Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns

Gender-neutral pronouns neither reveal nor impute gender when referring to people, animals or things.

In any language, gender is a linguistic term meaning no more than "kind", although the division of the sexes is a common form of gender.

English has very little gender compared to languages in which every noun and adjective has a gender. In English, pronouns are the only prominent use of gender, and at that in English, the only the personal pronouns which express gender are the third-person singular: he, him, himself, his, she, her, herself and hers. The rest, such as I, thou, we, you, etc. work equally well for either sex.

For the third person, however, only the plural pronouns may be considered strictly gender-neutral: they, them, themselves, their and theirs. For those people seeking a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, this is a problem. However, the singular they has been used in English since the 16th century and is commonly heard today:

Any American can succeed in business, if they try hard enough.

Usage of he, him, and his to refer to a person who could be of either sex was prescribed by manuals of style and school textbooks from the early nineteenth century until the latter third of the twentieth century:

The customer brought his purchases to the cashier for checkout.
In a supermarket, a consumer can buy anything he needs.
When a customer argues, always agree with him.

With the rise of the Women's Liberation movement and feminism, many advocates began decrying what they called sexist language, including the use of the masculine gender to include the feminine gender. They felt that the words he, him and his tend to imply masculinity and that this was all too often inappropriate.

Some people proposed compound forms to emphasize the possibility of the referent having either sex: such as he or she, him or her, his or her or himself or herself. Any of these forms could be reversed, so as not to imply that males had priority: she or he, her or him, her or his or herself or himself.

Traditionally in English, masculine pronouns have been taken to refer to both sexes except where the subject is strictly feminine (see gender-specific pronoun). Attempts to move away from this tradition are described by supporters as gender neutral, gender free, gender inclusive and non-sexist. Opponents consider these changes to be newspeak and politically correct.

Far and away, the most common solution is to replace gender-specific singular pronouns with gender-free plural pronouns like they, their and theirs. This use of the singular they has existed since the 16th century.

However, others have sought more specific, directed approaches to the problem.

Relevant Situations

"Language does not merely reflect the way we think: it also shapes our thinking."

-UNESCO Report on Gender-Neutral Language

There are a variety of situations in which a (possibly unconscious) decision must be made: whether to use gender-specific pronouns in a generic sense, singular they, recast the sentence, or some other solution. This also applies when referring to items with biological gender, such as animals and some plants.

To refer to people of unknown gender. Some people on the internet hide their gender, and babies can be very androgynous.
To refer to someone whose gender is unknown to you, but known to the person that you are speaking to.
To refer to people when you want to keep their gender a secret. The writer of a detective story might want to describe the actions of the villain without giving away his or her gender, whilst a teenager might want to talk about a friend of the opposite gender without prompting awkward questions.
To refer to transgendered people - that is, people who are not easily categorised as being either male or female, or prefer not to be. Some transgendered people prefer to be referred to using gender-specific pronouns, some prefer to be referred to using gender-neutral pronouns, and some don't express a preference.
In descriptions of people who are somehow hypothetical. If the hypothesis includes a gender, there is no problem: you can refer to the average tampon buyer as 'she' without any major worries. However, the average chocolate buyer does raise the issue.
To refer to ships, countries, swords, and other things that have traditionally been referred to using female pronouns (See "Ships and Countries" under gender-specific pronoun).
To refer to conscious things that don't have a gender. This is basically restricted to science fiction: intelligent robots, asexual aliens, and similar beings.
To refer to all people, regardless of gender, if gender is not relevant to the discussion. Someone who sees gendered pronouns as inherently sexist might follow this approach.

Options

There are a variety of options available to resolve these situations. Some workarounds are explained in a separate article:

Both male and female gender-specific pronouns can be used in a 'generic' sense. Also, constructions such as he or she or s/he can be used.
Singular they is widely used in informal language, and is becoming more common in formal language.
Sentences can be recast to avoid the problem, for example by using the plural or second person. See below.
In some sentences the definite article can be used, or the pronoun can be dropped.
'It' and 'one' can be used. See below.
Various neologisms have been proposed. See below.

In 2000 the American Heritage Dictionary got the following percentages when asking its usage panel what should fill in the gap in the following sentence: 'a taxpayer who fails to disclose the source of _____ income can be prosecuted under the new law':

his or her: 46%
his: 37%
no pronoun: 7%
her: 2%
an article (typically the) : 2%
all others: 6%

This is only illustrative, however - a less formal situation might have given different results, and the panel were not given the option of recasting the sentence into the plural, for example. Also, usage panels tend to be prescriptive rather than descriptive, and may not reflect the actual level of usage - only what is perceived as 'correct'.

It

In English, pronouns such as it and its have been used to refer to babies and pets, although with the passing of the Victorian era this usage has come to be considered too impersonal, with many usage advocates arguing that it demeans a conscious being to the status of a mere thing. This use of 'it' also got bad press when various regimes used it as a rhetorical device to try and dehumanise their enemies: implying that they were little better than animals.

The cute little baby giggled and kicked its feet.
We're taking it to the vet for a checkup.

'It' is still used for idiomatic phrases such as Is it a girl or a boy?. Once the gender of the child has been established, it is then normal to switch to gender-specific pronouns.

Some people propose using 'it' in a wider sense in all the situations where a gender-neutral pronoun might be desired. The advantage of using an existing word is that the language doesn't have to change as much. This is currently very rare, and most commentators feel that it is unlikely to catch on.

One

	Subject	Object	Possession (1)	Possession (2)	Reflexive
One (classic)	One laughed	I hit him	His face bled	I am his	One shaves himself
One (modern)	One laughed	I hit one	One's face bled	I am one's	One shaves oneself

Authors can take advantage of an avoidance technique by writing in the first and second person: 'I' and 'you'. A good example is the writing of Iain Banks - for example in Complicity or The Wasp Factory. Of course, writing using the first and second person has a dramatic effect on the whole flow of a book, so it's not a decision to be made lightly. The same technique is used for much different reasons in text adventure games: "you are in a maze of twisty corridors, all alike".

One who doesn't mind sounding a little upper class can resort to using 'one'. Curiously, while 'one' used to decline as 'one/his/himself', there is now an alternative declension of 'one/one's/oneself'. This new declension was first proposed by Robert Baker in 1770, not without opposition. Unfortunately, 'one' currently has a very specific meaning: essentially an abbreviation for 'everyone'. This is a very limited use, though no less useful for that. Sadly, extending it can cause confusion, and unlike 'they' it has no history of being used in a wider sense.

Recasting without pronouns

One approach is to simply avoid using any pronouns at all, and return to those long-winded sentences that drove us to use pronouns in the first place: 'Sam went to Sam's bedroom, and then Sam combed Sam's hair'. It's clumsy, but on the plus side, this means no new words or meanings, and everyone will understand what is being said.

Fortunately, a little rewriting can often reduce the number of pronouns needed, or indeed eliminate them completely. In the above example you could say 'Sam went to the bedroom and combed hir hair'. For example, some pronouns can be avoided by using the passive tense, so 'The teacher made hir point well' becomes 'The teacher's point was well-made'. The below article by Arthur Close provides many excellent techniques to reduce the need for pronouns, though sometimes they are difficult to apply, and readability can suffer.

In some contexts [previously described] approaches may be satisfactory. Frequently, however, the result is a document that is so "self-consciously" gender-neutral that this detracts from its clarity and distracts the reader. We suggest that a better approach is to adopt a "gender-free" style of writing - one that avoids the pronouns entirely.

-Gender-Free Legal Writing, Arthur Close, QC

The best solution, for some people, is to first determine the correct gender. So, don't speak about people unless you know whether they are male or female, which might explain the proliferation of 'a/s/l?' (a/s/l or asl is slang for 'What is your age? What is your sex? What is your location?'. The response might be 52/m/uk for a 52 year old man from the UK.) in internet chatrooms. This isn't always convenient, but it can be a very good solution for hypothetical situations. For example, Cryptographers routinely talk about Alice and Bob, where Alice is trying to send a message to Bob, and in many cases this can solve the problem. As long as it's clear that the names are arbitrarily chosen and a mix of genders, readers will normally understand that the genders were chosen equally arbitrarily.

Neologisms

So many different people have suggested so many new sets of pronouns that it is simply not feasible to go through them all here. The first on record dates from around 1850, and there may have been even earlier ones that are not recorded. Most of these words are no longer used: the failed ideas of dead people. None have become commonly used outside of narrow contexts, such as certain usenet groups. A complete list of all proposed sets, active and inactive, can be found at the Gender Neutral Pronoun FAQ, along with analysis of each set's usability.

The following sets of neologisms have articles in wikipedia, though both are very rare and most commentators do not believe they will ever become widespread: