neopronouns

 These are newly minted pronouns which extend the traditional range to meet the needs of the LGBTI+ community.  We used to have she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs but to this we can add xe/xem/xyr, or a range of variations on this theme.  Indeed you can make up your own pronouns if that is what you would like to do.  The full list of suggested pronouns is available online along with sample sentences of a rather stilted nature.

 I can understand that trans people might find it unsatisfactory to use they/them/theirs, even though this pronoun has been used in the singular so as not to reveal a masculine or feminine gender.  The point of it is to conceal one’s gender and be gender-neutral in a world divided into masculine and feminine.  Those people who feel that they are neither masculine nor feminine find the whole strategy irrelevant and unsatisfactory.  They would prefer to be upfront about their status.  On top of that they run the risk of being bailed up by people who still don’t find the use of they as a singular pronoun to be acceptable.

 The argument is that these pronouns are important to this community, and it is no more difficult to learn a new pronoun than to learn a new word.  Try explaining bitcoin.   But a minority group with minority pronouns is always going to have to keep explaining them.  I appreciate the difficulty of this, and remember the comment made by a gay person that you didn’t just come out of the closet once.  You had to come out every day of your life for one reason or another.

 I remember when Ms was introduced to add to the Mrs/Miss dichotomy of polite titles.  With the best will in the world it was sometimes difficult to know whether someone wanted Ms or not. The fallback was to use the person’s name – Dear Sheila Andrews – on the basis that a person who wanted to be Mrs Andrews might find that displeasing, but not nearly as displeasing as being addressed as Ms Andrews.

 Again, although trying hard to do the right thing, I found it very taxing to break the habit of a lifetime and change he to she for a trans friend.  I do more or less have it under control and my trans friend has become increasingly gracious as she relaxes into her new gender.  I think that this difficulty is as nothing compared to the difficulties presented by a whole array of new pronouns.

 The Oxford English Dictionary has ze as a new pronoun, but the only entry produced by a search on xe is Xe, the element xenon.  I’m slightly surprised because all the examples of use for ze are drawn from theoretical discussions rather than actual use.  Dictionaries need perhaps to see how this settles down.  If ze why not xe and ve?  Remember the inclusion of thon, a singular gender-neutral pronoun, in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 1934?  It never took off.