Pronouns

In 1978, I was in my college library tracking down journal articles via Psychological Abstracts.  I loved the experience of being surrounded by its huge blue volumes, discovering tantalizing titles, and tracing them to our library's holdings.  It was then that I first encountered the use of "she" as a gender neutral pronoun.  At the time, the idea of "he" being used in a gender neutral way was certainly criticized, but no serious replacement was commonly offered.  "He or she," or sometimes "she or he," have become common, obvious options.  Some authors mix the use of "he" and "she" in their writing or simply make occasional use of "she" examples when "he" might be expected, but I saw none of that until after my first experience of this little bit of linguistic, gender rebellion in the psychology literature.

Reading the gender neutral "she" in a peer reviewed article was quite mind expanding.  It made me take the whole pronoun question more seriously.  Eventually, I came to adopt "s/he" in my writing.  It was short. It didn't generate the numerical ambiguity that "they" creates, and it could easily be read as "she" while simultaneously preserving a masculine element; but it doesn't really work in conversation.

It's amazing that it took almost 50 years for a gender neutral alternative, i.e., "they," to really begin to take root.  Granted, I encounter mostly liberal and progressive people in my Zoom meetings, but people now very frequently indicate their preferred pronouns in those meetings.  It shows a growing sensitivity to the experience of non-binary people and the problems our language creates.  The increasing use of "they" is certainly a good thing.

Nevertheless, I remain not entirely comfortable with it.  Old linguistic habits really do die hard.  "They" is likely the best we have, but, yes, it creates a clumsy, numerical ambiguity.  This isn't unique.  Consider the singular and plural uses of "you."  Numerical ambiguity here doesn't usually pose a huge problem, but different places do make distinctions.  Some regions make use of "y'all," other regions make use of "yous guys" to indicate plurality.  

I've never heard a term that gives a satisfactory solution to the gender neutrality/numerical ambiguity problem, but in thinking about alternatives, I tried out "we."  Like "they," "we" (and "us," "our," "ours," "ourself," and "ourselves") are gender neutral, but also creates numerical ambiguity.  "We" really isn't an improvement over "they."  In fact, "we" is worse.  "They" preserves the third person character of "he" and "she," while "we" replaces third person pronouns with a first person pronoun.  Despite this -- or actually because of this -- I noticed a very peculiar shift in my thinking when considering "we" as a third person pronoun.

Using "we" instead of "he" and "she" had me identifying with the person I was referring to.  So instead of thinking, "he rang up the groceries," I thought, "we rang up the groceries."  I seemed to be doing the job with him.  I was inside his skin.  Instead of "she fell down the steps," I thought, "we fell down the steps."  Using the first person plural to refer to a separate, other person creates a feeling of commonality or at least intersection -- a shared being.  It breaks down the psychic barriers between people.  I think it fosters empathy.

Imagine if everyone used "we" this way.  I suspect our world would become quite different.  The gender neutral use of "he" provides subconscious support for patriarchy; the use of "he" and "she" normalizes a binary conception of gender; but a ubiquitous use of "we" as a third person pronoun just might produce a widespread sense of community, human connection, and empathy.  It just might make it clear that our lives and our fates really are shared.