Academia in English-speaking countries has gradually become more and more international, regularly recruiting PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from abroad. This has led to complaints that non-native speakers (NNS from hereon) of English are disadvantaged and/or experience discrimination with regard to their academic standing.
In our discipline, this claim of “linguistic injustice” has culminated in the Barcelona Principles (2021), initiated by Filippo Contesi.
Whenever I come across a silly academic paper, this song by Bon Jovi comes into my head: ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’. I then simply replace the word ‘Love’ with ‘philosophy’ or whatever academic discipline the paper might fall into.
You would expect that with double blind review in place no dross would be published, but far from it.[1] I think there are two reasons for the poor quality of some papers today: 1. the current publish-or-perish culture in academia; 2. some misguided notion of social justice, which has taken hold in many humanities departments. But I hear that they are even trying to decolonise mathematics now, which is odd, because we ‘culturally appropriated’ a lot of maths from India and Arabia.
Of course, in the olden days we also had weak papers. I think Edmund Gettier’s influential essay ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ from 1963 is overrated. The examples he uses are ridiculous, as I explain here. Several decades earlier, Bertrand Russell dealt with this problem, using a stopped clock to illustrate it.
The other day I saw an announcement for a talk about ‘Grammatical gender and hermeneutical injustice’. Being a grammar freak, naturally, I read on: ‘when the referent is human, the term’s grammatical gender corresponds to its referent’s gender’. All that this means is that the grammatical gender for the word ‘man’ (German: der Mann; Spanish: el hombre; Croatian: čovjek) will be masculine and the word for ‘woman’ will be feminine (die Frau; la mujer; žena). This also goes for ‘satellite elements’ like adjectives, articles and pronouns. So, in German, we would have: ‘ein junger Mann’ and ‘eine junge Frau’. You can see how the endings of the adjective ‘jung’ vary (-er; -e), depending on the grammatical gender, and we have similar variations for indefinite articles.
English nouns used to have grammatical genders in Old English (‘sun’ and ‘moon’ used to be masculine) but this was lost by the time of Middle English. Something of that flavour remains: in English ‘she’ can also be used for countries, cities, ships – and the Church.
Strictly speaking, we are not talking about the referent’s ‘gender’. Grammatical features don’t reflect the referents ‘gender identity’, but their sex.[2] Gender theory is a fairly recent phenomenon, whereas the grammatical features of natural languages are much older. The grammatical gender of ‘mujer’, naturally, is related to her sex: female. Our forefathers knew nothing about the ‘professor of parody’: Judith Butler.
The writer continues:
‘However, in grammatical gender languages, like Italian, French, and Spanish, that only have the masculine and the feminine for human referents, no grammatical gender corresponds to non-binary individuals. Hence, a discrepancy arises between the term and its referent’s gender.’
This may be so in Italian, French and Spanish, but it does not apply in all languages. In German human beings can take the neuter grammatical gender (and it is the same in Polish, in Croatian, and presumably in many more languages): ‘das Mädchen’ (the girl) is neuter and so is ‘das Kind’ (the child).[3] In Croatian ‘djete’ (the child) is also neuter. So, in many languages there is a grammatical gender that could correspond to non-binary individuals, if that is what they would choose. The latest Gender Census (2022) tells us that ‘it’ pronouns are on the rise among non-binary people (more on this below).
The ’discrepancy’ doesn’t really arise, because language developed reflecting the sex of persons (or animals), not their ‘gender identity’. The ’discrepancy’ for non-binary people looks like a confected problem to me, because most such languages have a third grammatical gender: neuter. We also have the neuter in English grammar: ‘it’. So, if you think you are neither exclusively a man nor a woman, then the obvious choice would be the grammatical neuter. The advantage of this solution – if it were actually needed – is that it would not impose additional burdens on language users and learners.
But the academic who is alerting us to the hermeneutical injustice rejects the neuter gender as a solution, because in Italian, French and Spanish persons cannot take the neuter. Although, this linguist is aware that this is possible in other languages, they fear that it might be dehumanizing. This only proves how limited their linguistic horizon is.
I suspect that the academic giving the talk would demand a fourth grammatical gender for non-binary people. But why should we do this? If we go this way, it will not stop there (I will explain why in a moment). In languages like English, a fourth grammatical gender will require distinct pronouns, different from male, female and neuter. If my ‘colonialist’ maths doesn’t deceive me, then this would require about 20 distinct forms (affecting: personal pronouns, possessive pronouns and reflexive pronouns). But at present it’s a free-for-all when it comes to non-binary pronouns, as I have argued here. In grammatical gender languages like German, Italian or French the linguistic burden for language users would be even greater, because we would also need to learn the new forms for the satellite elements (adjectives and indefinite articles). And in some languages the number of non-binary pronouns will be greater than in English, because these languages have more than three cases (e.g. German: 4; Croatian: 7). I will not try to do the maths for this.
Using the existing features of languages, i.e. the grammatical neuter, would make life easier for other language users. Inventing new pronouns or grammatical genders puts too much strain on language users and it impedes communication, especially if people feel that they can come up with their own pronouns and/or grammatical features. What is noticeable about these self-styled ‘social justice’ grammarians is that their inventions are often arbitrary. True, natural languages often exhibit exceptions (due to historical factors) but they favour systematicity. The regularity of a grammar makes it easier to learn a language, as well as to communicate in a language.
One could object that using the grammatical neuter ‘it’ for non-binary people dehumanizes them. If that were true, then all the neuter person terms in other languages would dehumanize children, girls, etc., but that is not the case. Even in English we use ‘it’ when we are not sure about the sex of a child. A newly minted father might say: “What is it?” And the midwife might reply: “It’s a girl!”
If we look at the 2022 Gender Census (with entries from 134 countries) we see that ‘it’ (it, it, its, itself) is on the rise: 16% approval (up from previously 6.9%). Among the under-30s 18% opted for ‘it’ pronouns; among the over-30s only 6% chose ‘it’.
(Graph from ‘Gender Census 2022)
In English it has become fashionable to use the third person plural pronouns ‘they/them’ for non-binary people; this usage is called the ‘singular they’ (but I have also seen the English terms used in German social media profiles, which strikes me as odd). This ‘solution’ destroys the precision of English. The ‘singular they’ was actually not invented for non-binary people; it has been used in English for centuries when we don’t know the sex of a person: ‘Once the PhD candidate passes their viva, they may call themselves ‘doctor’. This does not mean that the person is non-binary. However, the neo-grammarians want to use ‘they/them’ to describe a non-binary person. So ‘they/them’ pronouns now have taken on a triple function: 1. as third person plural pronouns; 2. singular they: when the sex of a person is unknown; 3. singular they: when the person is non-binary. Naturally, this will lead to confusion. One solution which would make learning and remembering easier is to shorten ‘they’ to ‘ey’ and ‘them’ to ‘em’ for the non-binary context.[4] However, according to the Gender Census 2022 support for ‘they/them’ pronouns is at 75.7%, but only 4.7% of the respondents opted for ‘ey/em’
The author of the talk announcement puts forward this argument:
‘Crucially, this discrepancy is not due to misuse by the speaker but rather to the structural features of the language, especially to the lack of grammatical gender for non-binary identities: it depends on a gap in linguistic resources. This gap makes non-binary people invisible, hindering the collective understanding of their gender identity, and originates from the entrenched prejudice that a person can only be male or female. For these reasons, I will argue that the lack of a grammatical gender corresponding to non-binary identities is an instance of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007); it possesses all its hallmarks: it is structural, it hampers understanding, and it depends on prejudice.’
The mistake here is to think that the structural features of a language need to map onto gender identities rather than onto sex. Academics who are driven by social justice issues may wish to change this, but it comes with a considerable cost for language users. Furthermore, there is no ‘lack of grammatical gender for non-binary identities’. We do have the linguistic resources to refer to nonbinary people, the third grammatical gender: ‘it’, and in anglophone countries ‘they/them’ pronouns seem to do the job. Although, and that is the complaint by the linguist giving the talk, non-binary people do not have a grammatical gender ‘assigned’ specifically to ‘them’.
The claim that this ‘gap’ in the grammar makes ‘non-binary people invisible, hindering the collective understanding of their gender identity’ is laughable. Non-binary people have been flooding the public consciousness for a while now (and I am getting tired of it). If they really didn’t have the linguistic resources to express their gender identity, then very few people would know anything about them; but that is not the case.
It isn’t really the existing features of a language which hinder ‘the collective understanding of their gender identity’. This imagined injustice doesn’t originate ‘from the entrenched prejudice that a person can only be male or female’, because that is actually the scientific consensus. There is no third sex, instead, there are many variations of gender expression within the two sexes – and allegedly beyond the binary. The lack of collective understanding of non-binary identities is more likely due to a lack of interest, rather than a ‘faulty’ grammar: Who cares?
‘Gender identity’ is a controversial notion. Many people say they don’t know what that is supposed to mean. I myself don’t have a gender identity, but I have known for a while now that my sex is male. That’s probably why I don’t need a ‘gender identity’.
Is the collective understanding of non-binary gender identities important? I doubt it. Why does the community need to know how some individuals relate to gender? It doesn’t really matter to them. Nowadays, they will be confronted with it, whether they want to or not: through pronoun badges, additions to emails, or when people introduce themselves. For most people the notion of ‘gender identity’ will only elicit a yawn.
On the LGBT-Foundation website we read: ‘Non-binary people may identify as both male and female or neither male nor female. They may feel their gender is fluid can change and fluctuate or perhaps they permanently don’t identify with one particular gender.’ I think there are much more pressing issues in society than trying to understand the many (invented?) permutations of non-binary gender identity. It seems that everyone feels entitled to demarcate their own space by coming up with ‘subtle’ differences. I suspect that in years to come social psychologists will diagnose that a specific form of narcissism was at work here. My hope is that the madness about gender theory will die down some time soon, and people will go back to being (mostly) reasonable.
The LGBT-Foundation explains:
‘The range of language and labels used within non-binary communities means that non-binary has become an inclusive umbrella term. Some examples of terms commonly used by non-binary people include genderqueer, genderf*ck, neutrosis, agender, gender-fluid, bigender and third gender.’
If there really were such a hermeneutical injustice, then we shouldn’t adapt the grammar to merely reflect non-binary people as a class, because this in itself would create further hermeneutical injustice. By subsuming agender, bigender, gender-fluid, etc. under the non-binary umbrella you make them all ‘invisible’. This would be just like including women into generic masculine terms. In German ‘der Student’ (the student) is masculine. Previously the plural ‘die Studenten’ included female students, but then it became common to make them visible by writing StudentInnen[5] (adding a feminine ending). So, the social justice grammarians need to bite the bullet and make all gender identities visible, and, as we know, they are increasing by the minute. This would of course lead to linguistic disaster. So, the better solution would be to either stick with what we have got (the neuter grammatical gender), or the new solutions like ‘they/them’ pronouns, or ‘ey/em’ pronouns to refer to non-binary people. The most important criteria for adoption of such new features are: 1. the pronouns are widely accepted; 2. they are easy to learn and remember.
But back to the so-called ‘hermeneutical injustice’. Imagine my surprise when I read the following about non-binary identities on the LGBT-Foundation page: ‘This is not an exhaustive list but shows the richness of language and the many ways that you can describe your gender.’ I’m afraid the talk about ‘Grammatical gender and hermeneutical injustice’, and any resulting publication, is creating a problem that never existed. But the proposed solution will result in some real problems (burdens on language users), many far-fetched ‘problems’, based on the alleged grammatical invisibility of non-binary people, as well as much larger problems, resulting from the far-fetched problems: it will lead to linguistic disaster, because each non-binary variation needs to be grammatically visible.
♫ You give Linguistics a Bad Name ♬
[1] The former editor of the British Medical Journal, Richard Smith said recently: ‘It’s fascinating to me that a process at the heart of science is faith not evidence based. Indeed, believing in peer review is less scientific than believing in God because we have lots of evidence that peer review doesn’t work, whereas we lack evidence that God doesn’t exist.’
[2] There may be times when we do refer to the gender presentation of a person: we may refer to a drag queen as ‘she’, and we may do the same to an actress playing a male character (although in this day and age actors are not allowed to do this anymore – it is ‘verboten’).
[3] I suspect the reason why ‘das Kind’ is neuter in German is because a child is not sexually developed. Diminutives ending in ‘-chen’, as in das Mädchen (the girl), are also neuter, probably because we don’t want to sex living beings that haven’t fully developed yet.
[4] Originally suggested in 1975 by Christine M. Elverson
[5] There are many more permutations now, aiming to include trans people.
Miroslav Imbrisevic 