Gender in English is hopelessly confused, and is growing even more so. The UK has apparently decided (that is, its schools and press have decided) that grammatical gender (at least as it relates to number) is utterly unimportant, and the US seems to be headed in the same direction. I can’t say whether that’s a good or a bad thing.
I’ve complained about the recent practice of referring to single, identified persons as “they” or “them”, and I confess that it does get up my nose; but I’m not insensitive to the genuine problems inherent in sticking with our traditional usages.
There was a time when one could argue with some force—if not entirely persuasively—that it was appropriate to use the traditional “generic masculine”, whereby “the male embraces the female” as one of my language teachers put it; that is, to use masculine pronouns for unspecified members of mixed groups, or where the sex of a person was unknown or unimportant. Some famous women writers of the 20th Century, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, carefully stuck to that practice.
Of course, because of the historical predominance of males in our society, it’s not always clear whether a writer—especially a writer from before about 1930—is using the masculine gender specifically or generically—whether he or she (usually he) is talking about a male or about anybody, male or female. (The fact that generic refers to the whole species, while specific refers to a particular gender, is just one of the mysteries of English linguistic history.)
Until the mid-20th Century, one could argue that the tradition was valid and harmless, even if some writers were a bit vague about it; but today, when females have claimed an equal role in public life with males (and I don’t just mean public office but every public aspect of life, whereas they once were theoretically restricted to private life), the “generic masculine” has become problematic and uncomfortable. To use it seems to be to stake out a position in a controversy, to assert a certain opinion about language or the proper role of women. I’m not entirely happy about that—I rather resent having to change the way I speak and the words I use so as not to be categorized as a Bad Person—but most people seem to disagree with me, and I don’t want, even if it were possible, to have a debate about it with everybody who might hear or read something I say.
At the same time, strangely, it has become de rigeur, in many cases, to use masculine terms where once we used feminine terms. A woman who carves statutes was once called a sculptress. Today, both she and her male counterpart are referred to as sculptors. We now call a woman who acts “an actress” at our peril. Her sex (or gender) remains important, but we’re supposed to call her a “female actor” or “woman actor”. A woman who has become adept in some discipline, or is in charge of something, used to be referred to as a mistress, as in postmistress, schoolmistress, headmistress, or “mistress of her trade” (though that last one is a bit jocular in context, and may be uncomplimentary); but now it is quite common to see a woman referred to as a master—Zen master, master mechanic, etc.
Women who teach college have always been called “professor” (at least since colleges quit requiring their students to know Latin), even though that’s a masculine noun; but when they retire, they’re called “emerita“, a feminine noun, rather than the masculine “emeritus“.
Many other occupations have been given gender-neutral names, of course. (I gather that a headmistress, where that term was ever used, is now called a Head Teacher.) What we used to call waiters and waitresses are now called servers or, horribly, “waitpersons”, or, even more horribly, “waitstaff”.
A different, but related, problem arises out of the word, or particle, man.
We wouldn’t dream, nowadays, of calling a specific female human being a man, even though that term has historically included both sexes; and terms like freshman and ombudsman, which are still applied to females today, have a peculiar odor of sexism about them. (I’ve encountered a female ombudsman who calls herself an “ombuds”. The term ombudsman is borrowed from Swedish, and the Swedes, as far as I’m aware, have no problem with it.) Women have been chairmen since there have been organizations with female presiding officers, and “Madam Chairman” has long been considered the appropriate way to address them; but in my lifetime chairmen have become chairs, and “chairman” is widely regarded as sexist. Jesus said, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23, RSV) Back in my church-going days, I was teaching Sunday school to a group of teenagers, and they wondered why Jesus would have excluded women like that. I had to explain that in his day, and when the RSV was made, man was understood to include both male and female.
That no longer seems to be the case, at least not generally. The mailman is now a letter-carrier. An anchorman is now an anchor or a newsanchor. And “-man” in many occupations has been replaced with “-person”: foreman→foreperson, draftsman→draftsperson or drafter, spokesman→spokesperson, salesman→salesperson, craftsman→craftsperson or crafter. (Some speakers seem to distinguish in those cases between -men, meaning males, and -persons, meaning females.) These changes strike me as ugly and unnecessary, but who am I to judge?
On the other hand, women can still perform workmanlike work. The U.S. Air Force still has airmen of both sexes. Perhaps most obviously, the word woman still contains the generic word man; and although there are a handful of radicals (not to say nuts) out there who insist on spelling it “womyn” (pl. “wimmin”), the notion of eliminating –man from woman has never gotten much traction.
All that is partly because of the age-old practice of treating one sex or the other as the exemplar of a species: we call cows and bulls collectively “cows” (or “cattle”, but that’s a separate thing—all quadruped livestock used to be referred to collectively as “cattle”, and it once meant property. Cf. chattel; and cf. Dutch vee, which means cattle, but is cognate with our fee. The old plural of cow was kine); foxes and vixens “foxes” (though “dogfox” does exist); ducks and drakes “ducks”; geese and ganders “geese”, and so on. We would pick the sex that was most important to us and use it to designate the whole species. Where each sex was of equal importance to us, we tended to use three terms, such as stallion, mare, and horse; or ram, ewe, and sheep. (Incidentally, where the young are what we eat, as with pigs and chickens, we tend to make the immature [and therefore sexless] creature the exemplar of the species and genericize our term for that. In the industry, a pig is a young hog. A chicken was originally a young hen—actually, chicken was once the plural of chick, which is still a young hen.)
Back when male human beings were more prominent in public life than females (as they were until less than 100 years ago in nearly every society on the planet, though nobody knows exactly why), males were taken to be the exemplars of our species, and the term man came chiefly to designate them. (In Old English, we used to speak of wer [= male, cf. Latin vir, Scots Gaelic fear] and wif [= female], while mann referred to any member of the species, as in woman [wif + mann]. Wif by itself survives as wife, a married female human being. Wer survives only in werewolf and (barely) in weregild, where, strangely enough, it seems to refer to a human being of either sex.)
The same practice is still active in English, where a group of females can now be addressed collectively as “guys” or “you guys”, though “a guy” is always male. Similarly, “a dude” is always male, but the plural, “dudes”, can include women, and anybody can be addressed as “dude”. Teenagers now commonly address one another, regardless of sex or gender, as “Bro”, which of course is short for brother. I suspect we—or many of us—still secretly, perhaps unconsciously, think of the male as the exemplar of our species.
Nowadays there are lots of people who are claiming that gender is merely a silly social convention, and therefore is, or ought to be, entirely optional. Some even go so far as pretending that our sex is “assigned” to us at birth by doctors or parents. I suspect that male and female trees don’t get their sexes assigned by other trees.
Of course, there really are rare persons born with secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes, or with chromosomal or hormonal abnormalities that genuinely make their sex uncertain. Nowadays we’ve all heard of the person who was written down as male at birth but began to grow breasts at puberty, or the baby who was thought to be female, only to develop facial hair and testicles later on. But these, so far from being typical, are exceptions that prove the rule. More often, the transsexuals we encounter are people who, for one reason or another (and far be it from me to try to figure it out, let alone judge them), feel unhappy with the sex they were born with, and get some kind of satisfaction from identifying themselves with the other sex, or from rejecting sex-roles altogether. I am absolutely not dismissing or belittling these feelings as a “choice” or “preference”, or suggesting that self-identification as transgender or transsexual is in any way trivial or capricious. I have encountered at least one transgender woman (i.e., born male but self-identified as female), and heard of others, who reported experiencing a sexual thrill from being “pretty”; but I don’t pretend that all cases are alike, or that such gratification is not merely a small part of a far more complex phenomenon. It is certainly true that males who identify themselves as feminine have existed in many cultures and since ancient times. Some cultures even recognize such persons as a “third sex”. Ours, traditionally, does not; but we seem to be on the way, at least in our cities and our mass-culture (i.e., in Hollywood), to abandoning the binary norm.
But this is threatening to veer off into social commentary, inappropriate on a blog about language. The question remains, what shall we do now about gender and number in our use of the English language? I hesitate to suggest anything. My own practice is to preserve number agreement wherever possible (as by making hypotheticals plural, or saying “he or she”), and to stick with traditional usages where they won’t offend or seem to imply censure. I think we’re in a period of transition, and it will take a while for the rules of our language to catch up with our modern mores. A generation or two from now, we’ll probably have given in to the activists, and all personal pronouns will be plural in form. Or maybe traditionalism will sweep the land, and we’ll go back to the way things were a hundred years ago. (Don’t hold your breath.) Until things sort themselves out, I prefer to stick to what I was brought up with, as long as I can do that without seeming to condemn anybody.