but because they are balanced, it can be claimed either that they are more feminine or that they are more masculine. In point of fact, they are totally balanced.

They were designed to correct a linguistic dilemma that is posed by the use of either the female or the male pronoun when the person talked about could be either. They were designed also to serve as pronouns are designed to serve, that is, as a short replacement for a noun. The common use of "she or he," "her or his" and "her or him" don't serve effectively because they are too long to be pronouns. But they are better than to use either the masculine or feminine pronoun when you are using nouns which could be either gender.

I believe my pronouns help us confront the situation of what pronouns to use when the traditional use of the masculine pronoun became unacceptable. And where the use of the feminine pronoun is also inaccurate and unacceptable.

Jim Skaine
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