Should we use "he" or "she"? Maybe "s/he"? What about "they"?

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So gender assignment of words isn't as big a deal in English as in other languages, but there's one instance where gender plays a big role: in the case of pronouns. "He" is the masculine and "She" is the feminine--clear enough, right? Well, what about when we need a be less specific or more universal, as in the case of "A writer needs his/her sleep" or "Every texter loves his cellphone"--what do we do then? Traditionalists might suggest just using the masculine "he" since that's been the practice for a long time, but that seems insensitive to a lot of people.

What have you heard suggested as a way to resolve this dilemma? What alternatives are there to using the masculine pronoun in these cases? Do any of the alternatives satisfy you?

(Something I read this week prompted me to post this, but I'm going to wait to share it until I hear what some of you have to say about it first.)

3 comments:

David O'Very said...

My first question is how did you post this during our class? That is some serious multi-tasking.

I was presented with two suggestion in a BYU writing course. The first suggestion was to use both the masculine and feminine forms: a writer needs his or her sleep. I found this very cumbersome

The other suggestion was to defer to the feminine form. I figure this works pretty well since boys no longer read or write....

One possibility is to remove gender from the equation completely by using the word "its" so a writer needs its sleep; thus we no longer have gender issues with sentences.

This is really a good question. One other suggestion is to change the sentence structure from "a writer needs her sleep" to "writers need their sleep." You create a non-gender specific sentence, but it feels limiting.

None of the solutions really satisfy. I am fine using the feminine form.

September 16, 2009 at 2:20 PM
katie said...

I agree with Dave that most of the solutions I've heard are annoyingly imperfect. My least favorite is using the feminine form. Perhaps because it's different than what I expect, the "her' disrupts my reading. And then I start thinking about the author and why he decided to use "she." Hm....I guess I just used the masculine in that last sentence to refer back to the author. That is what I most frequently do, even though I recognize its problems.

The best option, in my opinion, is to make the construction plural (like the example "writers need their sleep").

September 23, 2009 at 7:01 PM
Natalie Jane said...

I love just using the traditional "he" and "his". I like how it sounds and when people yell "Hey! What about she!? That's sexist!" I just say...Woah woah woah. Calm down. It's mankind, right? And since man is in the word...why not use "he"? That's my reasoning.

October 6, 2009 at 11:19 AM

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