gender-free

Gender-free language attempts to avoid making reference to irrelevant attributes of the people it discusses. This mainly involes removing the sex or gender identity of our subjects from our sentances but can also include any other superflous information to which others may attach a prejudice.

The english language fails to provide a gender-free third person animate pronoun, this can be a problem when referring to people who are not easily classified as 'man' or 'woman' but it is primarily an issue simply because it would be useful to have the ability to refer to people by a pronoun and have it imply nothing more than 'the previously named person'. In order to work past this people adopting gender-free language may wish to also adopt a gender-free pronoun set. This by its very nature is a pronoun set which is free of all gender. As such it is important to adopt it for use with all people and not just with any one group (if you must maintain gendered pronouns then there are many alternative 'third gendered' pronouns which can be applied to people who live outside the lines of the binary gender system as a suppliment (rather than a replacement) to the existing masculine and feminine sets).

By discussing and working towards gender-free language I am not suggesting that everyone must or even should adopt gender-free speech or that anyone should stop classifying people in terms of gender. What I am suggesting is that people might want to choose to stop constantly making reference to their classifications. I've met people who constantly make reference to body size or race of the people they talk about. They seem to be saying 'it is very important that you know my doctor is fat' or 'you should think differently about this anocdote knowing that the person in question had dark skin'. When we use gendered pronouns it is possible for others to use the genders of the people we make reference to to apply their own prejudices to our speech. As individuals we might choose to remove that gendering from our language in order to no longer endorce the prejudices of others.

Very occasionally in life people may come across a person who they are unable to gender and, with the current gendered language, may as a result feel uncomfortable as a result. When one no longer has to be aware of a person's gender in order to refer to them, interact with them or even (if we think in speech) think about them it is no longer much of an issue to meet an unclassifiable person. However I would like to stress that gender-free language is primarily about not making reference to gender regardless of what it actually is. As such acceptance or even awareness of 'third gender' identities is not required for a person to choose to adopt gender-free language. One does not need to cease thinking of people in gendered terms, one is simply given the option of referring to people's attributes only when they are directly relevant to the discussion. Gender-free language is about having the choice to specify or not specify. Our language becomes more powerful and more precise when it conveys only what we want to say without superfluous information which others may use to twist our meaning by applying their own stereotypes and prejudices.