Recently got involved in a discussion about the sidebar in CthulhuTech that proudly proclaims their intention to use “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun:
THE PRONOUN GAME
Okay, here it is — we use he, him, and his when we’re talking about people playing the game. It just seems weird to alternate pronoun genders within the same book — it make it feel like the book is written for two different audiences. The masculine pronoun is the standard and right or wrong we’re used to seeing it. It may not be politically correct, but you can’t please everybody.
This sidebar has enraged some people. Other people have cheered it on. Still others (who, I pray, are the majority) are just left scratching their heads.
My personal mileage is that I’m mildly annoyed by it. But my annoyance is pretty much identical to the RPG rulebooks that include sidebars expressing how amazing they are for alternating pronouns or whatever their hobby horse of a “solution” is for the gender neutral pronoun in English. The fact that RPG rulebooks somehow became a major battleground in the gender-neutral pronoun wars is one of the truly What The Fuck?! moments of the ’90s for me.
With that being said, I can certainly recognize that for people who actually care deeply about this issue that the CthulhuTech sidebar is basically a game designer going out of his way (and unnecessarily so) to say, “Fuck you.” I would find that fairly off-putting, too, if I was in their shoes.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN IN ENGLISH
Historically, “he” was the gender-neutral pronoun. Several hundred years ago, people came up with “she” to specifically differentiate women. Once women had been differentiated, the previously all-inclusive “he” picked up the specific connotations of being male.
As “he” lost its gender neutrality, however, the language reflexively adapted and “they” was used as a gender neutral pronoun. This worked fine until the the original grammar nazis of the 19th century arrived on the scene: A lot of the work they did to systematize the language was a huge net benefit to the English language, but they also had a lot of weird ideas. (Like trying to force English to obey the laws of Latin: For example, in Latin a split infinitive is simply nonsense. In English, however, phrases like “to boldly go” make perfect sense and people use them all the time. The attempt to ban split infinitives in English because they don’t work in Latin is nonsense. It’s like trying to ban people from playing Halo games on the X-Box because they don’t work on a Linux computer.)
One of the things these guys strongly objected to was the use of “they” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun. So, like split infinitives, many of them declared them to be bad grammar and insisted that “he” should be used exclusively as the singular gender-neutral pronoun. (Note that this was a choice: Either “they” could serve as both a singular and plural gender-neutral; or “he” could serve as both masculine and gender-neutral.)
Despite the grammarians, lots and lots and lots and lots of people kept using “they” as a gender-neutral singular. That made sense, of course. There was a reason that the language had evolved that way. And the situations in which “they” being singular instead of plural could cause confusion were much rarer than the situations in which “he” being treated as gender-neutral instead of masculine could cause confusion.
Fast forward to the 20th century: People begin noticing that “male = human, female = other” is really fucking problematic. And, yes, the grammarian attempt to enforce “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun hundreds of years after the language had attempted to naturally evolve away from that was part of that sexist memetic structure.
As a result, several varying efforts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun separate from “he” or “they” have been attempted. But language tends not to work like that. Instead, “they” has simply continued merrily on its way as a gender-neutral pronoun with ever-increasing levels of acceptance.
MY TWO BITS
I’m a pretty big fan of people communicating clearly and correctly. But I’m also a huge fan of telling prescriptivist grammarians to shut up.
So I strongly endorse making it your personal mission to boldly go forth and use “they” as your gender neutral pronoun in English.
For RPG rulebooks specifically: If you want to swap the gender of your pronouns when writing specific examples, I fully support and endorse your gender-inclusive agenda. Toss some zes and zirs in there, too. And if you aren’t talking about vis character, then you’re unnecessarily excluding future generations of AI players. Seriously: Specific examples of characters and/or players should be multi-ethnic, multi-gendered, multi-everything. Not because it’s politically correct, but because it’s awesome.
But trying to make “she” a gender neutral pronoun is like “fetch”: It’s not going to happen. Please stop trying.
What are your thoughts on the use of “man” in its original, gender-neutral sense – still extant in many idioms and when referring to mankind as a whole, but confusing when used in the specific sense (and often irritating to those who are unaware of or don’t care about the etymology)? My own preferred solution would be to use “man” in the gender-neutral sense and reintroduce a masculine prefix, preferably something with strong etymological ties to the original. I like that option both because it avoids horribly non-euphonic words like “congressperson”, and because it seems like once a certain critical number of people have adopted the change, speaking the old way would become confusing and quickly fall out of use. For some reason I’m very much in the minority, though.
For more on historical pronouns, and the acceptance of singular they and gender neutral he and what we used to have
http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2014/12/12/episode-54-pronoun-pros-and-cons/
and
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Person%C2%92s/dp/0670025852
I don’t think the point of she is to make it gender neutral. Their goal is to make women who feel excluded by he included.
If political correctness SJW keep pushing to strip “he” from being gender neutral, they are really going to have a problem on their hands. If “he” must refer only to males, then a woman can never become President of the USA. I don’t think think the founding fathers intended that, though surely they thought MOST presidents would be male, I don’t think they intended to ban women. Pushing this pc nonsense may backfire.
Michael: “I don’t think the point of she is to make it gender neutral.”
Which is, basically, the whole problem:
Joe: ” I don’t think think the founding fathers intended that…”
I pretty much guarantee you that at least 90% (and probably more like 99%) of the Founding Fathers never intended for women to become President. They also never intended for them to vote.
@Yomar: I’ve occasionally thought about “mankind” and the “-man” suffixes and never really come up with a good solution.
Looking at the etymology of “person” (which originally meant “false mask”), “human” (which derives through French and Latin from the Greek homo, which in turn comes from humus meaning earth), and “man” (which is actually unrelated to “human” and comes through manwaz from the Germanic languages) doesn’t actually provide much guidance.
What you need is something that sounds naturally derived. Something purely prescriptive would never catch on.
“But trying to make “she” a gender neutral pronoun is like “fetch”: It’s not going to happen. Please stop trying.”
Did you mean “he”?
It’s always easy for men to say women should just get over the inherent (or at least perceived) sexism of the English language. Of course, we could also bring up the inherent (or at least perceived) racism of the language. As a writer, you have a choice about the terms you use and whether you want to explain that or not. It’s hard to control how people decide to interpret your choice and explanation. Context, however, does matter. In the aforementioned case, could it be that other things about the RPG as it is presented make people interpret the explanation as being offensive?
As you say, it appears to be a choice: either ‘he’ is both gender-neutral and masculine, or ‘they’ is both singular and plural. Efforts to either make ‘she’ gender-neutral or to introduce a new singular gender-neutral pronoun just don’t seem to work.
Unfortunately, neither ‘he’ nor ‘they’ really sits right – the former is indeed exclusionary, while the latter is, unfortunately, incorrect.
So, IMO, people should just pick what works for them and go with it. If it really is a big deal, the market will decide pretty damn quickly what the answer ‘should’ be.
But I’m stunned that people and companies still feel the need to include a sidebar justifying their choice, whatever that choice happens to be.
For what it’s worth, my preferred approach is to do as the 3e PHB did – introduce a bunch of “iconic characters” for the classes, and thereafter when referring to that class assume you’re referring to that character and pick the pronoun accordingly – so all Fighters are ‘he’, all Wizards are ‘she’, and so on. Of course, that works better in a game with classes or similar structures.
Or they could assume that all the players are male while the GM is female, or indeed that all the real people (that is players and GM) are male, while characters within the game are female. Or…
On second thought, that last paragraph is a bad one: while a male player/female GM split is entirely reasonable, my other suggestion is a really bad idea posted without thinking.
I apologize unreservedly for any offense caused, and will now go batter my head against the wall while muttering, “stupid, stupid…” Sorry.
@Yomar: The original masculine form of “man”, IIRC, was “werman” or “waepman”, meaning sword-man, counterposed by “wifman” meaning weaver-man. Unfortunately “wepman” doesn’t exactly roll off the modern tongue and “werman” sounds too similar to “woman”. Taking it a step further back towards the Latin and calling males “virmen” doesn’t seem like a big hit either. A better option might be to look for a loanword in one of our sister languages.
@Justin, I should say :/
I have a theory that there are two requirements for a publication or document to be a roleplaying game: (1) it must contain a discussion of “What is a roleplaying game?” (2) it must contain a discussion of its own use of pronouns. Lacking these two elements disqualifies it as a roleplaying game. Any additional content is gravy.
Avoiding “he as default” actually has one fringe benefit I’ve noticed as a writer and designer:
When you’re only using male pronouns to refer to male characters, it becomes way easier to check if your characters are disproportionately one gender or you’re talking about one gender’s characters far more than the other.
Personally, I still use “he as default” in speech a lot, but my GMing suffers for it. While improving an NPC, “he as default” locks every NPC into being male unless I specifically decide their gender before I start to describe them.
And, to a large extent, you can see the effects of that in my NPC rosters. If I have everything prepared except shopkeeps, over 90% of my shopkeeps will be male. A lot of that comes back to my faulty use of pronouns.
Cheers!
Kinak
Maybe we should accept “he” as gender-neutral and introduce a weird new masculine-only pronoun.
There is now a list of gender pronouns at the University of Vermont for each student to choose from. And their excuse is that that’s the way to make transgender students feel welcome. Is this what we Liberals have devolved into, that we can’t make any cultural advancement without creating a new attention-getting tableau?
The answer is very simple: Stop using gender pronouns altogether, and just refer to everyone as “it”.
It took me, just an average smart thinker, mere minutes to realize this. And the staff of a state university can’t figure it out? Whatever happened to our education system? And whatever happened to Occam’s Razor?