On Writing – And Gender Pronouns

One of the many stories credited to the great Yogi Berra occurred while he was doing the color commentary on a televised baseball game: A couple of flashers ran across the field.  When asked whether they were male or female, Berra reportedly said,“I don’t know. They had bags over their heads.”

One of the changes in American and Euro-culture is how we regard sexual orientation. Another is gender recognition. It seems to me that the English (American) language accommodates orientation.  However we don’t do so well with gender.  Truth is: We never have. At a time when we are accepting people whose gender is in transition, has transitioned or will remain fluid or unidentified at the owner’s wish, why must we categorize it.  We don’t bother sorting out the genders of those who constitute a “they,” “their” or “them,’ why do we need to use an imprecise, misleading word to describe (usually a second reference anyway) an individual person.

In a case of better never than late, The Washington Post just announced that when the gender is unknown, it is journalistically acceptable to use “they” or “their,” rather than the awkward “him or her” or “his or hers,” or “he/she/them.”  The problem with this is that pluralizing a pronoun isn’t the same as referring to gender. This has been a problem with an informal broken-down solution for many years, but it strikes me there is a much better solution. Simply develop a gender-neutral set of short words for singular, gender-free pronouns.

Sadly, in this case, language doesn’t change like this. We let the use of language determine its correctness. It’s a natural evolution.  The same goes for words in dictionaries. We don’t make up words, put them in the dictionary and hope people use them. In high school a group of us wanted to see if we could invent a word. We came up with “fledge.” It would be a response to such questions as “what did you do all day?” Our answer would be an active version of “Just hanging out.” We moved around, did things, but in the end accomplished little. We flidged. We dropped that word into every conversation we had – for a while.

Are you familiar with the word?  Of course not.  But maybe, just maybe, a larger group – LGBT people, for example – could come up with something and start a campaign. If not, I’ve just spent a good part of an afternoon flidging.

Here is a related post   

Observations —Are Bisexuals As Rare As Unicorns?

Times are changing. Seventeen states have made same-sex marriage legal. A–list actors take on gay or lesbian roles as they might any other. Sport figures are beginning to out themselves, understanding how this will help teens deal with prejudice in the locker room. Straights in all professions are showing their support for the LGBT community as that community seeks acceptance for its members.

Unfortunately, though, not all members of that community support each other. When Olympic diver Tom Daley came out publicly, some felt it wasn’t a cause for celebration because he said that he still found girls attractive.  Oops.  Oops. Could it be that this handsome, young athlete was… dare I say it?… a bisexual?

I’ve been around a few years — most of it as a gay man. Sadly I have observed that the BT part of LGBT have been given short shrift by the L&G parts. Even some of the pioneers in the fight for gay and lesbian rights — author and blogger Andrew Sullivan and sex advice columnist Dan Savage come to mind — seem to buy into the notion that people must be one or the other, and that those claiming to like both boys and girls are trying to hide something from the world or themselves or both. Similarly, for many, it seems transgender people who do not opt for sexual reassignment surgery should “simply make up their minds.’”

At times, it must appear to bisexuals that they are without a country. And for those dealing with transgender issues, it must appear that the rest of the world does its best to ignore the meaning of sexual orientation and gender identity and the rights of  individuals to live their lives as they see fit. The either-or LGBT people do no good. Giving credence to these prejudices is doubly bad because they are easily turned back on all of us.