To Gender — or Not to Gender? — That is NO Question
‘Gendering’ is the latest term for making a distinction between the genders in written words that was not made for centuries.
Genders? Distinct? Why?
It’s simple, really: Words matter.
Because words make the ‘movie in your head’ start playing. When someone says “a dark brown, juicy, sweet, soft, tasty muffin” as an English speaker you know not only what they mean. The image of that muffin is created inside your mind and might look similar to the one above.
When we think of a man or a woman — or recently people who don’t feel either way, altogether — an image is created in our minds. Sometimes it’s not really clear, rather in the background, half-conscious only.
But as soon as you would start trying to ‘picture it’, consciously, even draw something, a scene perhaps, arrange a photo shoot, as it were — you start to realise that you might not be in it…
One example could be reading instructions for assembling a device or setting options in a software. In many cases sooner or later the pronoun ‘he’ is still used for a user who is supposed to perform an action. “The user’s credentials have to be ready. He has to enter them into the fields ‘name’ and ‘password’.”
In English, the variety of addressing users directly is much easier in that context: “…you have to enter…”
But in other contexts it can become difficult or impossible to address readers as ‘you’.
You might argue that it is no big deal, such short and few words…let’s remember: Images are powerful in our minds, and they are created by words.
Simply put: What — exactly — do you see when you look in the mirror?
Just for checking, ‘for fun’, take any text, shorter or longer, with the pronoun ‘he’ solely used inside and rewrite it replacing ‘he’ with ‘she’. Read it — and see what happens.
I think that checking our own mind’s approach, our minds’ individual movies, can help to make clear why ‘gendering’ is important.
The question HOW can perhaps not be answered easily all around the globe. But we will get there. In the meantime I vote for varieties that avoid any additional ‘dots and arrows’…make it simple and elegant. One possibility is using the plural. Oher solutions might be even better.
Let’s have the words in the writing mirror our mind’s images.
