Not long after moving to Tucson, AZ, following two years in China, I was at a contra dance with my friend Candace, her girlfriend Sam, and their friend Fern*, whom I had just met. At the end, Candace, Sam and I gathered near the exit. “Where’s Fern?” I asked.

“I think they’re talking to someone inside,” replied Candace.

“They?” I asked. “Who else is there?”

Candace was confused for a minute, then said, “Oh! No one. Fern theys.”

Now it was my turn to be confused, but I quickly realized what was up. “Oh! Ok.”

In theory, I knew about non-binary people. I was familiar with the gender unicorn, and I knew about various pronouns besides “she/her” and “he/him” that people use – “they/them,” “ze/hir”. However, I had never actually met anyone who used non-binary pronouns before.

After getting to know more people in the queer and activist communities in Tucson, I now have lots of friends and acquaintances who they. Some “look” non-binary, and it is easy for me to use their correct pronouns, since they don’t fit my pre-existing gender boxes anyway. Other times it is more difficult. Fern, for example, presents very femme, and it took me longer to get into the habit of using “they” to refer to them. In general, I am trying harder now not to assume the gender of people I don’t know. No matter what they look like, there is no way to know someone’s correct pronouns without asking. Language is powerful – using a different word can lead to a whole new mindset.

Now, I am a polyglot and amateur linguist, so I am fascinated by the ways in which new linguistic phenomena get adopted by language speakers, and it didn’t take long for me to start wondering how other languages are evolving in response to our evolving understanding of gender. I speak French and Russian, some Spanish and German, and a little bit of Mandarin Chinese. All of these languages except Mandarin have grammatical gender that pervades the language. This means that all nouns have gender, and pronouns, adjectives, and sometimes even verbs agree with that gender. That makes de-gender-binary-ing, or gender-spectrum-acknowledging, a lot more complicated.

Spanish

When I moved to Tucson, I was lucky enough to begin studying Spanish in a group that had connections with both Earlham College’s Border Studies program (woot! Indiana Quakers) and Mariposas sin Fronteras, who support LGBTQ+ immigrants (they’re great! give them money!). In our classes, the non-binary pronoun “elle”, as well as -x or -e endings (e.g. Bienvenidxs a todxs, Elle está cansade) are common currency. I’m sure there are other options in use in different parts of the vast Spanish-speaking world. None, as far as I’m aware, are accepted as standard, but it is refreshing that at least in this small community, the gender spectrum is acknowledged and celebrated.

French

French, like Spanish, has pervasive masculine and feminine agreement, but has its own set of issues regarding non-binarization. This blog article does a good job of presenting the most common options in an easy-to-grasp format, including some attractive infographics. For a more scientific approach, this page presents data from a survey of non-binary folks conducted in 2016. The main takeaway for me is that the subject pronoun “iel” (a combination of “il” and “elle”) seems relatively established, but there is less consensus on object pronouns and adjective agreement. Part of the issue is that a lot of differently-spelled words are pronounced identically in French, so all the different spellings don’t necessarily come through in speech!

NB: As far as I can tell, these sites reference French as spoken in France. If anyone has knowledge of practices in francophone regions of Canada, Africa, or elsewhere, leave a comment!

German

German and Russian actually have three grammatical genders already – masculine, feminine, and neuter – but most people do not consider the neuter gender appropriate for referring to non-binary humans.

In reference to German, Clarissa Lohr puts it well:

First, the neuter is far from the English neuter pronoun it when it comes to problematic connotations. It is by far less degrading and objectifying. We don’t have to make the same enormous mental efforts to use it for a person, it does not scream “this is an object” in a voice that we can barely tune out in our minds, it does not counter all our intuition. […] But the neuter gender has similar, albeit weaker objectifying connotations. The neuter gender is generally associated to low agency, low responsibility and infantilization. It is often used for small, cute, weak, cherished creatures that we feel protective of, for instance for nouns in the diminutive. In some dialects it alternates with the feminine gender to refer to women and expresses benevolent sexism while the feminine gender expresses hostile sexism. Basically, the neuter gender is applied as a term of endearment to women who “know their place” and expresses patronizing and condescending but benevolent attitudes that show affection as a reward for traditional female gender roles. It is noteable that the most common instances of neuter gender applied to people is with neuter nouns like Kind (child) and Baby, i.e. people who generally have low agency. In the standard language, neuter nouns that refer to women are often degoratory terms for gender-nonconformance (especially slut-shaming) and therefore they can also express hostile sexism.

Ok, so using “es” isn’t the best policy. What do people use instead? According to this blog (which has at least a partial English version at the bottom), the most common pronoun is xier (pronounced ksier). (The blog post also includes tables of declined forms of xier, possessive pronouns, etc.) However, there are a lot of other options, including just using the English words “they/their/theirs.”** This site lists 28 (!) different possibilities.

For German speakers, this article is a good introduction to non-binary identities and language by a fantasy writer who is starting to incorporate non-binary characters into her writing.

Russian

Russia is particularly hostile towards LGBTQ+ people in general, but this article from the Moscow Times shows that there are at least a few Russians trying to raise consciousness and make changes. Although some non-binary people have adopted the already-established neuter gender, most find it degrading or dehumanizing, so there is an active effort to come up with new forms. Another article by a non-binary American graduate student of Russian mentions a few additional options. One is to use the plural, which does not differ by gender (similar to non-binary folks using “they” in English). I also like the “оне (one)” option ze mentions. It has a nice simplicity, since -e and -o are both common neuter endings in Russian, but the traditional neuter pronoun is “оно (ono).” He is “он (on),” she is “она (ona),” and they is “они (oni),” so “оне” fits in well.

A Belorussian LGBTQ site published this discussion between Russian linguist Ol’ga Andreevskix, Belorussian author and linguist Aleksandr Pershai, and Russian trans activist Yana Sitnikova about changes to the Russian language for the purpose of either “feminization” or “gender neutralization.” For Russian speakers, I recommend reading the whole thing, but for the rest of you, here’s a partial summary.

The three begin by discussing the underscore that is already in use in written language among feminists and gender activists – for example, when referring to a general “student,” instead of using the masculine (студент) or the feminine (студентка), one can use a version with an underscore before the feminine ending (студент_ка), indicating the possibility of either gender, or even of something in between. One downfall of this method is that it works only in writing, not in speech. Yana brings up a different way of de-gendering nouns in speech that she/they^ made up, but Ol’ga counters that it does not take into account the Russian language’s history and phonological system and has little chance of catching on broadly. Yana replies:

Of course, it would be great if gender neutralization caught on everywhere, but for now my only ambition is personal use, and perhaps use in the non-binary community. At the moment some people talk about themselves using the neuter gender, but for me personally, that doesn’t really feel right.

After more discussion of the mechanisms of language evolution and whether activism really has a chance to provoke broad changes, Aleksandr notes:

The most important thing is to understand the point of gender neutralization. It’s important to remember that, beyond grammar, the use of accurate terms, suffixes, and endings, chosen by us, is not a “whim” – it’s the possibility of a fully realized existence.

As a final note on Russian, two of the articles linked above mention the Language Neutralization Laboratory, which was a group on VKontakte (the Russian version of Facebook) dedicated to coming up with new gender-neutral Russian language forms back in 2016. I haven’t read any of the posts yet, but I definitely plan to check it out.

Mandarin

Finally, we come to Chinese. Mandarin has NO grammatical gender, agreement, or morphology at all, so in theory, non-binary people should have it easy! Linguistically, anyway, if not culturally. The words for 他 “he,” 她 “she,” and 它 “it” are all pronounced the same (though they’re written differently), so non-binary people just need to come up with a new character and call it “ta” like all the others. However, there are two complicating factors that I find fascinating:

The character for “she” did not even exist until the 20th century, so originally 他 was a gender-neutral third-person pronoun for any human. According to the linked article, “The imperative to invent a Chinese equivalent to the female pronoun “she” in English was facilitated by the intensified language and cultural interactions between China and the West from the late nineteenth century onwards.”^^ It would be great if we could just go back to before then, but alas, the damage has been done. Basically all of our written communication now happens through computers of some sort. While writers of alphabetic languages can simply type some new and unheard of combination of letters any time they want, Chinese characters aren’t that simple. Most Chinese people use keyboards with Latin letters. They type the pinyin spelling of the character they want, and a menu of choices comes up. Therefore, if you type “ta,” you get the three choices above (plus some others with a different tone and/or meaning), nothing more. Not to mention the fact that Chinese characters are complex combinations of semantic and phonetic elements with a long history, and creating a new one isn’t as simple as it would seem.

For these reasons, the most common written form of gender-neutral “ta” in Chinese is……TA! That’s right. Capital Latin letters.** Go figure.

Conclusion

It is nice to know that there are people around the world actively trying to expand the gender possibilities of their languages. I’m also happy that I can now write about all of my non-binary friends in my journal when I’m practicing my other languages.

The various issues of cultural interaction and linguistic “purity” that come up when trying to broaden the usage of these forms could fill a book. For example, there’s a long history in Russia of claiming that pressure to accept LGBTQ people is Westernization or Americanization, and that it’s not a part of Russian culture. The use of English words in other languages as neologisms for non-binary people doesn’t help this perception, but that in itself is no reason not to use them.

I foresee a long period of destabilization regarding gender terms in language, since we are still grappling with what gender, sex, and sexuality even are, how they interact with each other, and how they differ by culture. The best we can do is use the terms that we have at our disposal at this moment, respect the ways people want to be identified, and be ready for them to change.

* All names changed for privacy.

** As a linguist and a descriptivist, I shouldn’t judge, but the adoption of English into other languages is one of my pet peeves, and makes me sad.

^ In the article, Yana talks about themself as a trans woman, but also talks about using gender-neutral pronouns for themself. Another wrinkle in the fabric of gender is that a person may have different pronoun preferences in different languages, so I don’t know what Yana would choose to use in English. (This may seem too complicated for some, but I find it super cool and exciting. How do our brains even work?? It’s not just about gender either – ask bilingual speakers about how their identities change when speaking different languages.)

^^ As a side note, the article is a fascinating overview of how a controversial linguistic neologism becomes ingrained and standardized.

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