Some English-speakers have been hailing the recent mainstream campaign to eliminate gender-specific pronouns in Swedish. A few Anglophones, though far from the mainstream, have also been seeking for some years now to implement neologistic gender-neutral replacements for ‘he’ and ‘she’. The Swedish case in particular has been held to be a reflection of that society’s relative progressiveness in the politics of gender. What is missed here, out of ignorance or wilful avoidance, is that there are many languages in which gendered pronouns have either gone extinct or were never used in the first place, and which are spoken in societies that are hardly known for their gender egalitarianism: for example, Persian or Turkmen. Somehow, even without access to ‘she’ or ‘her’, but only an all-purpose ‘he/she/it’, Iranian courts manage to sentence women to death by stoning for ‘adultery’. We might just as well predict that Swedish society would take up lapidation and anti-adultery laws as a result of the elimination of gendered pronouns, as that it would thereby draw closer to full gender equality.
Both predictions are absurd. And yet, this interest in gendered personal pronouns does at least remind us of a way of thinking about grammatical gender that is generally underemphasised by linguists and language instructors: that the masculine and feminine genders of pronouns, and more interestingly of nouns, reflects a division of the cosmos into categories that radiate out from the sexual dimorphism of human bodies. In English there is only vestigial gender for substantive terms for non-biological entities: ships, sometimes countries, sometimes sportscars, are ‘she’. In French, every noun is masculine or feminine, sometimes in ways that seem arbitrary. What is it, for example, about abstractions, such as those words ending in -ité or -tion, that is inherently feminine? And why is the word for ‘vagina’ masculine, or the most common slang term for ‘penis’ feminine? Yet there are also some ways in which the non-arbitrary ideology of gender is reflected in grammatical gender: the words for ‘father’, ‘son’ ‘god’, etc., are all masculine, which seems obvious of course, but which would not be obvious if, as we are sometimes told, there were no connection between grammatical gender and the presumed biological (or in the case of God, spiritual) sex of the entity in question.
In modern French the masculine has absorbed the neuter, which was the third gender in Latin, the principal ancestor language of French, as well as in Greek, Sanskrit, and Proto-Indo-European, and which remains the third gender in living Indo-European languages such as German and Russian. What is the neuter, and what does it reveal about the cosmology of those language-users who divide the world not just into masculine and feminine entities, but also into entities that are neither/nor? It may be that this category is not simply for the leftover entities that are neither masculine nor feminine, but rather is the vestige of an archaic system of noun classes in which the masculine and the feminine were only two instances of a much richer and more diverse way of carving up the world.
When I studied Old Church Slavonic with Boris Gasparov in the 1990s, he was actively interested in the noun-class system of the Niger-Congo languages, which include up to 22 nominal classes based on semantic hyperonymy in which more specific categories of being are grouped in more general nominal classes. Place, animacy, number, and so on exist alongside gender as basic noun forms. If I recall correctly, Gasparov was drawing on the work of some earlier formalist from Prague or Tartu who argued that the distinct declensions for animate and inanimate nouns in Slavic languages (in the masculine accusative singular for example) reflects an earlier system akin to the Niger-Congo languages in which masculine and feminine in no way exhaust the possibilities for carving up the world of things named by nouns, as they do, say, in modern French. On this view, then, the neuter could be the residue of what were once several different gender-like noun categories that unlike the masculine and feminine genders have not even a putative grounding in biological sex. These all could have been folded into the neuter gender in the same way that the neuter was in more recent times folded into the masculine in French.
Recent desultory clicking brought me to the website nonbinary.org. This organisation, I think, offers the purest expression I have seen of contemporary transgender ideology. I will make no secret of my inability to accept, or understand, certain elements of this ideology, nor will I hide my horror at the quickness with which inability such as mine is denounced these days as ‘transphobia’. I take it rather that the inability results from real inconsistencies in the ideology. In particular it is not at all clear to me how human social reality can be carved up into ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ if we are in fact committed to non-binarity. You can argue that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are just the tip of the iceberg, that one can also be, to take an example from nonbinary.org, ‘frostgender’. But if this is your view, if you think there are countless ways individual human beings might discover within themselves an inward affinity to some entity, process, or phenomenon in nature or in abstraction, and that the acknowledgment of such affinity is the only adequate account of gender, then don’t you dare tell me I’m ‘cis’. How on earth would you know?
It seems to me very plausible that such affinities are indeed the expression of a richer system of placing human beings within a cosmos of classes of entities than the one that divides everything into masculine and feminine. If it seems too fine-grained to believe that a person might truly be ‘frostgender’, by hyperonymy we might still be able to imagine a system in which some people affiliate with the class of water-based entities, or the class of cold things. Acknowledging our affinity to the animal world in particular, and expressing this affinity through our social identities, seems a particularly natural and appropriate thing to do. I am confident in fact that there is just as much sense in a human being saying that, though they were born in human form, it is to the class of jaguars or crows that they truly belong, as it is for, say, a human being born biologically a male to say that it is nonetheless to the class of human females that he truly belongs. At present the latter statement is supposed to command our full and unquestioning respect, while the former would be received at best with curiosity and most likely with unsanctioned ridicule. This distinction is arbitrary and culturally specific in the extreme.
The only social outlet the person who identifies with an animal has in our society is in outward affiliation to shabby sexual subcultures like the ‘furries’ or the ‘pups’. The profound truth that these subcultures skim seems to go unnoticed either by their members or by their mockers: that we are, not just in our ‘fetishes’ or ‘kinks’, but in our deepest natures, the kin of other living beings. Our historical bond with them is older even than sexual dimorphism, and it is not at all surprising that it moves some people to commit themselves in their social comportment to not just kinship, but inward identity, with a given animal kind. They do not need to go out and buy some rubber costume in order for the claim of identity to be veracious, either, any more than someone who claims to be frostgender needs to dress up as a snowflake. And mistaking the trouble one is willing to go through to manifest themselves socially as a member of this or that trans identity with trans identity itself is to mistake the trivial appearances for the fascinating and important metaphysics at work in human identity. We are, none of us, ‘cis’.
But back to grammar. There are vestiges in many languages of a vision of the world in which gender is largely ungrounded in biological sex: the vast majority of gendered entities —stars, houses, rocks, and so on— plainly have no biological sex at all. In languages such as English, gender has mostly retreated to those entities that are thought to have a sex, and until recently it was supposed that the classification in terms of gender was grounded in that sex. This grounding has been called into question in the past few decades, but if grammatical gender for pronouns withers away or is abolished by decree, this will only be the completion of a process of de-gendering that has already occurred for the vast majority of entities in the world. There was a time when stars and rocks could be masculine or feminine, with no expectation that this classification be grounded in biological sex. And now we have arrived at a point where even biological sex is not enough to ground gender, but what is forgotten here is that for most of human history, if natural language is any indication, there was no expectation of such a grounding.
Now we might say good riddance to grammatical gender, we might say that English is ‘more evolved’ than French to the extent that it mostly lacks gender. But we might also look back to richer systems of noun classes in other more distant languages as holding out for us a more adequate expression of the non-binarity we now claim to be seeking in the social expression of gender. What if we could find, in natural language, the elements for a conception of gender-like classes that do not stop at masculine and feminine, that presume no grounding in biological sex, and that help us to make sense of the sort of affinities, for example to entities in the natural world, that the new non-binarity is asking us to recognise? What if the best hope for progress is in archaicism, finding those old ways of speaking in which my inward affinity to another being can be expressed as true, even if my outward form is nothing like that being? Une étoile is not really feminine, and no human being is really a jaguar; it is also likely that no human being is a ’man’ or a ‘woman’ in any clear and incontestable sense. But these are all ways of talking, of making meaning in our human lives.
Hopefully we'll see more countries taking steps towards gender equality in the near future.
Posted by: Kate | June 30, 2016 at 10:09 AM
1. You write: "In particular it is not at all clear to me how human social reality can be carved up into ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ if we are in fact committed to non-binarity."
I know certain trans folks who agree with you entirely about this: they spend a decent amount of time creating various bulwarks for the binary -- arguing that it does some good, has some advantages, etc. (or at least a reformed binary would have advantages). This often surprises (cis) folks who think the only progressive/ enlightened view is something like non-binarity or something even stronger like gender abolitionism.
2. You write: "if you think there are countless ways individual human beings might discover within themselves an inward affinity to some entity, process, or phenomenon in nature or in abstraction, and that the acknowledgment of such affinity is the only adequate account of gender, then don’t you dare tell me I’m ‘cis’. How on earth would you know?" ... "We are, none of us, 'cis'."
Maybe I'm being uncharitable to you here, but this strikes me as over-reaching. (i) the gender assigned to me at birth by my doctor and parents was 'Male', (ii) I acknowledge an inward affinity to maleness, and (iii) I tell you and other people that fact (both explicitly and implicitly). (i) and (ii) together mean I fit the usual definition of 'cisgender,' and adding (iii) is how you and others would know that I am cisgender.
Perhaps your point is that I probably have other inward affinities -- e.g. let's say towards the jaguar. Yet my doctors and parents classified me as human/ homo sapiens. So I would be 'trans' in that sense of being attached a label at birth that does not match my inward affinities. That strikes me as sensible and correct.
But I think one can also say (in the most common understanding of the terms today): yes, I am cisgender, because of my inward affinity for maleness matches the 'Male' written on my birth certificate. I currently think the pros of that way of speaking outweigh the cons of declaring nobody cis.
Posted by: the illuminator | June 30, 2016 at 10:24 AM
There are languages wherein classes are based on physical characteristics - flat, round, long, thin, heavy, etc. I think the significance of classes - however defined and used - is that they are attempts to understand the world and our place in it. One of the major values of language is its ability to condense ideas into functionally useful units to facilitate grasping the relatedness of different things. I also think the obsession with matters of self-identity indicates serious problems in the social environment. Something's wrong when how you classify yourself becomes the most critical issue in your life. It reflects an unhealthy narcissism.
On the general subject of linguistic musing, note than in Russian, the object of a verb is normally in the accusative case when that object is inanimate, but in the genitive case when the object is a person. This usage may reflect on the whole concept of 'genitive refers to possession'. I've seen the same grammar in old dialects of German, and since German and Russian stem from Wes/East branches of IndoEuropean, the usage may be very ancient.
Posted by: RayS | June 30, 2016 at 10:44 AM
One interesting manner, I think, to frame language is as a tool for attention (but not as the only such tool, there are a lot, labels, jingles, colors, odors, wears...). So, when we are constrained to use the pronouns she/he we will be attentive to the gender of the person we are seeing for instance, because otherwise we would be unable to speak about that record. The language constrains the parents among others to ask to the child, "was it a boy or a girl whom you are speaking about" to correct her; the parents then concretely teach the child to be attentive to that criteria (but, even in a language without grammatical gender, there are a lot of other tools that will teach the child to pay attention to it, language is a tool for attention, not the only tool). Every language has a particular way to dispose, but not to determine, its speakers. I recall my then-almost-three-year-old son saying me "il y a beaucoup de personnages dans le metro"; I laughed and I corrected him, they are not "personnages", characters, but "personnes", people. I was attracting then his attention to the distinction between fiction and reality, game and life; the French language constrained to teach that distinction to my child. There are no language that doesn't dispose in a way or in an other its speakers. I can understand the non-gender project : it is maybe not always appropriate to pay attention to gender; but I think your proposition not especially to eliminate but to add more grammatical markers as in "archaic" languages is more relevant because it stimulates our inventiveness and attentiveness, we would learn new ways to be attentive to the world, whereas eliminating all classes will eliminate language tout court without creating anything new.
Posted by: Thibault | June 30, 2016 at 01:18 PM
A few things.
1. Stoning is no longer used in Iran. It's a recent development, from 2002... but decriminalization of homosexuality in Western countries is fairly recent, too, from about the 1960s or so. Yes, it's a quibble, but if you want to make an argument that Islamic countries are sexist, please get it right. And if you don't want to talk specifically about Islamic countries, why specify Turkish and Persian, and not Chinese or Lingala or Zulu or Japanese?
2. More to the point of Swedish gender-neutral pronouns, Swedish specifically borrowed the pronoun used in Finnish, which has no grammatical gender. This is why the other North Germanic languages, which have not had the same contact with Finnish, have not done the same. In similar vein, Malay, whose indigenous pronoun system distinguishes degrees of politeness, borrows the socially neutral English pronouns I and you.
3. You ask why abstract nouns are feminine. There is an answer: it comes from an animacy hierarchy, in which men > women > inanimate objects. It's no coincidence that the Latin nominative suffix for neuter plurals and feminine singulars is the same. When late Proto-Indo-European developed the three-gender system familiar in so many classical languages, it treated some neuter plurals as abstract concepts that could be animate, like aqua (but not hudor...), and those got their own gender, which also got to include women. All of those early civilizations were extremely patriarchal, and their language reflects this. There was as far as I understand the mainline of IE research no stage in which proto-IE had many noun classes; as reconstructed, it had an animate vs. inanimate distinction, which evolved into masculine vs. neuter, with the feminine coming from a new medial category of collective nouns and abstraction.
4. There exist communities of otherkin - people who believe that they're really various animals, or sometimes even mythological creatures like unicorns. They're derided by pretty much everyone else, for a simple reason: the gap between humans and animals is vaster than any distinction within humanity, including the gender distinction. Gender is for the most part binary, but there is a fair number of exceptions, hence trans and genderqueer people. By analogy, most people in Europe live on one side of the Alps or another, most in North America live on one side of the Rockies or another, and so on, but a few straddle the boundary, and in some places the boundary is fuzzy - perhaps the watershed boundary is fuzzy, with water seeping across the border (as with the Rhine-Danube watershed), perhaps it doesn't correspond perfectly to cultural regions.
5. Technically, grammatical gender is indeed a conservative feature of Indo-European languages - conservative in the linguistic sense, not the political one. People do say things like "Greek is more archaic than the Romance and Germanic languages in that it's maintained most of the classical case system and all three genders." This is specific to how grammatical gender (and case) is encoded in IE languages: final vowels, which have a tendency to erode over the millennia. This is especially true in Germanic languages, where the strong stress accent causes unstressed syllables to erode faster. In Afro-Asiatic languages, where the feminine is encoded with a -t (or t-, or both), gender is not considered an archaism.
6. Bantu word classes have some similarities with grammatical gender, but I think you're going too far in talking about how much richer the system is. First, it counts singulars and plurals separately, by which standards Indo-European languages ancestrally had 9 classes (3 genders times 3 numbers: singular, dual, plural). Second, a fair amount of this system is derivational: in Swahili, mtoto = child, classed with people; kitoto = infant, classed with diminutives; and utoto = childhood, classed with abstractions. Third, as far as I know, in no Bantu language does the noun class system distinguish men from women. A vague European equivalent is that any diminutive in German using the -chen suffix is grammatically neuter, even brazenly gendered words like Mädchen.
Posted by: Alon Levy | July 5, 2016 at 04:56 PM