Change the World, Not Your Pronoun
Don’t call me “she.” Call me “they.”
Why? You’re only one person, I say.
Yeah, but there’s no gender neutral pronoun.
Yes, there is. “It.”
I don’t want to be called “it.”
No one wants to called it, but nowadays there are some who want to be called they. Why? Because they don’t want others to know their gender.
Gender is probably the first and most fundamental thing we know about ourselves. It affects our entire life, perhaps even our destiny. So why would you not want someone to have this crucial piece of information about you? That’s like trying to know your neighbor without being told where she lives.
There’s no question that gender causes you to make certain assumptions about others. It may change how you act. What you say. How you feel about that person. If a woman meets a man, she may act flirtatious. But if she meets another woman, she may commiserate about a bad hair day or painful high heels.
When you meet someone who dresses androgynously, so that you can’t tell if they’re male or female, you probably spend much of the time just trying to figure out their gender. Not knowing someone’s gender might puzzle you and put you in a no-man’s land of social interaction. Down deep of course we’re all just human beings, but millennia of indoctrination and experiences cannot be altered by hiding your gender behind men’s clothes and being referred to as “they.”
And just to be clear, I’m talking about women who want to hide their gender and be called by a plural pronoun. Usually, men don’t do this. Why should they? They’ve been the dominant gender physically, socially, and financially throughout history. Matriarchal cultures and goddess religions have been the exceptions.
No, it’s women authors who hide behind men’s names, like George Elliot and Acton Bell. It’s women who abbreviate their first name, like J.K. Rowling. And it’s women like Ursula LeGuin who imagined a world where gender differences didn’t exist, in her fantasy novel The Left Hand of Darkness.
But in the real world, there is no such thing as having no gender.
We all have both male and female hormones in our bodies, both male and female tendencies. But we have only one set of genitalia which determined the box that was checked on our birth certificate under sex.
The pronoun they may refer both to men and to women, but why hide behind a plural pronoun? Why not be proud of your gender? And if you want to get rid of gender stereotypes and social assumptions made about you based on your sex, then work towards changing society, not yourself.