As I started my story for this year's
NaNoWriMo (click NaNoWriMo for the main website, click
here for my page/story synopsis), I started to wonder what it would be like to write one character without any gender pronouns, thus setting me up to stop writing and hop onto Google. Apparently, it's harder than one would think to "create" a genderless pronoun without offending somebody in the process. One of the first genderless pronouns that came up while I was on Google was "it/its/it's," and this bothers me for many reasons. First, it seems to me to be the kind of pronoun you would assign a human being, not a gender-nonconforming person. Second, I would never want to be referred to as an "it." The phrase seems demeaning.
The next term that I came upon was the term "
em." With this pronoun, the general consensus of the poster was that the term was "masking" a real gender. However, I think that em is a perfectly acceptable substitute or pronoun for those who don't conform to the gender binary.
I guess I have a couple of questions for you guys:
- What do you think of using gender neutral pronouns in everyday society?
- What pronoun would you use/invent if you answer yes?
- If you answer no, why?
- Do you think it's possible to write a story without revealing the gender of the mail character?
Other Gender neutral pronoun sites/blogs:
