The reason it may be better is that it’s what we currently have in place. All other things being equal, the system that doesn’t require change is better than the system that does, and the more disruptive that change will be, the more this is true.
If you’re designing a language from scratch, sure, leave gender out. But when you’ve already got a language with millennia of historical roots, a change to something as fundamental as pronouns is going to be disruptive.
Even individual use of non-gendered pronouns for folks with gender will be disruptive and unpleasant. Folks who identify strongly as gendered will be offended by your use of nongendered pronouns for them, whether or not you like that offense.
The benefits of this change do not, in my opinion, outweigh the disadvantages.
I identify strongly as female and I’ve got no problem whatsoever with anyone using nongendered pronouns for me.
What I’ve had a problem with for pretty much my whole life is people who use gendered pronouns for me, but assume that I’m male and therefore use the wrong ones. This doesn’t happen if they’re looking at me (though I’m sure it does to some people), but it happens with considerable frequency in writing and online, and occasionally over the phone. Nongendered pronouns solve this problem and are IMO a considerable improvement.
(again, as someone earlier in the thread mentioned, dictionaries aren’t a rule book. But they do explain the long, long history of “they” as a singular pronoun, no matter what your third grade teacher told you.)
Definitely fair point. I do think there are enough folks, both trans and cis, who’d be uncomfortable with non-gendered neologized pronouns applied to them that it’s a tricky issue.
FWIW I’ve spend years of my life being mis-gendered more often than I was correctly gendered. I have a little skin in the game.
Here’s my page about pronouns in an imagined future when AIs, uplifted animals and aliens are commonplace.
The dominant, general purpose pronoun is e, ey, eir.
I been writing fiction using these pronouns for twenty years (together with a number of other people), and we find it particularly useful to describe a future where most people are genderfluid in some way or another. Even if we don’t make contact with aliens, uplift animals or create sentient AI in the near future, our culture is likely to become increasingly genderfluid, so an expanded set of pronouns is likely to become very useful.
The default pronoun I tend to use is ‘e’, which covers most possibilities. If anyone wants to use other pronouns that’s their prerogative. Some people are quite keen to adopt one or another of the more specific pronouns, for reasons of their own, but they don’t need to do so.
Just had an experience that brought this thread back to me. I received an e-mail message from someone for a business purpose and replied with a formal salutation “Ms. So-and-So” because I could tell from the person’s name that E was (most likely) a woman. E replied back to me “Ms. Acsenray.”
This has happened to me frequently all my life, because my name is an Indian name that most Americans are mostly unfamiliar with and it kind of looks feminine. It’s not a terrible guess and I don’t blame em for making that mistake. But that presents me with a puzzle—do I correct em?
So, in some situations, this is the final message that is required to accomplish the business purpose. Do I send an additional one just to correct? In this particular situation, I did have a reply, but that reply was likely going to represent the final interaction between us … for ever.
I decided there was no point in correcting em. It doesn’t feel good tell someone “hey, you made a mistake” when there’s really no point.
But what this situation made me want was a formal title that wasn’t tied to gender. We have “Mr.” for men, “Ms.” for women (along with the still occasionally used “Mrs.” and the exceedingly rare “Miss”), and now we have a growing contingent of third-gender folks using “Mx.”
All that’s fine, but in each of these cases Mr./Ms./Mrs./Miss/Mx. to communicate “correctly” requires one to know the other person’s preference. That’s the same situation we have now with he/she/they.
People should be able to communicate with me—or especially about me—without ever having to bother to find out my preference among those choices. That’s what I like about a new set of gender-free and preference-free pronouns. “They” is caught up in the whole preference paradigm, and I want to be free of that.
I want a salutory title (“M.”?) and pronouns that no one can choose and no one can deny, because they don’t have anything to do with gender, but also because they don’t have anything to do with anyone’s individual’s preference. They’re inevitable pronouns.
I’m part of an organization that will now require you to have your pronouns on your badge at the Annual Conference. I’m seriously considering using “he, her, its”