Gendered Language: Why Preserve the Status Quo?

When it comes to language, how much gender is too much? In particular, how many gender-specific terms should our language have, and what sorts of terms should they be? Right away, we can see that natural languages display a range of options. At the gender-saturated end, we find languages like Hebrew, where in addition to gendered third-person pronouns, speaking in the first- or second-person also requires indicating gender. That is, in order to communicate “I/You have class” in Hebrew, one must literally say, “I/You female-have (or male-have) class”. At the other end, we find languages like Turkish or Finnish, which lack both grammatical gender and gender-specific pronouns.

English sits in the middle; it lacks most grammatical gender but has gender-specific pronouns, honorifics, proper names, and sometimes (though decreasingly) suffixes. For ease of reference, we’ll say that having gender-specific pronouns et al. are ways of ‘encoding gender in grammar’. In previous work, we argued that English would be better off toward the genderless end of the spectrum, without gender-specific pronouns (he and she); English, we suggested, should have one universal, gender-neutral pronoun such as they or ze.

We have three core reasons for wanting to eliminate gender-specific pronouns. First, if we maintain she and he, we have two options for referring to non-binary persons (that is, persons who do not identify exclusively as male or female). Either we can create new pronouns for each non-binary gender identity, or we can use a single gender-neutral pronoun for all (and only) these persons. We think the first option is infeasible and risky: pronouns are cognitively primitive, so learning one new pronoun is difficult, much less dozens; and misgendering would become unavoidable even for highly conscientious speakers. But the second option is no better: it is inegalitarian, as it provides binary-identified persons with gender-specific pronouns and lumps everyone else under a catch-all.

Second, continued use of she and he often puts queer, trans, and gender nonconforming individuals in a situation where they must either disclose their gender identity or (explicitly or tacitly) deceive others. Lori Watson’s article “The Woman Question” describes such a situation. Watson, who identifies as a woman but often is taken to be a man, writes, “My choices are to correct people when they call me ‘sir’ or assume I am a man, or let it go, which often means functioning socially as a man.” He, like sir, presumes someone is a man. If you are not a man but are called he, you must decide: will you disclose your gender identity by correcting someone, or let them continue to assume (and communicate to others) that you are a man? The same applies in situations concerning sexual identity: the “pronoun game” is familiar to queer persons, who frequently contort sentences or use alternative terms (e.g. “my partner”) to avoid using pronouns for their sexual partners.

Third, tentative empirical evidence suggests the density of gender-specific terms is causally related to harmful, essentialist beliefs about men and women. While not conclusive, numerous studies purport to show that grammatical gender is correlated to essentialist beliefs: the more ‘gender-loaded’ a language is, the earlier native speakers ‘learn’ their own gender categories and use gender categories to form preferences and make inferences about others.

While these arguments primarily target gender-specific pronouns, it is not difficult to see how they equally would apply to other ways we encode gender in English grammar, such as honorifics (Mr./Mrs./Ms.) or suffixes (actor/actress). And while our arguments may not be decisive, we suspect that resistance to eliminating such gender-specific terms often stems primarily from a gut intuition that our conclusion is counterintuitive.

Our present goal is to provide an argument defending this suspicion. In what follows, we sketch a ‘debunking argument’ against the intuitive judgment that we should maintain the gender-specific terms that are currently in use. We believe such intuitive judgments often are motivated by status quo bias, or what Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord call “an inappropriate (irrational) preference for an option because it preserves the status quo.” (658) To show this, we highlight evidence supporting two claims:

1. We share a pre-theoretical commitment to not encode social identities in grammar, and
2. We override this commitment with respect to gender identities due to status quo bias.

To motivate the first claim, we turn to a thought experiment found in Douglas Hofstadter’s satirical article ‘A Person Paper on Purity in Language’. There, Hofstadter—in the voice of fictional columnist William Satire—points us to a nearby possible world: one where current gender-specific English terms are replaced with race-specific terms. We can explicitly compare modern English to Satire’s English:

Satire is outraged that some activists (the “negrists”) want to “radically change our language in order to ‘liberate’ us poor dupes from its supposed racist bias.” More specifically, these activists want to eliminate race-specific pronouns, generic terms, honorifics, and suffixes from this alternative version of English.

Hofstadter’s short piece is worth reading in full to get its full effect. It will probably shock you. As he writes in the post script, it is meant to do so: ‘The entire point of it is to use something that we find shocking as leverage to illustrate the fact that something that we usually close our eyes to is also very shocking.’ Intuitively, it is wrong to use—let alone fight to preserve—the race-specific terms in Satire’s English. If that was our language, we should fight to change it, including by violating its grammatical norms.

Here’s one proposal for change which Satire considers and dismisses: “that the plural pronoun ‘they’ be used in place of the inclusive ‘whe.’ This would turn the charming proverb ‘Whe who laughs last, laughs best’ into the bizarre concoction ‘They who laughs last, laughs best.’” We think such proposals are exactly right; and moreover, we think that many of the reasons why they are right closely track the reasons we have offered for using they instead of he or she in modern English.

First, encoding a black-white racial binary into English grammar leaves us with no good option for referring to people who do not fit into this binary. This includes people who are neither white nor black (the whe/ble binary is not exhaustive) and people who both black and white (the whe/ble binary is not mutually exclusive). The same concerns apply to the masculine-feminine gender binary: he and she are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.

Second, encoding a black-white racial binary into English grammar puts people in situations where they must either disclose or deceive others regarding race. If you assume that a (gay) man’s partner will be a woman and refer to them as she in modern English, that man must either deceive you or disclose that they are in a homosexual relationship. By analogy, consider an exchange with a person in a mixed-race relationship: If you assume that a white person’s partner will be white and refer to them as whe in Satire’s English, they must either deceive you or disclose private information (note that opposition to mixed race relationships isn’t that much less fierce or prevalent than opposition to same-sex relationships).

Finally, encoding a black-white racial binary into English grammar is, we think, likely to be causally related to harmful, essentialist beliefs about racial groups. This is for the same reasons we gave before. And we also think it is intuitive: If we used pronouns (whe/ble) and professional titles (author/authoroon) that communicate information about race, we’d communicated that race is relevant: “ble won the race” insinuates that the winner won because of their race, at least to some extent. To always communicate in such a manner is to communicate that race is always explanatorily relevant. As Paul Taylor notes, treating “because they’re black” as a go-to explanation is a tenet of classical racialism (89).  

There’s more to be said here (and indeed, we take up these issues more in ‘How Much Gender is Too Much Gender?’, forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language). But we hope to at least have made a prima facie case for the claim that we have a pre-theoretic commitment to not encoding social identities like race in grammar.

Why, then, do we make an exception for gender? Here we turn to our second claim. One possibility is that gender is exceptional. But another is that our intuitions are shaped by status quo bias: as Hofstadter suggests, we’re too close to our actual language, so we “usually close our eyes” to ways in which it is shocking.

One way to tease out whether or not status quo bias explains our intuitions about gender-specific terms is to follow the ‘Reversal Test’ described by Bostrom and Ord:

When a proposal to change a certain parameter is thought to have bad overall consequences, consider a change to the same parameter in the opposite direction. If this is also thought to have bad overall consequences, then the onus is on those who reach these conclusions to explain why our position cannot be improved through changes to this parameter. If they are unable to do so, then we have reason to suspect that they suffer from status quo bias. (664-665)

Say you intuitively oppose our view that we should have fewer gender-specific terms in English: that is, that we should eliminate gender-specific pronouns (he/she) and suffixes (-ess) and so forth. Consider a change in the opposition direction. Imagine that we had far more gender-specific terms in English. Modern English only has gender-specific third-person pronouns, so imagine we had gender-specific first- and second-person pronouns. Modern English only affixes feminine suffixes to some nouns (actor/actress), so imagine that we did so for all such nouns. (While its use is rare, ‘philosopheress’ is in fact a recognized term in Modern English.)

We expect that most people would resist that change. Intuitively, it would be worse to have more gender-specific terms than we already have. But this is puzzling. To paraphrase Bostrom and Ord, the onus is on those who think that more gender-specific terms would be worse to explain why fewer gender-specific terms would not be better. If it would be bad to have gender-specific second-person pronouns, why is it good to have gender-specific third-person pronouns? This calls for an explanation, and if none is forthcoming then we have reason to suspect that intuitions in favor of maintaining current gender-specific terms in English are distorted by status quo bias.

This isn’t a decisive case that these intuitions are distorted by status quo bias. But we think it is telling. Those who assert—often quite emphatically—that we should preserve modern English’s gender-specific pronouns and suffixes do not seem to think we should adopt more gender-specific pronouns and suffixes. They don’t seem to be fired up by the absence of noun forms like philosopheress, or by the lack of masculine and feminine versions of I and you. This isn’t necessarily the product of status quo bias. But it’s hard to explain in another fashion. Should we really think that modern English just happens to have the exact right level of gender-specific terminology, such that it’d be worse to take some away or add more? Consider how fortuitous that would be, given the amount of variation in the amount of gender-specific terminology in English over time, and between English and other natural languages right now.

Let’s recap. We propose that English should be less gendered than it is. Many resist this conclusion due to a gut intuition that it is counterintuitive. But we think that they share our intuition that it would be bad to racialize English in the way that it is gendered, or to make English more gendered than it is. This suggests, to us, that many share our pre-theoretic commitment to not encode social identities in grammar, and do not apply that commitment to preexisting gender-specific terms in English due to status quo bias.

We want to end by explicitly noting one thing we have not argued for here. We do not think that all objections to our view should be dismissed as instances of status quo bias. There’s plenty of room for reasonable disagreement about the messy and complex social dynamics around current gender distinctions and how they’re treated in natural languages. One can make arguments defending the status quo, or at least something relatively close to it. All that we’re pushing for here is that the status quo stands in need of a defense, and the inchoate sense that radical proposals for change feel wrong shouldn’t be marshalled in its defense.

For Further Reading:

The Problem with Pronouns Political Philosopher June 23, 2017

If someone wants to be called ‘they’ and not ‘he’ or ‘she’, why say no? The Guardian June 4, 2018

He/She/They/Ze Ergo (2018) 5(14) 371-406

Aware, 2016 (top); Insidious, 2016; and Trappings of Pink, 2016 used with permission of Libby O’Daniel.

Raised by a quilter and a photographer, Libby O’Daniel learned textile craft from their mother, and visited their father daily in his home-based photography studio. From an early age, O’Daniel has maintained an intimate relationship with color, associating the people on her lives with colors in her childhood crayon box. Their work examines the nuances of gender identity, untangling the ‘natural’ from the ‘nurtured and socialized’ parts of self. Libby O’Daniel was born in Tucson, Arizona, raised in Michigan and Colorado, and has lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 2002.

Robin Dembroff

Robin Dembroff is an Assistant Professor at Yale University. They received their PhD from Princeton University. Robin’s research focuses on feminist metaphysics, epistemology, and language, with a particular emphasis on the social construction of gender and sexual orientation.

Daniel Wodak

Daniel Wodak is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. They work primarily in ethics, philosophy of law, and social and political philosophy.