Gender Agreement Resources
21. September 2021
According to the APA Style Blog, „if transgender and gender non-conforming people (including Agender, Genderqueer and other communities) use the singular as pronouns, authors should also use the singular `them` when writing about them“ (para. 1). From a linguistic point of view, pronouns are words that refer to human beings by replacing proper nouns as well as nouns. A pronoun can refer to either a person who speaks or a person who is being talked about. Common pronouns include them, she/she and er/she. Pronouns indicate a person`s gender; traditionally, it refers to men while it concerns women. The English language does not have a gender-neutral third-person personnel name, but in recent years it has gained considerable strength in this role. They have been officially recognized as correct by several important bodies such as the Associated Press. Similarly, the Chicago Manual of Style now finds that the singular „them“ is common in informal communication (while acknowledging that it has not yet achieved the same ubiquity in formal spaces). Fortunately, most native English speakers are not aware of grammatical gender, at least until they take their first French course (or other language courses). They discover that each French noun must be the or the.
When people whose sex is neither male nor female (z.B. non-binary, agender, genderfluid, etc.) use the singular to refer to themselves, they use language to express their identity. Adopting this language is a way for writers to involve a number of people and identities. To continue our example with „eating“ and foods of different sex: Cree uses the verb -môw- with animated nouns. He uses the verb -mîc- with inanimate nouns. To know which verb to use, you need to know the grammatical gender of the food that is consumed. The table below shows examples of overlap with objects of both sexes. Mistakes happen: As long as you seriously strive to be respectful of someone`s pronouns, small mistakes can be forgiven as long as you learn from them. Being aware of sexual pronouns means telling individuals that you are an ally. Human beings can be human beings and ask how to address them, because that is by nature their right.
In Cree, however, grammatical sex extends to verbs. The sex of the noun object determines the choice of words. (For now, we don`t know that each verb must match in number and person.) Since we don`t know the gender of the person who left their backpack, we use it to include all genders as means for that mysterious person. Not only is this respectful of people of all genders, but it also makes the sentence shorter and easier to say. In fact, almost all of us use this language regularly, without thinking about it. In recent times, many academic and popular publications have begun to accept the use of the pronoun „them“ as singular pronouns, meaning that writers use them to respond to singular topics to avoid sexist pronouns. Although the pronoun „she“ is only a plural pronoun in some style guides, APA encourages writers to use them as singular or plural pronouns, with the specific intention of embracing gender diversity. For gender grammatically, concordance is really important. Agreement occurs when a word changes shape relative to other words….