William & Mary recently elected Jessee Vasold, a transgender student, homecoming queen. The Flat Hat reports that “Jessee Vasold ’11 made history at the College of William and Mary Wednesday when ze [sic] was announced as the school’s first transgender homecoming queen, representing the Class of 2011.”
As a student at William & Mary, my fraternity, Psi Upsilon, co-sponsored the Gay Student Union’s annual Drag Ball. At home somewhere I have a photo of me in a white dress shirt and plaid skirt (and a mohawk) at the drag ball from that year. The GSU hired professional drag queens to dance at the event which, in my junior year, would prove a bit too raucous for The College’s taste and get the event banned. I fondly remember two of our members, Mason and Russell, dressing in black suits with phone cords stuffed in their collars to look like secret service agents, acting as “security” for the performers and escorting them around the University Center. After the show the girls came back to Unit A to party. This may not have been the first time drag queens partied at a W&M fraternity, but I like to think we broke the mold.
All of this to say, I have some amount of gay cred, but I can’t get on board with The Flat Hat’s use of “ze” as a gender-neutral pronoun. Some languages, like German, have gender-neutral pronouns. English does not. Perhaps in time people will start to adopt new words like “ze” and “zir”, but I think at present they just make for awkward reading. A pronoun’s job is to stay out of the reader’s way, allowing the sentence to flow without needing to constantly repeat a person’s name. Having to stop and define a pronoun undermines the purpose of pronouns.
Yet language is an important battleground that does affect how people think. For example, The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s Media Reference Guide states:
Because of the clinical history of the word “homosexual,” it has been adopted by anti-gay extremists to suggest that lesbians and gay men are somehow diseased or psychologically/emotionally disordered - notions discredited by both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association in the 1970s. Please avoid using “homosexual” except in direct quotes.
We should try to avoid using offensive terms inadvertently, but it’s easy to go too far in altering language to avoid offense, as the Politically Correct English movement in the ’90s evinced. In his essay “Tense Present”, David Foster Wallace notes:
As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as “economically disadvantaged” rather than “poor.” Were I he, in fact, I’d probably find the PCE term insulting — not just because it’s patronizing but because it’s hypocritical and self-serving. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker — scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language — and so serves the selfish interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed.
But what if the problem isn’t knowing which of a few terms to apply (“poor” versus “economically disadvantaged”), but that no good term applies?
GLAAD’s style guide states:
We also encourage you to ask transgender people which pronoun they would like you to use.
A person who identifies as a certain gender, whether or not they [sic] have taken hormones or had surgery, should be referred to using the pronouns appropriate for that gender.
If it is not possible to ask a transgender person which pronoun he or she prefers, use the pronoun that is consistent with the person’s appearance and gender expression. For example, if a person wears a dress and uses the name “Susan,” feminine pronouns are appropriate.
Fine if the person has decided on a gender, but not useful for an individual with no, or changing, preference. I’ve seen some publications starting to use the abbreviation “LGBTQ”, adding a “Q” for “questioning”, when referring to the collective group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (including my employer’s Georgetown Law Weekly).
GLAAD’s recommendation makes common sense: use whatever the individual in question prefers. The Flat Hat article, however, states that Vasold prefers to be referred to neutrally. If I were a newspaper1, I wouldn’t use “ze” as a gender-neutral pronoun, I’d use “he” or “she”, because of the stylistic reasons mentioned above. The job of a pronoun is to stay out of the way. If the individual declined a preference, I’d pick. In the context of the homecoming queen article, I’d use feminine words, since the story is about a male acting in a female role. If there were no gender context, I’d use whatever the person’s biological gender were. Yes, this would go against the wishes of the article’s subject, but if anyone can appreciate needing to do something because of style, it’s the homosexuals.
See also: “All-Purpose Pronoun”.
- I do have an internal style guide for what I write on this site, as do all newspapers. For example, I use serial commas, I put quotation marks inside other punctuation “British style”, and I don’t put spaces around dashes. But I leave quoted passages intact, so if they use different rules, I let them be.