gender neutral pronouns & animals
Zorro probably wonders why loud music always starts playing right after ze gets comfy and starts grooming zirself.
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Zorro probably wonders why loud music always starts playing right after they get comfy and start grooming themself.
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marahmarie questioned what pronoun to use for a burping squirrel, and it got me thinking.
There's not much point in using gendered pronouns for animals, as usually there's no need to distinguish them based on their sex. For example, "That bird is squawking so loud, it's giving me a headache." When there is a need to point out an animal's sex, one can simply say so: "That's a male bird"; "That's a female bird".
The pronoun "it" is gender-neutral but also impersonal/depersonalizing. We don't usually call a companion animal "it", but rather "he" or "she", because "it" sounds too impersonal. Generally, we know the sex of our companion animals, so we know which gendered pronoun to use.
Even so, calling animals "he" or "she" based on their sex seems silly to me sometimes. Those pronouns evoke mental gender-related connotations and stereotypes which are even more ridiculous when applied to animals than when applied to people*.
It's not usually obvious however, what sex an unfamiliar animal is. So one can either call it "it", or one can guess and call it "he" or "she".
If some gender-neutral pronoun other than "it" came into common usage for people, we could use it for animals too, both familiar and unfamiliar ones. We would no longer need to distinguish between them based on their sex, nor depersonalize them.
If that happened, I wonder if it would also affect how people think of animals in general. Would people start to feel more kinship/empathy for them? Would people who are unable to feel such empathy tend to call animals "it" while people who felt empathy would use the other pronoun?
* A character in a book I'm reading, in saying good-bye to his horse, said (translated from German) "You're the prettiest, smartest, and most dependable companion one could ever wish for." It was a female horse. If the horse were male, I doubt the character would have called it pretty. Yet, are female horses prettier than male horses? I think not.
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I was also thinking that while "they" is gaining traction as a gender-neutral pronoun, it would be good to have another option. One to use when we don't know or care about a person's gender, and another for people whose gender we know is other than male or female.
The singular pronoun "they" can already be used for both cases. But due to the first usage, it feels somewhat impersonal and distancing. While I don't mind being called "they" (and sometimes would appreciate it), it's not really my preferred pronoun.
But having 2 such pronouns might bring about too many complexities.
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The thoughts that spark a post like this take only a few minutes in my head. Why then, does it take me over 2 hours to put those thoughts into coherent written form? And even then, the sentences feel awkward, and I feel like I'm leaving out half of what I wanted to write?
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Zorro probably wonders why loud music always starts playing right after they get comfy and start grooming themself.
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marahmarie questioned what pronoun to use for a burping squirrel, and it got me thinking.There's not much point in using gendered pronouns for animals, as usually there's no need to distinguish them based on their sex. For example, "That bird is squawking so loud, it's giving me a headache." When there is a need to point out an animal's sex, one can simply say so: "That's a male bird"; "That's a female bird".
The pronoun "it" is gender-neutral but also impersonal/depersonalizing. We don't usually call a companion animal "it", but rather "he" or "she", because "it" sounds too impersonal. Generally, we know the sex of our companion animals, so we know which gendered pronoun to use.
Even so, calling animals "he" or "she" based on their sex seems silly to me sometimes. Those pronouns evoke mental gender-related connotations and stereotypes which are even more ridiculous when applied to animals than when applied to people*.
It's not usually obvious however, what sex an unfamiliar animal is. So one can either call it "it", or one can guess and call it "he" or "she".
If some gender-neutral pronoun other than "it" came into common usage for people, we could use it for animals too, both familiar and unfamiliar ones. We would no longer need to distinguish between them based on their sex, nor depersonalize them.
If that happened, I wonder if it would also affect how people think of animals in general. Would people start to feel more kinship/empathy for them? Would people who are unable to feel such empathy tend to call animals "it" while people who felt empathy would use the other pronoun?
* A character in a book I'm reading, in saying good-bye to his horse, said (translated from German) "You're the prettiest, smartest, and most dependable companion one could ever wish for." It was a female horse. If the horse were male, I doubt the character would have called it pretty. Yet, are female horses prettier than male horses? I think not.
.
I was also thinking that while "they" is gaining traction as a gender-neutral pronoun, it would be good to have another option. One to use when we don't know or care about a person's gender, and another for people whose gender we know is other than male or female.
The singular pronoun "they" can already be used for both cases. But due to the first usage, it feels somewhat impersonal and distancing. While I don't mind being called "they" (and sometimes would appreciate it), it's not really my preferred pronoun.
But having 2 such pronouns might bring about too many complexities.
.
The thoughts that spark a post like this take only a few minutes in my head. Why then, does it take me over 2 hours to put those thoughts into coherent written form? And even then, the sentences feel awkward, and I feel like I'm leaving out half of what I wanted to write?
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*ahem*
Anyway, the word "it" is a real dilemma for me in relation to animals...glad to see I'm not the only one who might feel awkward around it. Bad: I will sometimes slip into "it" even when discussing my own animals. Good: I hate myself for it and usually catch myself instantly and make a gendered correction on the spot. Bad: even the gendered correction (when gender is known, as it is with my own animals) still sometimes bothers me.
Thing is, I've been conditioned, along with the rest of society, to assign gender to literally anything breathing (as well as to wholly inanimate objects like ships, cars, bikes, computers, etc). But sometime in the last few years...I guess it started with my male cat. Men especially would compliment "her" for being so "beautiful" (my cognitive dissonance was unreal and I could stay upset for weeks each time this would happen - not so much for the misgendering and gendered compliments as for the fact that the gender even mattered, and that it had its own descriptors that differ from those used for the male subset).
In the ensuing years I've come to think he's "beautiful" more than I think he's "handsome". I actually prefer the former term over the latter. While I see stereotypically masculine features that happen to fit the socially acceptable definition of "handsomeness" in him, and while I've been trained by upbringing and society to celebrate his good looks solely through the lens of which gender they supposedly reflect, those features are not what makes him uniquely nice to look at as a cat. So when you say about the horse probably not being any "prettier" for being a female horse, I think I know what you mean.
Getting back to "it", the use of the word on animals is very impersonal and sometimes deliberately depersonalizing. When I think of "it" used in relation to animals, I think of animal haters saying something like: "Get it [or, alternatively, that] off my property before I shoot it. I hate them things." I've heard cats, dogs, squirrels, deer, opossum, etc. spoken of like that and it chills my blood, so personally I've come to equate the use of it/that with something akin to true disrespect for and even outright hatred of (at least some) animals.
Coming up with an easy to understand and more respectful alternative than the depersonalizing at worst/bland and generic at best "it" and educating people enough to know to use the word out of respect - and kindness - might go a long way to lessen the danger of animals being thought of as easily disposable commodities or easily rid-of nuisances.
In general, "they" has always felt a little weird to me. If I get to the pick the neutral gender term (say, while writing a post for my DW) I will take "they" every time over ze/zie/zir simply because it's less linguistically awkward and foreign-sounding to me. But it's also a grammar buster (at least, according to exactly how I was taught) but it's a grammar buster I've always engaged in verbally simply to keep my descriptions shorter and more efficient (my speech tends to take every shortcut I can take to save time and therefore can be almost over-condensed), so switching "they" over to my writing is not much of a stretch, even if it does make me feel guilty every time I use it - because I feel like I'm breaking a rule of some sort.
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(Anonymous) 2015-07-13 01:14 am (UTC)(link)anon was me - here it is logged-in
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