As McConnell-Ginet observes:

English speakers learn very early to use she (and the rest of the paradigm: her, hers, and herself) for specific individual (presumptively) female referents and he (and him, his, and himself) whenever speaking of those we take to be male.4

Small animals of whatever sex are sometimes referred to with masculine pronouns: 2.

There is a spider is the bathtub. Please get him out.

On the face of it, we are like horses. If the animal in the field is a human female, then (1) is fine; if the animal is a human male, it isn’t. There is no special FM pronoun for humans only. If someone is in the bathroom plucking their eyebrows, next to a cat on the floor licking itself, and these are the only two occupants, then (3) is true and unproblematic just in case the person and the cat are female: 3.

Every (human or non-human) animal in the bathroom is grooming herself.

Interestingly, she is more committal for the speaker than female. Consider: 4.

That animal is female and in the field.

However, the parallel commitment of (1) persists if the sentence is negated. (6) commits the speaker to the claim that the referent of she is female, just as (1) does: 6.

It is false that she is in the field.6

That is not the only possibility for the relationship between (1) and the claim that the referent of she is female. The other is presupposition, as illustrated by (14) and (15): 14.

Muriel has stopped ruminating.

There is a vast literature on presupposition, and much disagreement among theorists.11 For present purposes it is enough to note one difference between presuppositions and conventional implicatures, namely that presuppositions can be removed by some predicates, including non-factive attitude verbs and verbs of saying. These are called presupposition plugs.12 The presupposition of (14) is not removed by negation: 16.

Muriel hasn’t stopped ruminating.

Languages are not immutable: the use of they for non-binary people is an example of rapid linguistic change, at least in some subcommunities. Perhaps FM pronouns have undergone, or are in the process of undergoing, change too. To investigate this thoroughly would require a different paper. Moreover, Dembroff and Wodak—the authors of the main philosophy paper on the political/social issues raised by pronouns, to be discussed in later sections—agree that “our actual use of he and she marks male and female.”14 To keep the discussion manageable, problems and prospects for an alternative account of FM pronouns will have to be deferred.15

Imagine that a person of interest to the police runs into a field. The dispatcher at headquarters does not know the suspect’s sex, but it is clear that the suspect is an adult. The police officer on the ground utters (1), “She is in the field,” into his radio, thus communicating to the dispatcher, not just the whereabouts of the suspect, but that the suspect is female. The officer and the dispatcher both know that the suspect is an adult, so the officer has also effectively communicated to the dispatcher that the suspect is a woman. In an alternative scenario, the suspect is known to be a child; in this case by uttering (1) the officer also communicates that the suspect is a girl.

Similarly, if it is known that the referent is an adult lion, then the additional information communicated by uttering (1) is that the animal is a lioness. But the fundamental semantic connection is between FM pronouns and sex. The information that the animal is a lioness can be explained as an entailment from what is conventionally implicated—that the animal is female—and the background knowledge that the animal is an adult lion.

One might think that the explanation in the case of woman is parallel. Just as adult lion and female entail lioness, adult human and female entail woman. A speaker who knows that the referent of she is an adult human is therefore committed to the claim that the referent is a woman. In fact, the entailment is routinely denied by philosophers who have proposed answers to Simone de Beauvoir’s question: What is a woman?16 Although there is no consensus in the philosophical literature on an answer, there is a near-consensus that woman is compatible with male. By the same token, man is compatible with female, and (although this is rarely discussed), girl is compatible with male and boy is compatible with female. This position is sometimes motivated by the conviction that transgender (trans, transsexual) women are women and transgender men are men, or that at least some of them are, and that these people remain their natal sex.

Woman, man, boy, girl are often called gender terms.17 Other gender terms include non-binary and agender; for the sake of the argument we will not question whether the latter should be grouped with woman and man. Since female and male are (in this usage) not gender terms, the terminology reflects the near-consensus view just explained. A related term is misgendering, which (in the case of transgender women) Kapusta takes to mean:

something broader than simply the use of male pronouns, or of designations associated with being male … the notion includes the use of gender terms that exclude transgender women from the category woman.18

Let us say that gendering is conveying that someone is a woman, man, girl, boy, non-binary person … and so on for other gender terms. (Construe conveying broadly, to include asserting, implicating, and presupposing.) Sexing is conveying that someone is female or male.

Imagine that farmer Frederick, an unexceptional middle-aged male, is climbing over a stile leading into a field. Julia and her companion are looking down on the field from a nearby hill. Julia’s companion utters (1), “She is in the field,” pointing to Frederick. Frederick has been mistakenly sexed. Has he been mistakenly gendered? That depends.

Suppose that orthodoxy in the metaphysics of gender is correct, and that adult females of our species are not guaranteed to be women. Suppose, further, that Katharine knows this and is the utterer of (1). When Julia tries to correct Katharine by saying, “Wrong, that’s not a woman,” Katharine protests that she never said or implied such a thing. Katharine rightly takes this “correction” to be like someone responding with “Wrong, that’s not a woman” to: 23.

That person is a preschool teacher.

On the other hand, suppose that orthodoxy is wrong and that woman is like lioness. Suppose, further, that Benjamin is Julia’s companion in this alternative scenario; he utters, “She is in the field,” pointing at Frederick. Benjamin knows that (adult human) female entails woman, and accepts Julia’s correction, “Wrong, that’s not a woman.” In the first scenario, Katharine does not mistakenly gender Frederick; in the second, Benjamin does.

This is a complication that should be kept in mind in what follows. Fortunately, as will be explained in Section 3, whether the orthodox view of gender is correct is not especially relevant to this paper.

Tom is a transgender man. A natal female and a “tomboy” growing up, Tom suffered from gender dysphoria, “the aversion to some or all of those physical characteristics or social roles that connote one’s own biological sex.”20 Tom’s dysphoria did not abate after puberty, and in his twenties, Tom “transitioned” to male, with the assistance of surgery and testosterone.21 Thanks to that powerful hormone, Tom’s voice deepened, fat redistributed, muscle and facial hair grew. Tom presents as a neatly bearded man in his thirties at work and in his leisure time, and uses bathrooms and facilities appropriate for his sex-of-living. Tom’s dysphoria is now greatly reduced, and he is getting on with life, concentrating on his career and relationships, and not bothering anyone else.

Tom’s courtesy pronouns are the masculine ones, the pronouns that match his sex-of-living. Tom’s colleagues all use them when talking about Tom in his absence, not out of courtesy but because it would never occur to them to do anything else. Only a few of Tom’s colleagues know that he is a trans man.

Did Tom literally change his sex from female to male? Of course, if he did, then the propriety of referring to Tom with feminine pronouns is a non-issue: this is inappropriate just as a feminine pronoun for farmer Frederick is inappropriate. However, Tom has not changed sex. Some animals do change sex in normal ecological conditions, but mammals don’t, and Tom’s medical treatment comes nowhere near to approximating actual sex-changes in the wild; in that sense, it is cosmetic.

We will assume, then, that no sex change has occurred. (We could also consider a version of Tom with no medical treatment, and only a social transition; here a sex-change is not credible in the slightest. But we will stay with Tom as described.) Let us say that feminine pronouns are Tom’s Linguistically Correct (LC) pronouns: the conventional implicature of feminine pronouns, applied to Tom, is true. (The fact that she is one of Tom’s LC pronouns does not entail that it is permissible to use she to refer to Tom.)

Did Tom literally change from being a woman to being a man? On orthodox views in the metaphysics of gender, he did. And if Tom is a man, then to convey that he is a woman, or not a man, is to convey something false. In the terminology adopted here, it is to mistakenly gender Tom. The propriety of saying or implying that Tom is not a man is a non-issue: this is inappropriate just as saying or implying that farmer Frederick is not a man is inappropriate.

Now using she for Tom might well suggest to the uneducated that he is not a man, but (granted orthodoxy) that is not the pronoun’s fault. The unwanted suggestion that Tom is not a man could be removed (perhaps!) by explaining that Tom has changed gender, not sex. Still, it is clear that at least in some circumstances, she should not be used to refer to Tom, even among the educated who accept that there are female men.

An alternative hypothesis is that woman entails female and man entails male. If this is correct, Tom is not a man, since his natal sex is his present sex. Saying that Tom is not a man is then not to make a factual mistake, just as referring to Tom by his LC pronouns implicates nothing false. If (accurately) using she to refer to Tom is objectionable, presumably saying (truly) that Tom is not a man is objectionable for similar reasons.

The upshot is that, for present purposes, controversies about gender terms like woman and man can be ignored. Either man applies to Tom or it does not. If it does, then man is not worth discussing: Tom is a man and there’s no reason to avoid saying so. And if man doesn’t apply to Tom, then not a man or woman adds little to the issue already raised by she.

To use feminine pronouns for Tom is to correctly sex him, to conventionally implicate (or presuppose) that he is female. It is not very interesting to be told that Tom’s LC pronouns should not be used at work. Tom is not playing a frivolous game of dress-up: he has undergone drastic medical treatment for a serious psychological condition. To use Tom’s LC pronouns would be cruel and a gratuitous invasion of his privacy. What is interesting, however, is whether it is ever permissible to use Tom’s LC pronouns in an ordinary conversational context.

Imagine that two of Tom’s close friends, who know his history, are talking about him in private. Tom’s sex is relevant to the conversation—perhaps they have read something about the effects of high levels of testosterone in natal females and are concerned for Tom’s health. Or perhaps they are wondering if Tom, who always wanted children, could get pregnant while continuing to take cross-sex hormones. Or perhaps they are talking about the treatment of females by males, and why Tom does not receive this treatment, despite his sex. Probably it would be easier and feel more natural for them to continue to use Tom’s courtesy pronouns, as they usually do, and state Tom’s sex—somewhat awkwardly—by saying “He is female.” Or they could use his name, or find some euphemistic substitute for female. But what if they used his LC pronouns? Would Tom have been wronged in any way?

Dembroff and Wodak, in their agenda-setting paper on FM pronouns,22 argue that he would. They give four arguments for the following claim: TW 

We have a duty not to use he to refer to transgender women.

Dembroff and Wodak’s “first and most obvious reason” in favor of not using Tom’s LC pronouns is that “it expresses disrespect towards [him] in virtue of [his] social identity, and thereby also expresses disrespect to those who share [his] social identity (i.e., other transgender [men]).”25

This reason is not so obvious. When social identities come with approved ways of speaking—Doctor for physicians, Father for priests, Comrade for members of the Party, and so on—it can be impolite to leave these out. Addressing Father O’Brien as Mr. O’Brien might mildly disrespect him, and the clergy in general. But is there much, if anything, wrong with using Mr. O’Brien when speaking of him in his absence? (Note that Mr. has no incorrect conventional implicature or presupposition.) And not all social identities deserve respect anyway—perhaps including some religious identities. If using Tom’s LC pronouns is to egregiously disrespect him, that must be because of some distinctive feature of the transgender case.

And Dembroff and Wodak offer one candidate for a distinctive feature. Someone who uses Tom’s LC pronouns expresses “disrespect towards [Tom] by referring to [him] as [she], thereby communicating that [he] is a [woman].”26

Since gender terms like woman and man are a distraction, the point should be recast in terms of communicating that Tom is female. And that, we are supposing, is true: Tom is female. (Contrast referring to Father O’Brien as Mr. O’Brien: in some contexts, that conversationally implicates that O’Brien is not a priest. But here what is implicated is false: O’Brien is a priest.)

Now it is also true that using Tom’s LC pronouns could conversationally implicate that Tom is some kind of fraud or “evil deceiver,”27 and that Tom is offending against nature or God: his sex-of-living should match his natal sex. That is undoubtedly problematic. But in another context, for instance in the conversation between Tom’s friends, there is no such implicature.

How are Tom’s friends disrespecting him? They are not revealing any secrets, or trying to humiliate Tom or exacerbate his dysphoria. Neither are they conveying anything false: it is true that Tom is female, and there’s no shame in that. Tom’s sex may be irrelevant in most contexts, but it is not entirely irrelevant, and it is relevant in the conversation between Tom’s friends.

Indeed, we may suppose that Tom himself agrees with the following remarks from a (non-fictional) transgender man:

I wasn’t identified as a female at birth. My sex was observed—not assigned. It wasn’t some random & spontaneous guess. My biological sex is still relevant in many aspects of my life. The fact that I’m a trans man does not erase my biology. This shouldn’t be controversial to say.28

Second, the argument doesn’t just target the correct sexing of individuals. Correctly sexing transgender men in general is also problematic, on Dembroff and Wodak’s view. FM pronouns are still relevant in this case, since they can be anaphors to singular indefinite noun phrases like a transgender man, or fictional names like Tom.

Dembroff and Wodak’s second argument against using Tom’s LC pronouns is that

it implies that we may withhold from them certain resources (understood broadly), to which they are genuinely entitled. Categorizing [Tom as a male] carries a vast number of practical implications and entitlements: it implies that [Tom] has appropriate access to [male] spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms ….29

The analogous point applies equally to trans women, although in this case there are well-known complications. Categorizing a trans woman as female, according to Dembroff and Wodak, implies that she

has appropriate access to [female] spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms; that she can appropriately take part in [female] social groups; that she can apply for scholarships, jobs, or housing intended for [female] applicants; and so on.30

Although correct sexing does not prejudge issues about entitlement (or the weaker notion of permission), it is disputed whether trans women are entitled (or permitted) to use (certain) female spaces. In this respect, the situations of trans men and trans women are importantly different. To take two examples, it is not obvious that transgender women should be allowed to compete in weightlifting events for females. Neither is it obvious that transgender women should be housed among the general population in the female prison estate. These issues arise because of differences between the sexes: in the case of weightlifting, because of the male advantage in strength; in the case of prisons, because of the asymmetric threat males pose to females.31 It is not possible to debate these issues properly without correctly sexing trans women.

Dembroff and Wodak’s third argument turns on “gender-specific norms.” The actual norm they consider in the case of trans women is “women shave their legs”32; a corresponding norm in Tom’s case would be: men (should) take their hats off indoors. Keeping the focus on sex, let us modify that to: males (should) take their hats off indoors.

This norm does not apply to Tom, since he is not male. Suppose Tom decides to act as if the norm applies to him, and removes his hat on entering someone’s house. According to Dembroff and Wodak, using feminine pronouns for Tom would “undermine the intelligibility” of this action:

[Tom] can only be recognized to conform to or violate the norm if the norm is recognized as applying to [him]. So if Tom is [referred to] as a [she], the intelligibility of his actions and choices is undermined.33

We are back where we started: Tom should not be gratuitously embarrassed or humiliated or accused of a crime against nature. But there are plenty of situations where using Tom’s LC pronouns is to do none of these things.

There are further cases to consider. To wittingly use courtesy FM pronouns instead of LC ones is to participate in a kind of pretense.35 Usually that is to the benefit of the person referred to: using courtesy pronouns presents them to others as they wish to be presented. But sometimes the speaker may have reasons for not using words that invert a person’s actual sex.

Here’s one example. When a married father becomes a transgender woman, this can be highly stressful and emotional for the family.36 It was for the writer Christine Benvenuto and her three children, whose husband announced he was transgender after more than twenty years of marriage. She kept to the old pronouns:

She. Pronouns, of course, become problematic around a person crossing gender lines. I still use the male variety to refer to Tracey because even now I can’t think, speak, or write about this person any other way. This results in minor conversational oddities such as the following:

Acquaintance: “Have you asked Tracey about this? What does she say?”

Me: “I have asked him. He says…”37

Another example is provided by Karen White, a UK transgender woman who was charged with multiple rapes (among other offenses). White, who had not had sex-reassignment surgery, was sent to a female-only prison, HMP New Hall, where White sexually assaulted some fellow inmates.38 Stock, who uses courtesy pronouns by default, draws the line at “trans women who assault or aggress women. So, for instance, I will not call Karen White ‘she’ nor ‘her’.”39 One might think this choice is permissible.40

Some feminists go much further. Jeffreys, for instance, offers a mirror image of Dembroff and Wodak’s argument from respect:

Another reason for adherence to pronouns that indicate biology is that, as a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour.41

So far we have discussed Dembroff and Wodak’s arguments for: TW/M 

We have a duty not to use LC pronouns for transgender women or transgender men.

Dembroff and Wodak’s working example of a non-binary person is the US rapper Angel Haze, “who identifies as genderqueer.”44 Postpone the issue of what being non-binary or genderqueer amounts to. Is it “gravely wrong”45 to refer to Haze as she?

Apparently Haze does not think so:

I sound like four people when I get written about as “they”. It drives me crazy … Sometimes I want to be a dick and say: “Call me they”, just to see how seriously people take me. But they do take me seriously so it’s not that much fun. If you call me “him” or “her” it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t consider myself of any sex. I consider myself an experience.46

This brings out a point made by Dembroff and Wodak themselves, that their arguments do not depend on anyone’s “preferred pronouns”: “We do not think that the duty not to misgender [i.e., use LC feminine pronouns for] … Haze is explained in terms of what preferences people happen to have.”47 Haze’s “it doesn’t matter to me” notwithstanding, it is wrong to refer to her as this sentence does.

This is surprising. Admittedly, people can be oblivious to cutting remarks or other kinds of verbal insults and attacks; they can be wronged without realizing it. But can Haze—who seems to have given the matter some thought—really be this confused?

Since Dembroff and Wodak’s four arguments for (TW/M) are unpersuasive, the project of adapting them to establish (NB) is not promising. Looking at the first two arguments will be instructive, though. Before doing that, we need to say something briefly about being non-binary.

A common definition—in the words of a “non-binary sex educator” consulted by Teen Vogue—is that a non-binary person is “someone who does not identify as a man or a woman, or solely as one of those two genders.”48 Another common more-or-less equivalent alternative is that non-binary people “identify as neither male nor female.”49 But what does this mean? It is uncharitable to interpret Haze’s “I do not consider myself of any sex” as a biological remark. Haze is a standard-issue female and she makes no attempt to disguise this fact.50

Numerous self-declared non-binary people have offered explanations, and one consistent theme is that to be non-binary, or “outside the gender binary,” is to be in some respects feminine and in other respects masculine:

I don’t like to classify myself as simply “masculine” or “feminine”. I tend to be most comfortable in masculine clothes, while some of the personality traits I’m most proud of are that I’m compassionate, thoughtful, and emotionally expressive—traits that are often linked with femininity.51

I find myself embracing a combination of manly and womanly characteristics. For instance, I love wearing makeup, being all smooth and shaved, baking bread and desserts, but I also like lifting weights and I am quite minimalistic with my furniture.52

Let us now turn to the first two of the four analogous arguments for (NB). Just as using she for Tom is to (allegedly) disrespect him, so too is using she for Haze:

Referring to Haze as he or she expresses disrespect towards Haze in virtue of their social identity, and thereby also expresses disrespect to those who share their social identity (i.e., other genderqueer people). It does so by communicating that Haze (they) either identifies as [male] (he), or identifies as [female] (she).54

There is no good reason to convey that Haze is not non-binary, since she is and is happy to say so. But would feminine pronouns do that? Non-binary people themselves may prefer FM pronouns. As Teen Vogue reports:

Non-binary people can also have a variety of pronouns. Some go by they/them, some go by she/her, some go by both, and some go by more than that. The only way you can know is to ask.55

The second argument for (NB) concerns resources. Although using FM pronouns for Haze “may not imply that we may withhold existing resources,”

it suggests that we may refrain from establishing resources that are accessible to genderqueer persons. That is, to use she or he for individuals like Haze implies that they can and should fit into a binary and gender-specific organization of restrooms, legal identification, educational institutions, social clubs, dating apps and so on.56

As with (TW/M), we are back where we started. Angel Haze is no more deserving of humiliation and unkindness than Tom is. If using she to refer to Haze in her presence would upset her, that is a consideration against doing so. But there is nothing evidently wrong with using her LC pronouns in private conversations, especially when her sex is relevant. And since she presents as female, her sex is considerably more relevant than Tom’s.

Having said that, is the enthusiasm for non-binary they (along with exotic coinages like ze/xir), and the consequent pressure to share one’s pronouns, a welcome development?

A non-binary person may look exactly like a vanilla woman or man, with a gendered name to match. Judith Butler, referred to with feminine pronouns in thousands of pages over many years, and as patently female as she always was, is now legally non-binary. “I am enjoying the world of ‘they’,” she remarked recently.57 (They was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2019.) Although Butler herself does not mind she/her, they/them are her pronouns in the more progressive reaches of journalism and academia.

Assuming that the account of being non-binary in Section 5 is along the right lines, non-binary people were around long before the word was coined. As Butler says, “When I wrote Gender Trouble [in 1990], there was no category for ‘non-binary’—but now I don’t see how I cannot be in that category.”58 Butler was non-binary in 1990, despite the lack of the contemporary non-binary signal, reference with they/them pronouns.

Butler does not suggest that non-binary people were somehow deprived back in the day, because no special pronouns were in use and they were referred to by FM ones. Perhaps the later introduction of the term non-binary was a positive step, allowing non-binary people to categorize themselves and understand their experiences, but pronouns are an entirely different matter.59 Decades past indicate that being non-binary and being correctly sexed can happily coexist. Some non-binary people are now very particular about pronouns, but a non-binary female (say) may be fine with she.

These points bring out a massive disanalogy between non-binary they and courtesy pronouns for transsexuals. Judith Butler used to be called she; in contrast, there was never a time when transsexuals were routinely referred to with LC pronouns. The pioneering sexologist Harry Benjamin and others in the 1960s and 70s instinctively used pronouns for trans women and trans men that matched their sex-of-living.60 As they saw it, if one wanted to help these people live productive and happy lives, this was the only option. (By the same token, if one wanted to be mean, the choice of pronoun was clear.61)

Whether someone should be referred to with she or he used to be obvious, even if sometimes it was unobvious whether the pronoun matched the person’s sex. There was thus no need to make any announcements, or to wear pronoun badges, or to have pronouns in one’s email (or snail mail) signature. Politeness and decency brought about the desired result by themselves. And, no doubt, many trans women and trans men thought this the ideal arrangement.

Although the vast majority need no pronoun badges, those who do will stand out even more if they are the only ones. Hence the trend in universities and elsewhere—as yet only partially completed—for everyone to state their pronouns, non-binary or not. Not everyone is on board: the iconic gender-bending Culture Club singer Boy George once described current pronounmania as a “modern form of attention seeking.” Unsurprisingly, this was not well-received.62

Still, perhaps respecting people’s pronoun preferences is a harmless indulgence, like calling Elaine’s boyfriend (in the famous Seinfeld episode), Maestro. If using they makes a few people feel better, why not go for it?

The downside arguably outweighs the upside. Imagine what it would be like if they was consistently used for (often gender-atypical) self-declared non-binary people, reinforced by the majority’s preference for she and he. Feminine and masculine pronouns would be more strongly associated than they are now with gender stereotypes. Given the non-binary tendency to avoid self-ascribing woman/girl/man/boy, and the strong link between these gender terms and FM pronouns, woman and the rest would also be more strongly associated than they are now with gender stereotypes. Masculine woman and masculine girl might start to sound jarring, surely an unhealthy result. Self-declared non-binary people frequently proclaim their desire to overturn gender stereotypes, but the widespread use of non-binary they risks producing exactly the opposite result.

There is at least an initial case, then, for resisting the world of they, along with the practice of sharing one’s pronouns.63

English does have a defect which has been long-recognized: there is no singular epicene pronoun—like the Finnish hän—appropriate for any person. It would be convenient to have the option of answering “Where does Smith live?” (asked by someone ignorant of Smith’s sex) with some polite version of “It lives in London.”

A frequent claim is that masculine pronouns have a sex-neutral sense in sentences like (26): 26.

Every one of us knows he is fallible.

Could non-binary they step in to fill the breach? Using non-binary they, (31)—uttered when pointing at Haze—is felicitous. True, it offends against mainstream English grammar, but so what? Dembroff and Wodak point out that this is not like offending against the rules of morality71; as Humpty Dumpty observed “The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.”

However, there are two problems. The first is that (at present) non-binary they is not appropriate for everyone. In a typical context, (33) suggests that Smith has some preference for they: 33.

Smith has recorded their new album.72

Hen, supplementing hon (she) and han (he), was originally coined in the 1960s, and took off in 2012 with the publication of a children’s book, Kivi and Monsterdog, in which hen allows Kivi’s sex to remain unspecified.74 Appearing in the official Swedish dictionary in 2015, it has been a partial success. Hen has been steadily increasing in use, but as of 2019 the ratio of occurrences of hen to FM pronouns in the Swedish press was estimated at 1:122.75

Interestingly, the many similar proposals for English, dating back to the nineteenth century, have failed completely. Here are a few from a list compiled by Baron:

ne (c. 1850); thon (1884); hi (1884); hiser (1884); ir (1888); ons (1889); e (1890)76

What about something considerably more ambitious? Dembroff and Wodak advocate for getting rid of FM pronouns altogether. They offer three arguments. The first depends on the argument for (NB) that we have already examined, so can be passed over.79 The last argument is that FM pronouns (and other gender markers) have “harmful effects on social cognition about gender.” This is a complicated issue that cannot be treated properly here, and Dembroff and Wodak acknowledge that the “evidence is not conclusive.”80

The second argument is that FM pronouns can put people in “morally problematic” positions. For instance, if Frederick, a gay man, says he is going on holiday with his partner, and someone asks “Oh, is she looking forward to the sun?” Frederick is in a tight spot if he doesn’t wish to reveal his sexual orientation.81 If the only pronoun option were the equivalent of hen, the problem would not arise.

Fair enough, but obliterating she and he will not guarantee privacy. What if Frederick and his partner are invited to a barn dance at a neighboring farm? What if someone, on hearing that Frederick and his partner have a baby, offers to donate a breast pump? Hen is not going to come to Frederick’s aid. Social attitudes towards homosexuality are a more feasible target—and of course in recent years they have been transformed.

Given the dismal failure to introduce an epicene English pronoun, the minor incursion of hen into Swedish, and the fact that mastery of FM pronouns will be needed in the future to understand the enormous past stock of English books, movies, and other media, it is unrealistic to expect that she and he could be marginalized, let alone driven to extinction. In this case, changing the world is easier than changing the word.82

To close, a brief mention of two other issues, neither yet addressed at any length in the philosophical literature.83

The first concerns childhood social transition, where a gender dysphoric child adopts a new name and clothing appropriate for the target gender, and is referred to with courtesy FM pronouns. The reality star Jazz Jennings, for example, socially transitioned from male to female at age five. This is a controversial practice, because social transition may make it harder for the child to desist later—to revert to living as their natal sex, avoiding surgery, treatment with cross-sex hormones, and compromised fertility.84

The problem is that the use of a socially transitioning child’s courtesy pronouns can deceive them. Conventional implicatures (and presuppositions) are sometimes deceptive: “Ampleforth, a doctor, is at the door” can be used to get someone to wrongly believe that Ampleforth is a doctor. She, used of a male, can be similarly used to deceive.85

Return to our trans man Tom. He was never under any illusions, and others’ use of the pronoun he does not deceive him about his sex. But children are different. They have an imperfect understanding of sex, and the use of feminine pronouns for a young dysphoric natal male child is effectively deceptive: children are often present when adults talk about them in the third person.86 If girl is similarly deceptive, substituting trans girl might be a solution, but she and her are compulsory with a social transition to female.

This is not deception about trivial matters, like saying that the Tooth Fairy will come tonight or that the (open) candy store is closed. And in any case, some argue that it is even wrong to deceive children about Santa.87 Perhaps paternalistic considerations, invoked in many medical contexts, justify the use of courtesy rather than LC pronouns for some children, but the answer isn’t obvious. We will have to leave the problem there.

The second issue concerns compelled speech. Consider the following case:

In 2017 Maria MacLachlan was assaulted while she was waiting to attend a public meeting in London about proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act 2004. One of her attackers, Tara Wolf, who self-defines as a ‘trans woman’, was convicted of assault by beating in April 2018. While McLachlan was giving evidence at Wolf’s trial for the assault in the Magistrates Court, the presiding District Judge instructed her to call Wolf “she” or “the defendant”, as a matter of “courtesy”. MacLachlan has said that she tried to do this, but that because she was nervous while giving her evidence, she kept reverting to calling Wolf “he”. The judge is reported to have described this as “bad grace” on MacLachlan’s part, and to have given this as one of the reasons for his decision not to award her financial compensation for the assault.88

The law goes beyond requiring employees to be polite and respectful when dealing with members of the public. Preferred pronouns are not relevant in a face-to-face meeting. As written, the law requires employees to use preferred pronouns when talking about someone in private, regardless of the person’s appearance.

Should employees have to use non-standard pronouns? A more interesting question is about the conventional implicatures (or presuppositions) of standard FM pronouns. Someone who accepts that Ampleforth is at the door should not be legally forced to go the extra step, and utter “Ampleforth, a doctor, is at the door”—especially if Ampleforth is not a doctor. Ampleforth’s feelings are not a consideration. Are FM pronouns different, and if so, why?

One might think that pronouns present at best superficial problems, such as whether to add xe/xem to the official list of preferred pronouns at an elite liberal arts college. But on closer examination the issues run deeper. English feminine and masculine pronouns sometimes produce an unavoidable collision between social and sexed reality.