---
layout: post
title: "Gender neutrality isn't about gender equality"
date: 2019-02-24 21:00:00
categories: language
---

I've been proponent of gender-neutral language (in english it's mostly about
pronouns, but other languages have much more gendering of words) for a long
time. Recently i noticed that there seem to be a common misunderstanding about
its meaning.

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Very often people (whether they support it or not) tend to associate
gender-neutral language with gender equality. The usual argument is that using
one gender form (usually male in english, russian and other languages i'm aware
of) in place of indeterminate gender supports discrimination or at least
inequality. While that could be true (about inequality anyway), the key here is
that it only *supports* existing way of things.

First, lets imagine a perfect copy of some "patriarchal" society with only
difference that the indeterminate gender of choice in it is female. Would it
change anything substantially in gender perception, roles and equality? My guess
is a no: while it may affect society in some subtle ways, people can easily
adopt to see "default" gender as either "superior" or "inferior" or however else
as they please.

Now imagine a world with perfect gender equality and no (recent) history of
discrimination whatsoever; needless to say, i don't think "default gender" would
be seen as much more than grammatical convention.

And this brings us to one of the points of this post: "default gender" ─
whichever you choose ─ is a very bad grammatical convention. To see why,
consider the following dialogue:

A: Hey, why didn't you bought the bread?

B: Beautiful middle-aged female shop assistant told me in an unpleasant
high-pitched voice it isn't fresh.

A: Is it important that they were beautiful middle-aged female with high-pitched
voice? Why do i have to hear about it?

B: Because old grammar dictates us so!

A: Why would anyone would ever want to use such a grammar?!

Well, luckily we don't use such a grammar. But the problem is the same: gendered
grammar forces us to disclose irrelevant information. This isn't just about
situation when we don't know gender (using "default" gender in that case may
confuse whoever we talk to, by the way), it's also about information noise. We
aren't forced to tell age, pitch or beauty of other people and in cases when
it's irrelevant would obviously prefer not to; likewise, i would also prefer not
to be forced neither into disclosing superfluous information nor into receiving
it. And i would also like to not have to think about that; indeed, zero
information should be default.

Besides this (which is in my opinion enough by itself to justify inconvenience
of changing language habits), there is another (albeit related) reason to switch
to gender-neutral defaults and even to drop grammatical gender altogether
(i.e. abolishing gendered pronouns and lexicon in english).

Gender is simply irrelevant. It is made into a holy cow in most cultures, but
reasons for that are hopelessly outdated in enlightened society. Having one
adjective per biological gender to use in appropriate contexts and perhaps some
ways to describe variety of gender associated behaviour patterns should be
enough.

***

Now for some language specific comments:

In english one can almost always use a neutral pronoun (though there's also some
gendered lexicon), but unfortunately singular "they" which is by far the most
optimal solution at this point has its drawback: namely, it removes the
distinction between singular and plural which (also unfortunately) is one of the
most important mechanisms for distinguishing pronoun referents.

Russian is much more gendered; past tense verbs, adjectives and even more
pronouns are required to indicate gender (in singular form). Furthermore, nouns
have grammatical gender and while there is neutral gender (funnily enough, it's
called "middle"), it is used for a fraction of inanimate objects (the only
exception that i know of is "привидение", ghost); the rest are gendered as male
or female without any obvious pattern (beyond grammatical form).

Japanese is quite different in the way of handling pronouns and i think it would
be fair to say that it has no grammatical gender, but quite some social/lexical
(honorifics, word choice, manner of speech).

Finally, as expected, lojban is about perfect in this aspect. Pronouns are fully
abstract, being distinguished either by explicit assignment, grammar place/role
or part of referent word (i.e. being abbreviations).
