Pronoun set

A set makes no claim about gender. It is a group of slots in a sentence, which is why it is filed here rather than beside the identity terms, and why a person's set does not disclose a person's gender any more reliably than a name does. The 2017 survey asked each respondent how they tend to gender their own set, and the options on the form ran from masculine and feminine through non-binary and open to anybody to a fifth meaning that nobody else uses it.

What the forms of a pronoun set do

The order below is the order every English grammar uses and the order a reader comparing two sets needs. The three inherited sets fill it out.

The subject form does the acting and the object form is acted on. The two possessives are distinct in function even where they are identical in spelling, which the masculine set makes plain: his is the determiner in his newspaper and also the pronoun in the newspaper is his, while the feminine set separates them into her and hers. The reflexive closes the set and is the form guides most often leave out.

The last cell is the one with an argument attached. Both themselves and themself are in use for a single person, and the Gender Census left that question deliberately open. Its pronoun survey supplied worked examples under every other prompt and gave none for the reflexive, so that respondents would choose between the two spellings without being steered. The result of that decision is not recorded in the material on file for this entry, which is a gap in the record rather than a settled answer.

How the Gender Census asked for each form

The 2017 survey did not offer a list of sets to tick. It gave five sentences with a blank in each and asked every respondent to fill them in, which is the only way to recover a full paradigm from somebody who has never written one out.

The frames were a request that somebody be asked whether they would like to buy a newspaper, a statement that the newspaper now belongs to them, a statement that they are reading their newspaper, an answer to the question of whose newspaper it is, and a statement that they bought it for themselves. Each frame carried examples from the inherited sets, except the last.

Two further questions went with each set. One asked whether it takes singular or plural verbs, since the difference between xe is and xe are is not recoverable from the forms themselves and the inherited sets split on it. The other asked how the respondent tends to gender the set, with masculine, feminine, non-binary, inclusive and a fifth option meaning that only the respondent uses it. Respondents could enter up to five sets each.

Why a set is named by its opening forms

Ranking the sets meant reducing each one to its first two forms, and the survey said plainly what that costs. The shorthand merges sets that differ and splits sets that do not. Xe/xem more than doubles in count once the variant continuations are gathered with it, because a slight difference in spelling further down a set sends an otherwise identical answer into a separate row. Thirteen distinct sets beginning with the letter n were written in, of which the commonest was entered by seven people and eleven by one person each. The only property shared by all thirteen was that they took singular verbs.

The published guides disagree about how much of a set to print, which is a second reason the shorthand is unreliable. The Jed Foundation's page on gender identity lists she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs and xe/xem/xeirs, three forms apiece. A pronoun guide on the LGBTQ and ALL site lists ze/hir/hirs, ze/zir/zirs, xe/xem/xyr, ey/em/eir and fae/faer/faers, also three. The Gender Census asked for five and reported the first two. None of the three is wrong, and a reader moving between them is comparing different things.

The survey's own conclusion after several years of asking was that the coined sets are not converging. For most of them, half the people using them or more write different words after the first form. Some sets sound alike and are spelled differently, such as xe/xir and ze/zir, and some are spelled alike and pronounced differently: xy/xyr is said both as zee zeer and as zye zyer.

Why some people give several sets

Giving more than one set is common enough to have its own name. LGBTQ Nation calls the practice rolling pronouns and reports the 2020 Gender Census finding that roughly a third of the transgender and non-binary people who answered use two sets, with over a tenth content with three or more. Those fractions describe a self-selected community sample and hold for nobody outside it.

The reasons recorded differ from each other. Ada Powers, quoted in the same article, identifies as a woman and as Non-binary and takes she/they because neither half tells the whole story. For Genderfluid people, more than one set follows a gender that moves; Jonathan Van Ness, who uses she, he and they, has described feeling like a man on some days and a woman on others. Others give several sets as a refusal of the demand that gender be fixed in one form at all.

The practice is well documented among public figures. Elliot Page announced he and they on coming out as Transgender in December 2020, and LGBTQ Nation lists Emma Corrin, Gerard Way, Sara Ramirez and Kehlani among others who give two. How the sets are meant to be rotated varies by person: some expect alternation inside a single conversation, some prefer one set on one day and another on the next, and some name a main set and treat the rest as also acceptable. The article records that people sometimes list their sets in order of preference and sometimes do not.