Why I think we need two sets of gender-neutral pronouns.

[corrvin]

The problem with gender-neutral pronouns is that generally, even people who use them only want to use one set, and I see two distinct uses for them.

One use is for talking about a single person who we don't know yet:

"Whenever we hire an intern, zie can use the desk over there." We haven't hired an intern yet so we don't know what gender that person will be.

The other use is for talking about a person whose gender is known not to be one of the main two:

"When our new intern Chris starts next week, zie will have that desk over there." Chris is genderqueer and so we're using the pronoun "zie."

The problem with this is that you can't always tell which usage is meant, so you might get the meaning backward:

"When our new intern starts, zie will have that desk."
"I thought we'd already picked someone?"
"We did, Chris is the new intern."
"Oh... oops."
So in this case, using "zie" has failed to signal Chris's gender.

Or the opposite problem: A friend of mine, in private conversation, may want to mention a fact about a non-mutual friend; to protect that person's privacy, my friend uses "zie" so as not to give away their gender. For example, my friend would say--

"Oh, a friend of mine got a ticket for that, and zie was able to get it thrown out. Have you considered that?"

And I immediately think "You have another genderqueer friend?" And that's not what was meant AT ALL.

No, I don't have a preference on which set to use for which. I wish I did.

Comments

[kaberett]

You're missing the case of people of known gender who are making the political point of being gender-neutral (which can include third-gender people, obviously), which I am going to write about at some point. (i.e. nice job I agree ;)

This is why I am quite so territorial about neologisms as pronouns for third-gender/genderqueer/etc people, even though I personally prefer "they", because they is _the established gender-neutral singular pronoun in English for unknown gender_.