Xe/xem

How xe and xem decline

The set fills the same five slots as he and she, and the variants Wiktionary records sit beside the commonest spelling rather than under it.

Xe takes third-person singular agreement, which is the practical difference between this set and singular they. Wiktionary's usage note gives xe is, xe does and xe has, against they are, they do and they have. A writer moving from singular they to xe has to change the verb as well as the pronoun.

Heckin' Unicorn, a Singapore-based queer brand whose glossary entry was updated on 16 September 2021, sets the paradigm out as three substitutions: xe is hungry in place of he or she is hungry, please tell xem that lunch is ready in place of him or her, and this sandwich is xirs in place of his or hers. Them, in its guide to gender-neutral pronouns, describes trans and Non-binary people as having sought out sets like this one or built new ones because he and she did not suit them.

Where the xe set came from

Wiktionary's etymology is unusually blunt about the provenance. The pronoun was apparently independently invented by several people, Don Rickter among them, and the dated part of that account is the publication rather than the invention: xe appeared in UU World, the magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, on 1 May 1973. Mario Pei gave Rickter the credit on page 145 of Weasel Words in 1978, and that page is the reason Rickter's name travels with the set at all.

What the record does not hold is a proposal. No source on file reproduces the 1973 text, says what Rickter put the pronoun forward for, or names the other people said to have arrived at it separately. The multiple-invention claim is asserted rather than itemised. That leaves 1973 as a date of publication and 1978 as a date of attribution, with nothing recovered in between.

Which spellings the record carries

The argument is over a vowel. Wiktionary's headword gives the oblique form as xem with xer as an alternative, and the possessive as xyr, xir or xer; its declension section adds xhe as an occasional subject spelling. The reflexive runs three ways, xemself, xirself and xyrself, and the possessive pronoun follows whichever possessive a writer has already picked, xyrs or xirs.

Wiktionary's appendix of English third-person singular pronouns prints the neopronouns in one table beside he, she, it, one and singular they. It gives the xe row two possessives and three reflexives and marks none of them as primary. Sources outside the dictionaries choose a spelling and do not explain the choice: Heckin' Unicorn heads its explainer xe / xem / xir and uses xirs throughout, while the Usenet citations Wiktionary collects from the 1990s use xyr and xyrself. Both spellings are current and neither is claimed as prior by any source on file.

Where xe sits among the earlier proposals

Xe is a late arrival in a queue that Dennis Baron dates to 1789. Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has written a book on the history of the English pronoun, told Them that gender-neutral pronouns were discussed in local newspapers and periodicals from that year onward. The proposals he names each carry a coiner and a date. Thon, short for that one, was invented by the American composer Charles Crozat Converse in 1858 and admitted to Funk and Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary in 1903 and to Webster's Second New International Dictionary in 1934. Ze was created in 1864 by a writer Baron identifies only as J. W. L. Hir was coined in 1920 by the Sacramento Bee, a newspaper in California, and used on and off into the 1940s.

Set beside those, xe is unusual in having no first-person account attached to it. Converse is named in full, J. W. L. is at least initialled, the Sacramento Bee is a masthead with a date. Xe has a magazine issue, a book that assigns the credit five years afterwards, and a dictionary note saying the credit may not be sole.

How xe reached print and Usenet

The dated uses Wiktionary collects begin in 1992, with an essay by Jim Sinclair archived from the original in 2003. In it Sinclair writes about not wanting to miss knowing a person because that person happened to be the wrong sex, and the pronoun does the work of leaving the sex out. Sinclair used the set again on the Usenet list bit.listserv.autism on 14 September 1993, in a message about telepathy that carries xe and xyr in one sentence. Three further Usenet citations follow: talk.politics.libertarian in April 1999, where the pronoun stands in for a property owner in an argument about ownership rights; a moderated fiction group in December 2000; and alt.suicide.holiday in March 2002. All five come from discussion lists rather than from anything edited, which is where a pronoun in circulation but not in print leaves its record.

The author of the December 2000 citation uses xe and hir in a single passage, taking a subject form from one set and an object form from another. That is what the record looks like while two paradigms circulate side by side rather than in competition.

The most recent citation is fiction. Aimee Ogden's story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for July and August 2023 uses Xe, Xem, Xir and Xemself, capitalised throughout, for a god.

Wiktionary carries a second usage note: xe pronouns are sometimes used by far-right internet communities when speaking about people they are mocking. No citation is attached to it, and it is the only remark on the page about anybody using the set apart from the people it was proposed for.

What the dictionaries actually hold

The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for Xe and it is not this word. OED records Xe as a noun formed within English by clipping xenon, at about 0.5 occurrences per million words in modern written English, with its earliest evidence dated to 1900 in the writing of G. Rudorf. The pronoun is absent from it, so a reader checking a major dictionary for the attestation date of xe lands on a chemical abbreviation.

Wiktionary marks the pronoun nonstandard and gives it three pronunciations, /ziː/, /hiː/ and /ksiː/. A set with three accepted pronunciations has no single spoken form to learn, and Heckin' Unicorn names exactly that as one of its reasons the pronoun is met infrequently, alongside a lack of awareness and what it calls the fragmentation of proposed pronouns.