By C. Nowak
When I arrived on campus for my first year of college in 2011, I quickly became acquainted with the practice of being asked for my personal pronouns when meeting new people. In those first weeks of college, when every face was new and when I was trying desperately to learn the unwritten rules of the school, I was asked the question over and over. In one house meeting I attended, a fellow first-year student answered that she used feminine pronouns and gestured to her outfit with a laugh as if to say, “Of course, I’m a woman. Look at me.” She earned herself a correction from the meeting’s leader; one can’t assume a person’s gender or pronouns based on how they dress or present themselves. The question was not a joke, and answers must be taken seriously.
Most of my peers at this women’s college were cisgender women and were expected to answer with a flat “I prefer she/her pronouns.” But in most large groups, especially among upperclassmen (upperclasspeople?), there would be some who would state a preference for “he/him” or for a neutral or non-binary pronoun. The question was so common in both social and academic situations that the college’s Office for Equity and Inclusion eventually published an official explanation of pronoun etiquette.
In Massachusetts in 2011, non-binary pronouns took several different forms: they/them was the most common, but I encountered people during my college years who used ze/zir, xe/xem, and ey/em. These neo-pronouns were viewed by some students as a solution to the perceived problems of the singular epicene they/them. Was they too impersonal? Should you say, “They are…” or “They is…”? Would others be more reluctant to accept a shift in usage for an old word than the creation of a new word?
Back then, the use of they to refer to a single, known person was a hotly contested issue, as discussed in The New York Times Magazine’s “On Language” column in 2009. According to the article, the singular usage was accepted by some dictionaries and style guides and rejected by others, but the pronoun was well on its way to becoming standard. The article also cites significant literary precedent for the epicene they, dating back centuries, indicating that this use of the word is not as novel as it may appear to some linguistic conservatives.
They’s big moment in mainstream grammar finally arrived in 2019, when Merriam-Webster named it “Word of the Year.” The dictionary noted its increasing popularity to refer to non-binary people and mentioned some famous cases of non-binary people in the media from the year.
As much ink has been spilled in recent years on the epicene pronoun(s), the English language seems to be adapting. In English, changes in gender are a simple matter of replacement: only the pronoun needs to change in most sentences. But in other languages, like French, changing the grammatical gender of a subject or subject pronoun has implications for many other parts of the sentence, and the rigid grammatical structure has not yet been bent by pioneering linguistic activists.
In a grammatically correct French sentence, many parts of a sentence are gendered, and the genders must agree. Creating a sentence about a non-binary individual in French is not simply a matter of deciding on personal pronouns, but also agreement of adjectives, articles, nouns, compound verbs and impersonal pronouns. There is an assertion by some French grammarians that the masculine form itself can be used as a sort of neutral or “unmarked” form. This is because in many cases in contemporary French, masculinity takes priority over femininity. For example, famously, a group of 100 women and 1 man would be referred to using the masculine plural ils instead of the feminine plural elles, despite the womens’ overwhelming majority. Recently, there have been several vehement rejections of this idea, especially by linguist Éliane Viennot in her 2014 book, Non, le masculin ne l’emporte pas sur le féminin!
If the need for language to discuss non-binary people is becoming more and more accepted in English, then what about non-binary people in French-speaking countries? To what extent have Francophone non-binary people been able to adjust French’s rigid grammar to suit their needs? French feminists and professional women have seen significant success in in the last few years to normalize so-called “gender inclusive” terms in professional contexts: for example, calling a woman president la présidente instead of le président and allowing other parts of the sentence to agree with that gender-swapped title. This kind of alteration to professional titles was the subject of significant popular debate in France in the latter half of the 20th century, but has become quite commonplace in the 21st century. This shows that there is some flexibility for the French grammar system to change alongside French society.
In response to Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year” announcement in 2019, Huffpost France published an article about how the singular epicene pronoun is sorely missing in French, while noting that some alternative pronouns are gaining in popularity, notably iel and ille. But just as when I was an undergraduate in the US, there does not appear to be universal agreement on which pronoun(s) will best suit the needs of non-binary French speakers. Other alternatives include: yel, ul, ol, olle, ael, ielle, æl, aël, im, em, ulle, al, i, and el. Beyond pronouns, there have been suggestions for modifications to the French grammar system, but they all deviate significantly from the standard.
The French language can be slow to adopt linguistic changes that reflect societal changes. Within France, the official agency that regulates language, the Académie Française has been known to take conservative stances on alterations to the language, especially with regard to gender issues like the inclusive professional titles cited above. The Académie has no power to enforce its rules within French society, but its declarations on proper usage are widely accepted by French-speakers in France and around the world. English, on the other hand, with its unwieldy, ungovernable flexibility seems much more capable of adapting to the reality of gender in the 21st century.
Languages in Conflict 