Re: [dq-rules] Hidden Bias (was Gender Neutral Writing)

[Esko Halttunen <esko.halttunen@luukku.com>]

Having read the discussion so far, I've something to add. First off, to 
me it seems all this talk about which pronoun to use is much ado about 
nothing, as the male pronoun is typically used as a generic one.

Second, you guys have no idea just how lucky you are to have a language 
with separate pronouns for the sexes in the first place. In Finnish 
there is only a single neutral pronoun, "hän", which refers to both men 
and women, and it completely fucks up many sorts of sentences that an 
English-speaker would write without a second thought.

Consider the following (rather poor and hurriedly thought up) example: 
"James met Jack and Helen at the mall. He had long fancied her, but knew 
that she was with him, so he'd always kept his feelings to himself."

Now, try and write that with a single gender-neutral pronoun: "James met 
Jack and Helen at the mall. Hän had long fancied häntä (objective form), 
but knew that hän was with hän, so hän had always kept hänen (his/her) 
feelings to hänself."

Not very good, is it? This is the kind of stuff that anybody who has 
ever written in Finnish has to deal with every single time. The example 
makes perfect sense in English because the pronouns clarify who is being 
referred to, precisely because they are gender specific. In Finnish, or 
when substituting a neutral pronoun as I just did, the thread of the 
example disappears pretty much at the beginning of the second sentence. 
Who did James fancy? Without any information on his sexual preferences, 
with a neutral pronoun it could be either Jack or Helen (presumably 
Helen, given statistical probabilities). If a truly gender neutral 
pronoun were to be coined and accepted into use (and if it were to 
eventually supplant the gender specific ones), it would lead to a 
massive change in the way English is written at level more fundamental 
than most of you can grasp, I think.


My own personal opinion is that the attempts to push the use of the 
female pronoun for this purpose or (*puke*) alternating the male and 
female pronouns is just a misguided trend arising out of oversensitized, 
hysteric political correctness which seems to pervade much of American 
culture these days. It sometimes seems as if people are actively looking 
for something, anything, to be offended at, and many go to ridiculous 
lengths to find something trivial to nitpick. Even worse are those who 
accommodate such nitpickers. Do remember that this statement is generic, 
though, and does not apply to anyone here based on what I've seen in the 
past, but I've seen this thrend elsewhere in less distinguished comapny.

That said, I don't take offense at somebody using the female pronoun as 
generic, it's just as good for the purpose as the male one, which is the 
default only by tradition, and keeping a tradition just for the sake of 
keeping a tradition isn't enough justification to say that it is somehow 
wrong. I'll personally use the male pronoun for generic expressions 
because that's the way I learned it and because it still is the accepted 
form, while using 'she' is considered an oddity. I don't see it in being 
in any way sexist, but given that I grew up with a language where this 
whole problem does not exist in the first place, I have something of a 
different perspective on it. Using 'he' for generic expressions is just 
like using the Finnish passive form for me.

I'm something of a linguistical purist in some respects, but I realize 
that languages change with the passage of time and some things that were 
previously "forbidden" may become accepted, and I don't have a problem 
with that. It's the stuff like people substituting "possibul" for 
"possible" and similar illiterate stupidity that send me through the 
roof, not the minor things like whether to use he or she for generic 
pronoun. That's not something that can be called butchering the English 
language, not by a long shot.

As for the hidden biases mentioned, I agree that some of that exists. 
Don't know much about it with regard to left-handed people, as I the 
only lefty I know is my sister and I haven't talked about it with her. 
Regarding women, some professions are seen as women's stuff largely 
because those were basically seen as the only jobs that could be 
considered proper for women to do (so far as any jobs were), and those 
troglodytic attitudes have taken a long time to disappear. There's still 
a long way to go before they are completely eradicated, but it's 
happening. Not fast enough for some people while others are content with 
this pace, but getting all PC about certain less significant things in 
order to compensate for the more important stuff isn't the answer.

And now that I've more or less offended everyone here so far, feel free 
to crisp me to a cinder. *dons flame-retardant body armor* ;-)

EDi