When I started publishing in the mid-1970s, the issue of the sexism of the third person singular pronoun came up. With new authors, we would just advise them of our concern. But when our Mudborn Press broke up (she kept the name, I went with Bandanna Books for my FBN), and I became interested in publishing classic texts, I soon confronted the sexism issue directly.
Obviously, the older authors had no idea that there might be a concern about using “he” or “man” as applying equally to women as to men, and there are historic reasons for that. Until the 18th and 19th centuries, girls were not traditionally sent to school, so why bother with he-and-she when the only readers were male?
In Plato’s Athens, women were not part of the political process; his writings were on major themes of honor, justice, and such, so we moderns assume that he included all persons in his ideas. But when he writes The Republic, it’s clear that he didn’t. We tend to gloss over that, so that today we read his philosophy as universally applicable. Is it? That’s a question for an editor to be worth asking.
When I launched Bandanna Books, my very first book published was a version of the I Ching. Simple, straightforward, right? But the model in almost every entry was the Prince or the noble man, the good man. Again, were women explicitly to be excluded? In a number of instances, women’s roles are mentioned separately from those of men. Nowhere is there an instance of a woman held up as a model. Does that negate the ideas in the I Ching about right living and judgment? Again, we like to read it as if these were universal truths or guides. How should the text read then, if English has a gender split in the third person singular?
I gave it a lot of thought, tried and rejected several ideas before coming up with what I call “humanist pronouns.” I noticed that we already had a set of non-sexist-tagged third person pronouns, interrogative pronouns: “who,” “whose,” “whom.” These are ordinarily used when we don’t know the person or gender and are asking. But what if we started using, with the same pronunciation, “hu,” “hus,” and “hum”? The spelling is similar to what one would expect, the sound is familiar, and even the sense is close to what one expects to hear. “Someone is knocking. See hu’s at the the door.” “A customer left a package. I picked up hus package and put it away.”
This, I believe, works better than using the plural in place of the singular, or he/she, hir, s/he, him and her, or other constructions that I’ve seen.
Some authors are careful in their writing, so that little or no
“gender editing” is required. This is generally true of Shakespeare, Poe, and others. Yet a few books, starting with the I Ching, require major surgery.
What has been the response? I did a little survey, and got something like 8 positive, 2 negative responses from teachers who used the books in their classes. It hasn’t caught on with anyone else, as far as I know. College textbooks go out of their way to keep their texts from being sexist, sometimes going to extremes of rearranging sentences to avoid using any pronoun at all.
Will I continue using the humanist pronouns? That depends on the text at hand, the audience, the acceptance. It’s my best effort at regularizing English.
Actually, the concern has spread to other languages, most of which have explicit masculine and feminine nouns, pronouns, adjectives, sometimes even neuter pronouns. Their solutions, the ones I’ve seen, tend to tack on the second gender with a slash to the ends of words.
Why do I care? Why is this issue important to me? Because I have changed genders myself, and I am forced to ask other people to change their pronouns for me. Now, if we had a non-sexist third person pronoun, that would not be required.
I live in the United States, where equality is part of the law of the land, even when our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” The universal “he” has not disappeared; I don’t know if it ever will. I would like to see another option continue to be available.