About a dozen years back, after I had moved to Texas to keep an eye on my aging father, I signed up for a writers workshop. I had to write a couple of stories for it and travel to get there, so I expected it to give me the kind of energy boost I needed to work on my own stuff around parent care and my day job.<\/p>\n
It turned out to be the wrong workshop for that. In the end, it may have done more harm than good. But that\u2019s the chance you take with workshops.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve let go of most of my bad feelings about it, but there was one thing that got said in the workshop that I completely rejected at the time and feel even more strongly about today. I hope that the person who said it has changed the way they think about it, but having heard several other writers in the same general age range make similar comments, it is possible that they are still stuck in this rut.<\/p>\n
The thing they said was, \u201cThe first question we ask about a baby is \u2018Is it a boy or a girl?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This was in criticism of a story I wrote in which I named a character Jade and didn\u2019t indicate gender immediately. The instructor said firmly that the gender of the character should be established immediately.<\/p>\n
Now it happens that in the story as then written, Jade was male and that became clear. That is, I wasn\u2019t even writing a story in which a character was non-binary or their gender unknown. I just had two people meet and, given the differences in their backgrounds, their genders weren\u2019t immediately obvious to each other.<\/p>\n
I bristled at the idea that one must always label the gender of a character. Once I heard that, I decided that the instructor in question had nothing to teach me and gave up listening to them.<\/p>\n
(BTW, I am using they\/them\/their pronouns because the gender of the instructor is not relevant and not important to my experience. I suspect the person in question might resent that, but that\u2019s their problem.)<\/p>\n
They\/them pronouns have become common usage lately. Non-binary people use them and they are common in situations where the gender of a person is unknown. Using they is an easier shift in language than creating a gender-neutral singular pronoun.<\/p>\n
And of course, as has been pointed out many times, use of they in the singular isn\u2019t even new. (I think the rule against singular they is one of those \u201crules\u201d set out in Strunk and White. I happen to detest Strunk and White, something I\u2019ve said many times. I\u2019ve got an old essay on the subject I\u2019ll share here one of these days.)<\/p>\n
But there are some people who take pride in their inability to shift with the language, including some people who write fantasy and science fiction and should know better. We make up words and use other ones differently all the time in SF\/F; why not change the way we use pronouns?<\/p>\n
A few of these people are the same ones who bleat that \u201che\u201d can be gender-neutral and that \u201cman\u201d includes all humans.<\/p>\n
I knew that was a lie when I first heard it as a teenager and my dislike of that approach was magnified in law school where we were told that \u201che\u201d in reference to lawyers included us women (who made up 10 percent of the class) because it was gender-neutral. And then we\u2019d read a passage that said \u201cthe lawyer he\u201d and \u201cthe secretary she.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those in the past who used man in phrases like \u201cthe common man\u201d or \u201cman\u2019s search for meaning\u201d weren\u2019t really using man as a gender-neutral term. They didn\u2019t consider women to be part of the discourse.<\/p>\n
Yes, you can go back and interpret what they said as referring to all humans, because in many cases it does, but don\u2019t assume that those who wrote those things considered women to be real people.<\/p>\n
Nothing I\u2019m saying here is new. I\u2019ve been thinking about pronouns for a long time. I used to always end up on the pronoun panels at cons because I found the subject fascinating.<\/p>\n
But I was moved to write on the subject because last week I saw a lot of discourse about the negative attitude that Mercedes Lackey, recently named as a SFWA Damon Knight Grand Master, has expressed in the past toward the use of they in the singular. Her opinion drew criticism, with some concern about her attitude toward trans and non-binary persons.<\/p>\n