caryoscelus:~#

Very often people (whether they support it or not) tend to associate gender-neutral language with gender equality. The usual argument is that using one gender form (usually male in english, russian and other languages i’m aware of) in place of indeterminate gender supports discrimination or at least inequality. While that could be true (about inequality anyway), the key here is that it only supports existing way of things.

First, lets imagine a perfect copy of some “patriarchal” society with only difference that the indeterminate gender of choice in it is female. Would it change anything substantially in gender perception, roles and equality? My guess is a no: while it may affect society in some subtle ways, people can easily adopt to see “default” gender as either “superior” or “inferior” or however else as they please.

Now imagine a world with perfect gender equality and no (recent) history of discrimination whatsoever; needless to say, i don’t think “default gender” would be seen as much more than grammatical convention.

And this brings us to one of the points of this post: “default gender” ─ whichever you choose ─ is a very bad grammatical convention. To see why, consider the following dialogue:

A: Hey, why didn’t you bought the bread?

B: Beautiful middle-aged female shop assistant told me in an unpleasant high-pitched voice it isn’t fresh.

A: Is it important that they were beautiful middle-aged female with high-pitched voice? Why do i have to hear about it?

B: Because old grammar dictates us so!

A: Why would anyone would ever want to use such a grammar?!

Well, luckily we don’t use such a grammar. But the problem is the same: gendered grammar forces us to disclose irrelevant information. This isn’t just about situation when we don’t know gender (using “default” gender in that case may confuse whoever we talk to, by the way), it’s also about information noise. We aren’t forced to tell age, pitch or beauty of other people and in cases when it’s irrelevant would obviously prefer not to; likewise, i would also prefer not to be forced neither into disclosing superfluous information nor into receiving it. And i would also like to not have to think about that; indeed, zero information should be default.

Besides this (which is in my opinion enough by itself to justify inconvenience of changing language habits), there is another (albeit related) reason to switch to gender-neutral defaults and even to drop grammatical gender altogether (i.e. abolishing gendered pronouns and lexicon in english).

Gender is simply irrelevant. It is made into a holy cow in most cultures, but reasons for that are hopelessly outdated in enlightened society. Having one adjective per biological gender to use in appropriate contexts and perhaps some ways to describe variety of gender associated behaviour patterns should be enough.

Now for some language specific comments:

In english one can almost always use a neutral pronoun (though there’s also some gendered lexicon), but unfortunately singular “they” which is by far the most optimal solution at this point has its drawback: namely, it removes the distinction between singular and plural which (also unfortunately) is one of the most important mechanisms for distinguishing pronoun referents.

Russian is much more gendered; past tense verbs, adjectives and even more pronouns are required to indicate gender (in singular form). Furthermore, nouns have grammatical gender and while there is neutral gender (funnily enough, it’s called “middle”), it is used for a fraction of inanimate objects (the only exception that i know of is “привидение”, ghost); the rest are gendered as male or female without any obvious pattern (beyond grammatical form).

Japanese is quite different in the way of handling pronouns and i think it would be fair to say that it has no grammatical gender, but quite some social/lexical (honorifics, word choice, manner of speech).

Finally, as expected, lojban is about perfect in this aspect. Pronouns are fully abstract, being distinguished either by explicit assignment, grammar place/role or part of referent word (i.e. being abbreviations).