What are your pronouns?
(...And why does it matter?)
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Pronouns are a part of speech that stands in for a noun. However, when we talk about someone’s pronouns, we are talking about third-person, animate pronouns in English. (You don’t really need to know what those words mean to have this conversation.) On this website, when we say “pronouns”, we actually mean these specific pronouns unless we say otherwise.
Pronouns serve to make communication quicker and more accurate. When we talk about a certrain person, thanks to pronouns, we don’t have to repeat that person’s name over and over to keep talking about the person, or even know said person’s name.
Instead of:
I asked Elizabeth about Elizabeth’s project. Elizabeth says Elizabeth’s will be done all on Elizabeth’s own.
you can just say:
I asked her about her project. She says hers will be done all by herself.
In English, someone’s pronouns are reflective of how the speaker perceives that person’s gender. While we cannot police anyone else’s speech—or in fact, the gender that others see us as—we can introduce ourselves to others as a certain gender and request that they refer to us as such. They might refuse, but politely requesting it instead of demanding it, as well as accepting the other person’s request within reason, is the polite thing to do.
In English, someone’s pronouns are determined by their gender as such:
| NUM | G | SBJ | OBJ | REFL | POS.PN | POS.DET | (BE) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SG | M | he | him | himself | his | his | (is) |
| F | she | her | herself | hers | her | (is) | |
| C/N* | they | them | themself | theirs | their | (are) | |
| INAN* | it | it | itself | its | its | (is) | |
| PL | any | they | them | themselves | theirs | their | (are) |
^ English doesn’t have full grammatical gender (outside of gendered pronouns), meaning different genders are not inflected differently. “Neuter” is a term used in languages with three grammatical genders where the other two are masculine and feminine. “Common” is a term used in languages where the masculine and feminine genders have merged. Neither term really accurately represents the role of the singular they in English.
^ Note that, however, some inanimate objects do get treated like animate nouns. Dolls and humanoid robots, for example, are often referred to as “he” or “she” instead of “it”. Some old-fashioned people and books may call ships and countries “she”, too. However, the inverse, calling a human “it”, is only done to dehumanize them, oppress them, invalidate their existence, diminish their sufferings, and equate them to non-sapient animals. Never refer to a human being as “it”.
Yes! English pronouns are closed-class, meaning that new ones can’t be coined without significant effort and cognitive load.* Nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs aren’t like that, and you can verb nouns willy-nilly.
^ This isn’t to say that English can’t create pronouns when the need for one arises. Ever since “you” absorbed “thee” and became ambiguosuly singular and plural, English speakers have invented explicitly plural forms of “you”, like y’all, yinz/yins/y’ins/yoons, yous/youse/yis/yiz, and all these synonyms. When the need arose to refer to a person of nonbinary gender, the singular “they”, formerly widely used to refer to a hypothetical person of irrelevant gender since the late 1300s, recently got widened for that purpose.
No. Gender and sex mean different things.
Sex is generally a medical term that has to do with the physiology inside someone’s body like sex hormones, karyotype, and gamete production, as well as some externally visible features, like skeletal structure and genitals.
Gender is generally a sociological and societal term, dealing with how society expects certain behaviors, interests, and roles to come with sex features. Gender is why we find it weird for a man to wear a skirt, and for a woman to be the President of the United States of America.
However, there is some research that shows that transgender people have brain anatomy that more closely matches the sex matching their claimed gender, than to the sex matching their
In conclusion, the rule of thumb is that, unless you’re that person’s doctor, and that person has not medically transitioned, you’re dealing with their gender, not sex.
Some other websites will just push it through with “it’s common courtesy”, but we think it merits a bit deeper of an explanation.
Since pronouns directly correspond with gender, getting people’s pronouns right is an important way to show to others that you respect who they are. Calling a woman “he” or a nonbinary person “him” is as invalidating and wrong as calling any human being “it”.
However, it is a thankless gesture if the person you are referring to isn’t there with you. It is also a potential cause of confusion if the person or people you’re talking to doesn't understand the pronouns you use for others. In addition, certain people, like those who claim that their “preferred pronouns” are “it”, will cause offense (“How dare you call a human ‘it’!”) in addition to confusion (“Wait, is [name] a person or some kind of robot or website or something?”).
Everyone needs to strike a healthy balance between respecting the person’s identity and being understood by the people to whom you speak.
Good question. We don’t know. It may just be the trendy phrasing that stuck; it may stem from a misunderstanding of the nature of gender identity and grammatical gender in English.