"This registers as a modern problem, but gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed for centuries. In 1808, Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested repurposing “it” and “which” “in order to avoid particularizing man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently.” But only recently has mainstream pop culture entertained the idea of a neutral pronoun for referring to trans, genderqueer and even some feminist folks who either don’t identify as “he” or “she” or are interested in demolishing that binary in speech. A flurry of totally new constructions has emerged to bridge the gap. On Tumblr, it’s now typical for young people to pin their preferred pronouns to their pages: The writer behind a blog called “The Gayest Seabass” identifies as “Danny, xe/xim/xir or he/him/his or they/them/their, taken-ish, 20.”...
Saturday, April 23, 2016
"Who’s ‘They’?"
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