Why are pronouns gendered at all?

Preferred pronouns are a hotly debated topic in the USA these days (at least judging by the amount of media coverage). It feels like everyone is arguing about which pronouns to use¹, but nobody seems to be asking why pronouns are gendered in the first place.

Think about it. Why does your gender have to be part of every single sentence that’s ever spoken or written about you?

Imagine a pronoun specifically for Black people. Imagine that, if talking about a Black man, you had to use “ze” instead of “he” for your English to be “grammatically correct”. I’m sure there would be people who’d say, “It’s not racist, it’s just grammar!” But you and I both know, it would be racist as fuck. Why else would you create a pronoun to refer to a specific group of people, grouped by an arbitrary characteristic that you decided is socially important?

Now, I know this isn’t a perfect analogy. In my hypothetical scenario, we’d be making a new pronoun out of the blue, but for all we know, he and she have been with us since the dawn of time. (Which isn’t true, by the way. And while many languages have gendered pronouns, many do not.)

It’s still worth wondering why personal pronouns came to be gendered in the first place. I don’t know the answer to that, and it’s likely nobody ever will. But my guess is that it had something to do with social status and hierarchy. I’m guessing that because of how we treat animate (he/she) vs inanimate (it) pronouns today: it would be offensive to call a human “it”, but it’s OK to call a dog that. He/she > it. Are he and she equal? Perhaps today. Is it a stretch to imagine it used to be he > she > it? After all, in many parts of the world, that hierarchy is still very much alive.

Are you starting to see my problem with gendered pronouns?

I still remember stumbling upon this experiment that found that simply asking female students to fill out a demographic questionnaire before a math test, thereby reminding them of their gender, negatively affected their scores.² Guess what gendered pronouns do? Remind people of their gender! And of the fact that their gender is so significant that it has to be mentioned, regardless of what is being said about them.

If I say “she is a doctor”, you know I’m talking about a female human. But you know nothing else. What is their hair color? Skin color? Age? Doesn’t matter! If it did, I could specify (“She is 32 years old. She has blond hair.”) But gender? Well, that one characteristic is so important for some reason that I just need to mention it to be “grammatically correct”.

Reproductive sex is real. Humans reproduce through a binary sex system: male sperm fertilizes a female egg. That’s not up for debate.³

But choosing to divide the population based on reproductive biology, and use different pronouns to refer to them, and making it a grammatical necessity that we use these pronouns in almost every sentence… well, those are arbitrary decisions our society has made, and can therefore undo.

I hope the current discourse around pronouns leads people to question why they are gendered at all. That’s the conversation I want to have.