Neopronoun

The distance between the label and the things it labels is the argument in miniature. Dennis Baron, emeritus professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of "What's Your Pronoun?", told CNN he has traced more than two hundred coinages, many of them made before the twentieth century and a good hundred and twenty years before the current arguments over pronouns began. A set proposed in 1864 is now described by a word from the 2010s, and several of the disputes turn on which of those two dates a reader has in mind.

Where the word neopronoun comes from

Wiktionary gives the formation as neo- plus pronoun and defines the result as a pronoun used in place of he, she, one, it or singular they, especially one of the modern coinages used by some non-binary people. Three printed uses are on file, all of them from general publishing and none from linguistics. Matthew J. Metzger's novel Life Underwater uses the plural in 2018. Lee Airton's primer "Gender: Your Guide", from the same year, records a practical disadvantage: the sets stand out whenever they are used, because relatively few people have ever heard the words before. Morgan Lev Edward Holleb's The A-Z of Gender and Sexuality, from 2019, glosses the headword as new pronouns and puts the word new inside quotation marks.

The historical account behind those quotation marks is not in dispute among the sources on file.

Why some neopronouns are older than the label

Baron told CNN that calling hir and ze neopronouns may not even be technically correct, since both are over a hundred years old. The purposes behind the earliest coinages had nothing to do with non-binary identity. English grammarians had promoted generic he since the sixteenth century, following William Lily's Latin grammar of 1542 and its doctrine that the masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine, and the pressure to replace it came from arguments about women. John Stuart Mill complained in 1851 that the want of a neutral word forced him into generic he, which he called more than a defect in English because it rendered half the human species invisible. Mill coined nothing himself.

Others did, in quantity. Baron separates two kinds of coinage in his account to CNN. Some sets were repurposed from words already in the language or borrowed from another, such as the dialect form ou or the French le. Others filled what he called a "semantic black hole", invented for the purpose and resembling nothing already in English.

Which sets the record actually dates

The dates below come from the accounts on file, and where two accounts disagree the entry prints both. None of these sets was a success in its own time.

Thon has the most tangled record, and it is the clearest case of a date quoted confidently online from sources that do not agree. Wikipedia gives 1858 as the year Converse introduced it. The pronoun guide on file reports that the Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ dates it to 1884 instead and that "Words and Women" gives 1859. CNN reports Baron's version, in which Converse coined the word in the middle or later nineteenth century and only began promoting it in 1884. The dictionary record splits the same way: Wikipedia has thon entering the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1934 and dropped from it in 1961, while the guide lists Webster's International Dictionary in 1910, Funk and Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary in 1913 and Webster's Second International in 1959. Both accounts agree that the entries won the word no users. Ella Flagg Young's heer had the same fate after Funk and Wagnalls took it in 1913.

Three later dates mark the point at which the surviving sets stopped being proposals. Kate Bornstein used ze and hir for a character in the 1996 novel Nearly Roadkill. Leslie Feinberg named the same set in a 2006 interview as one of several used depending on context, on the grounds that it makes assumptions about a person harder to hold. The Oxford English Dictionary added an entry for ze in 2018 and entries for hir and zir in 2019.

How often neopronouns turn up in surveys

Every figure here is a share of the people who chose to answer a self-selected survey, and the two surveys on file measured different groups. No figure here is a population rate.

The Gender Census ran a survey devoted to pronouns from 19 to 26 August 2017, open to people whose gender was in some way not binary, and counted 2,686 participants after removing a joke submission and two duplicates. Reduced to the first two forms of each set, they/them took 73 per cent and he/him 18 per cent, ahead of she/her at 12 per cent. Eleven per cent said any pronouns were fine and five per cent asked that pronouns be avoided altogether. The coined sets came in below all of those: it/it and xe/xem at 2 per cent each, with 58 and 57 people, ey/em at 2 per cent with 52, fae/faer with 25, and ze/zir and ze/hir with 20 apiece.

The survey's second finding matters more to anybody trying to count the sets. Reducing a set to its first two forms flattens it, and the survey found no convergence underneath the shorthand: for most coined sets, half the people using them or more write different words after the first form. Thirteen distinct sets beginning with the letter n were written in, the commonest of them by seven people, and the only property all thirteen shared was that they took singular verbs.

A separate figure, drawn from a different population, is the one most often quoted. Wikipedia reports an online survey by The Trevor Project in 2020 which found that 4 per cent of the LGBTQ young people surveyed, aged 13 to 24, used neopronouns.

Why neopronouns are argued about

Wikipedia's account of the reception records opposition inside the transgender community as well as among cisgender people, and gives the objections in the terms their holders use: that the sets are unfamiliar and hard to use, that the practice, and nounself pronouns in particular, comes from a position of privilege, that it makes LGBTQ people look like a joke, and that attention spent on it is attention taken from transphobic bullying, the murder of trans people and suicide. Colin Wright, writing as an opinion contributor to the Wall Street Journal, has described nounself pronouns as unhelpful and unnecessary.

The same article records the case made on the other side: that the sets are useful to Genderqueer people looking for a word made for them rather than adapted, and to neurodivergent people whose relationship to gender does not fit the vocabulary already available. Baron's position, given to CNN, is a linguist's rather than an advocate's. He holds that refusing to let people self-identify is a way of excluding them, that every word in every language was invented at some point, and that present resistance is likely to be resistance to the Non-binary and Transgender people using the sets, since the nineteenth-century coinages met a public resistant to language change in general and were mostly ignored.

Both the objection and the defence single out the same subset, the nounself pronouns, which the sources on file treat as one kind of neopronoun.