The case for gendering first person pronouns

I love seeing gender pronouns in email signatures. Just a decade ago basically no one provided their pronouns alongside their name, and now it has proliferated across social media, websites, and anywhere else we might create a written bio for all to see. We’ve even come so far as to begin to refine the terminology around pronouns we expect others to use when referencing us. Yes queens, kings, and royals!

Written communications make it easy. I’ve yet to hear someone provide their gender pronouns along with their name unprompted in a personal introduction. Instead, we listen for cues or simply ask directly what pronouns they prefer.

And there it is–our one chance to assimilate whether this person, who we may not see again for weeks or months–prefers he, she, they, xe, or ey.

Personally, that one mention has about as much likelihood of being retained in my memory as their name. Writing it down in my phone might help (@android can we get a contact form line for that?), but fumbling for my phone will make for an awkward reunion. So I’m pretty concerned that as a growing number of folx opt for pronouns that society may not have assigned them, I will increasingly commit gender gaffes simply due to limited memory capacity.

It would kinda be like if everyone on the planet had one of four or potential names. Can we reasonably expect ourselves to perfectly recall whether the particular person in front of us is Jemi, Jamey, Jaemi, or Jaime every single time? I’m definitely going to fuck that up multiple times per day.

All this makes me wonder: why don’t the first person pronouns — I and me in English — have gendered versions? Just about everyone uses first person pronouns all the time in everyday conversation. Hearing which gender someone uses to introduce themselves would be a silky smooth social cue for employing their preferred third person pronoun. For example:

My name is Megan –> (??!!) name is Megan

would become:

Hyr name is Megan.–> Her name is Megan.

or:

Zhy name is Megan -> Ze name is Megan.

And hearing a person repeatedly reference themselves with a gendered first person pronoun would create an association in my memory banks as infallible as their name. Politically correct slam dunk!

So why aren’t we doing this?? Statistically it would seem at least a few of the ~6,500 languages living on the planet would be doing this. Based on my 2 minutes of research, Thai is the language that most consistently identifies gender in the first person pronouns. Several languages have optional gendered pronouns, or gendering of only the written or spoken forms. Several Romantic languages distinguish the absence of men in first person plural. For example in Spanish, nosotros = we, mixed gender or all men; while nosotras = we, all women.

My unfounded theory: for most of human history, generating heirs was at the crux of wellbeing and survival. Everyone wanted to know who was the heir of whom, which brought about marriage conventions. The marriage economy became a primary lever in creating political and geographic allies, stabilizing family finances, and ensuring good social reputation. A person’s physical body determined their ability to either donate sperm to or host a fetal heir; this in turn determined how they contributed to their family’s participation in the marriage economy. In many ways, your physical sex was your career, and your career was your identity.

Under that scenario, there were really only two desirable gender identities, and for expeditiousness, they had to be absolutely correlated to physical sex. To make it even clearer, very distinguishable dressing conventions were developed for each of the two identities. And so the marriage economy rat race began.

Regardless of what sort of historical residues we find ourselves wiping away, gendered first person pronouns would be one way for individual’s to reflect their identity choices out to the world. Any linguists ready to birth some new pronouns?