IN WHICH The Girl Buys a Pronoun

"How may I pronoun you?"

Apparently, I'm fixated on gender recently. I read Rachel Hartman's Shadow Scale, the sequel to Seraphina, last week. While I enjoyed the story overall, the one part I can't out of my head is the treatment of gender pronouns by one of the book's nations. Who wouldn't obsess over an interesting grammatical innovation?

Gender identity has gotten a lot of attention lately as people start to talk more openly about what gender actually means. Many people today accept gender as something defined by society and tradition rather than sex. Our ideas about gender roles have changed, at least slightly, over time, and are likely to continue changing. As we come to see gender as malleable, we can also see why people may identify themselves as a gender different from their biological sex or somewhere on the spectrum between sexes.

This understanding and acknowledgement of varying gender identities is starting to be seen in colleges. It is not out of the ordinary for a student to request a different name and/or pronoun from what is on the roster sheet at the beginning of a semester. Many schools are introducing gender-neutral bathrooms, and campus groups have made more effort to bring awareness to the faculty and students. In the orientation at the beginning of this semester, one such group came and talked to the faculty about gender identity. One suggestion they provided was to ask each student what name and pronoun he or she would like to go by on that first day. This is why I was so struck by a country whose customs require you to ask each person you meet which pronoun he or she prefers:

"You use cosmic neuter for a stranger, Abdo insisted. And he's a stranger until you've asked, 'How may I pronoun you?'"

However, the issue in America is not just a lack of understanding and acceptance of different gender identities, but a lack of pronouns. The English language doesn't accommodate unknown or indeterminate gender. We have he for males and she for females, but no gender neutral pronoun for people. No cosmic neuter like in Porphyrian. We often deal with this in two ways; we use it, which is inappropriate - and insulting - for humans, or we use they, which refers to more than one person. We can use he or she, like I did earlier, but that is just bulky. Our language encourages gender to fit into distinctly masculine or feminine boxes and excludes everything else.

The Porphyrian language in Shadow Scale addresses this issue by having a variety of gender options:

"Sounthlanders can't speak it, said Abdo sleepily. Too hard for your flimsy foreign minds. There are six genders and seven cases. . . naive masculine, naive feminine, emergent masculine, emergent feminine, cosmic neuter, point neuter."

Vocabulary adapts to the modern world constantly. For example, words like hot mess and selfie have been added to the dictionary. Nevertheless, it is very hard to change the more basic structures of the English language, such as pronouns. I feel like if people can accept that literally often means that something is not actually true, they can eventually adapt to a new pronoun or two. It will be interesting to see how English does or does not adapt in respect to gender over the next decade or so.

In Shadow Scale, we also get to see a character who has changed her gender identity and, therefore, her pronoun choice as well. Seraphina, the main character, encounters Camba for the second time without recognizing her because she had appeared masculine earlier:

"I racked my brains for the Porphyrian verb Abdo had taught me, a polite inquiry that didn't even exist in the Southlands. 'How may I pronoun you?' I hazarded. Camba smiled warmly and inclinded her stately head. 'I pronoun myself emergent feminine,' she said in Porphyrian, then added in my native tongue, 'Or I do now, at last. On my Day of Determination, I declared myself naive masculine. I was already ityasaari; it embarrassed me to be even more complicated than that.'"

Interestingly enough, Hartman also implies that this culture allows people to pick their gender on a celebration day, Day of Determination. However, we can see that in any culture it is difficult to be different from the expected.

The pronoun question is just one intriguing and progressive aspect of Hartman's Seraphina series. Plus, it's about dragons. Go read it!