Gender pronoun weakness in English

Note: Another post I wrote back in November 2006. I hope this can be a starting point for more of a discussion of ideas about gender and feminism.

In English when you want to refer to someone using a pronoun, you have the option of He as a subject and Him as an object. Likewise for a female you have She for the subject, and her as an object. Both of these are singular, so they refer to only one person. Besides these English offers It, which is a non-gendered singular pronoun, that can be either a subject or object.

The problem is that English has a serious shortcoming. He/him implies the male sex (gender). Likewise she/her implies the female sex (gender). It, on the other hand, implies a neutral reference(or in some cases simply non-human, such as "Cute dog! What's its name?"). However, there are many times where we are making a non-specific reference to a singular human, in which case it seems misleading and problematic to imply gender. For example, I came across this sentence: It is usually difficult for a programmer to check for vulnerabilities in his own software. We already know there are gender balance issues in fields such as computer programming. Having language like this doesnt help, and might in fact have something to do with the imbalance.

What English needs is a gender-neutral singular pronoun. While It technically fits the description, at present, like I mentioned, It references non-human items. So It could be a good solution, but I also think its good to have a non-human pronoun (tho anti-anthropocentrists might strongly disagree with this). Luckily We already have a solution to this problem, it's just that a lot of people don't seem to be comfortable formally acknowledging it. We use it all the time for informal speech; it's known as singular They.

The problem is that grammatically prescriptive people insist that is "incorrect". And from their perspective, it's understandable why they might thing so, for one simple reason: They is traditionally a plural pronoun. Thus it would seem that it has no place being used as a singular. But therein lies the beauty of language, which prescriptivists often seem to lose sight of, in their quest to eternalize a certain form of speech. Language is ever evolving, and much of what we say is contextual. In fact we have references going back to the 15th century of singular they, which certainly provides some precedent, and should displace any notions of "improper" usage. But more importantly, the solution singular They provides to the need for a non-gender singular pronoun is much more important than any confusion which may be produces from They having the potential as both a singular and plural pronoun. In fact, thanks to context there should be very few chances for confusion (at least for native speakers), thanks to subject-verb agreement.

Of course, a better solution would probably be a whole new pronoun, but its not such an easy thing to just inject a new usage into a language. Whereas with this people are already using it, and have been for quite some time. The next step is to formalize it, thus teaching it in grammar classes, and one way or another showing the prescriptionists then benefit and necessity in defining a non-gendered human singular pronoun.

Long live they!

Here's an article on Wikimedia discussing the issue: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_gender-neutral_pronouns