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.

So does language have that profound of an effect on our understanding of gender? Or is this just a convenient excuse for people who don’t want to respect gender identity (ahem Ben Shapiro ahem)? Language determinism is a theory that suggests that our cultural and personal experiences are deeply and inextricably affected by the language we speak. And with everything I’ve explained so far, it would seem to be a fair assessment. But bilingualism may pose a problem for language determinism. Whilst my Russianness clearly impacted my understanding of gender socially, it has to somehow fit in with my linguistic Englishness. I have spent my entire adult life thus far in the UK, speaking predominantly English, and therefore English is my main mode of expression and self-reference.

Am I more willing to accept and be open-minded towards various gender identities and expressions, even if they fall outside of the binary, because of my Englishness?

Truth be told, I don’t know. In many ways, language is deeply connected to culture—our cultural experience is expressed not only through the physical such as food, dance, and music but also through language. Storytelling, for example, is a fundamental element of every culture, and of course, expressed through language. Every culture has its fairytales, myths, and folklore, passed down from generation to generation through the act of storytelling, through language. So when it comes to language determinism, or even the bilingual problem, you cannot solve it by just considering language. I am who I am, and I understand and experience the world as it is not just because of the languages I speak, but because of the cultures of which I am a part.

Gender expression, mainly through pronouns in English, and through verb and adjective inflections in Russian, is social—we express genders because they represent our part of society. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler theorises that gender is performative, and it should follow that pronouns as a form of gender expression are also performative, right? You act as a woman, you perform womanhood, and so you refer to yourself as such and the world (ideally) refers to you as such. The same goes for any other gender expression.

Not only is gender performative, but language is kind of inherently meaningless. Words only mean something because we decide they do. ‘She’ only refers to a woman because we collectively agreed on it and ‘he’ only refers to a man for the same reason. So when people shout “‘THEY’ IS A PLURAL PRONOUN”, they ignore the fact that language is a social

construct with no intrinsic meaning beyond its societal context. So ‘they’ is a plural pronoun, and also a singular gender-neutral pronoun, not because it has an inherent, unchangeable meaning, but because we decide that it is. It really is as simple as that. English was gendered and then, through a complex series of historical events, it ended up losing its grammatical gender and only retaining the pronouns. However, as a language, it is just as meaningful as any gendered language. The grammatical genders in Russian mean nothing outside of their grammatical context the moment we acknowledge that language is a construct. Therefore, even though my experience of a gendered language affected my perception of gender, my deconstruction of the significance of language broke down those gender views.

It is difficult to accept something for which we have no language. When we cannot articulate a social experience, we class it as taboo, unnatural and wrong. When we didn’t have adequate language for various members of the LGBTQ+ community, we classed them as the ‘other’— something that exists outside of the norms for which we have developed language. When you’re a Russian speaker who doesn’t have the verb and adjective flexibility to accommodate non-binary people, you reject the whole identity as inarticulable and thus invalid. When you’re an idiot who has no basic understanding of the grammatical functions of they/them pronouns and their historical usage in the English language, you feel vindicated in rejecting the notion of that pronoun as a gender-neutral singular one, and thus vindicated in your rejection of any identity which doesn’t fit your binaries.

But once you remember that we decide what language means and how it is used, that we have the ability to reclaim and transform language, to invent new words, to abandon old ones, you realise that we have the fluidity to express any gender whatsoever. All it takes is simply agreeing on that usage. Lacking language to express a certain identity is not a good enough excuse for rejecting it when that language can be created.

Language only determines who we are as much as we allow it to.

If we change our language to fit the needs of real people, instead of demanding they change to fit our language, we might, perhaps, come closer to living in a better society.