Unsex Me Here: Stripping Gender from Language by Sophia Robinson It’s a Saturday evening in lockdown, and you suddenly find yourself lost in the depths of YouTube, watching a video of Ben Shapiro angrily assert that NEVER have the pronouns ‘they/them’ been used as singular gender-neutral pronouns in the HISTORY of the English Language. As an English Literature student who has had to suffer through literary works ranging from Chaucer to Beckett, you, of course, know that is nonsense. Then you begin to ponder: does the language we speak and does our linguistic experience inform our perception of gender and gender identity? Being bilingual, I have recently tried to reconcile my linguistic and cultural experiences as a speaker of a gendered and non-gendered language. One of my languages, Russian, is heavily gendered—there are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. This grammatical gendering also extends to social gendering—I think, most heavily reinforced by the fact that adjectives and verbs inflect for gender in Russian, and so self-reference becomes deeply gendered. My other language, English, mainly has no grammatical gender (although Old English did)—it does not group nouns into masculine and feminine, nor do English verbs or adjectives inflect for gender. However, we do have gendered pronouns: he and she. So whilst grammatically English is largely gender-neutral, it does have social gendering. I spent almost 17 years of my life living in Russia and thus was constantly surrounded by the deep linguistic gendering. Reflecting on it now, I recognise that I instinctively attribute gender to everything around me: the table is masculine, the lamp is feminine, the window is neuter. If I must allocate everything to a gender, then I must also allocate myself and others to a gender. As a cisgender woman, this posed no issue to my personal gender identity: I am a woman, so I am classed into the linguistically feminine. I found it easy to understand gender so long as it fit into the binary—I never struggled to use proper pronouns for transgender people, nor to accept wholly and without debate their gender identity. But I did struggle to fully understand the concept of being ‘non-binary’. I respect it, I don’t question its validity as a gender identity, but I struggled to empathise with the experience.
My language is so deeply gendered on the binary, that my brain struggles to compute anything outside of that. 4
