Gender and Language

Two years ago, following the death of my dog and cat several months earlier, I adopted a ten-year-old dark calico cat named Midnight.  I changed her name to Minuit (French for midnight) and began having a conversation in French with her every morning, fondly calling her “mon petit chat.”  Then I thought, wait, French is a gendered language.  Better check. Yup, I was unwittingly offending my cat by using the wrong gender. She is ”ma petite chatte. “

Gendered language issues are not new.  Back in the day long ago, a human being in English was man. A female human being was a wo-man.  A male human being was a wer-man.  Then the male human beings dropped the “wer” part, leaving us with centuries of confusion of who was included.  Are all men created equal? Does that include me?  Probably not, or the founders would have given me my justly deserved right to vote. One man, one vote? Man of the year (which finally became- thank you, Time magazine- person of the year).

Other distinctions were more subtle.  Is a female on stage or screen an actor or an actress?  Are you pleased that we no longer have stewardesses but instead flight attendants? Were those who fought for women’s right to vote suffragettes (-ette being a suffix meaning little, as in kitchenette or dinette) or suffragists (-ist being a suffix that denotes a supporter of a political position, as in communist, strict constructionist, capitalist, fascist, racist, sexist, leftist…)

Back in the 1960s, there was a frenzy over the title given to women.  Men were just Mr., unless they happened to be a doctor or a senator or a governor or something.  But women’s title was defined by marital status.  An unmarried woman, however old, was Miss (mademoiselle in the case of my cat). A married, divorced, or widowed woman was forever Mrs., an abbreviation for Mistress, indicating that she was-or at least at some point had been-attached to a male. I managed to partly escape that dilemma with at least some people by becoming Dr. Ulbrich, but the larger escape was the widespread use of Ms., indicating gender but not marital status.  (Pronunciation “Miz” is courtesy of the South, and it applies to all adult women regardless of marital status.) More recently, there was an effort to desex the terms for a person of Latin American heritage from Latino (male) or Latina (female) with the unpronounceable Latinx. Not a hit even among people of that particular ethnic heritage.

And now it is a “they-them-their” controversy, and I am an absolute troglodyte on that issue. While I am firmly on the side of LGBTQ rights, I find myself in a lot of company with others who are distressed over the chosen nonbinary pronouns of they, them, their.  (When asked, I assure people that my pronouns are still I, me, and mine). I do not think those rights need to include the use of a plural pronoun that takes a singular verb sometimes and not at other times, the bane of every English teacher. Yes, we do have a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, but no one is suggesting “it” as a replacement.  A little creativity is called for.  How about sherm, herm, herms? Or a loan from another language?

In the meantime, at least my cat and I have gender clarity.  Even though she has been neutered, she is still a very female cat and doesn’t seem to object to being so identified.