Vancouver School Board makes a modern case for genderless pronouns

A move by the Vancouver School Board to be more inclusive in the way they address transgendered students has reawaken a long-simmering grammatical debate about how to address a person without labeling them with an unwanted gender.

And it may be time for the debate to finally find a resolution.

The school board voted this week to introduce a policy that allows the use of gender-absent pronouns in class. In other words, "xe, xem and xyr" will become acceptable replacements for he/she, him/her and his/hers.

The change was part of a policy to improve inclusivity for transgender students. The policy states that trans students should be addressed by the names and pronouns they prefer, that they can choose which group they join during sex-segregated activities and can use whichever bathroom they identify with.

The school board also states it will work to make single stall gender-neutral washrooms available.

According to the Vancouver Sun, the board voted in favour of the change after a "brief debate that sparked unrest among opponents of the policy who shouted 'dictator' and 'liar' at trustees as security guards and police officers watched from their posts at council doors."

The issue of how to address transgender and gender-ambiguous people has become a serious topic in recent years. In one recent case, a Toronto couple declared their intention to raise their baby without gender. How they would address the child became an issue – at one point they chose to flip a coin to neutralize the matter during a vacation to Cuba.

But the idea of establishing an English gender-neutral pronouns isn't new, the concept has been pushed for decades, even more than a century.

The University of Illinois wrote that Webster's Dictionary series included “thon” as a genderless pronoun as early as 1934, though the issue at the time was simply about simplifying the written language. Archives accessed by the university suggest similar debates were ongoing in the 1800s.

It was only in more recent years that the debate became a question of how to reference transgender and gender-ambiguous people.

Sweden, considered to be among the best countries in terms of gender equality, recently went through a similar debate after the pronoun "hen" was added its national encyclopedia as a gender-neutral alternative to he or she.

In 2011, a Swedish preschool banned teachers from referring to students as “boys” and “girls,” instead referring to everyone as friends and, yes, employing hen as a pronoun.

While thon and hen have had their day, there has been some debate about which set of gender-neutral pronouns should be implemented.

Xe, xem and xyr, referred to as the x-series, is only one of several sets of genderless pronouns being promoted by advocacy groups. Other collections include ne/nem/nir and ve/ver/vis. Others have rallied behind the pronoun "they" to be used to identify individuals as well as groups.

Earlier this year, Australia's highest court recognized the existence of a third "non-specific" gender, under very specific circumstances, though the ruling didn't weigh in on how those people should be referred.

And earlier this year, the White House was asked to legally recognize non-binary genders, though the petition failed to garner enough support to prompt an official response.

Considering the campaign for a gender-neutral pronoun has been ongoing for so long, it is unlikely that the Vancouver School Board's decision will be the straw that finally broke the camel's back.

Then again, students were taught not that long ago to use the male identifier in the case of mixed groups or uncertain situations. That notion is antiquated nowadays. And language is far more fluid than it has ever been before.

A study out of Baltimore found teenagers there had unintentionally established “yo” as a gender-neutral pronoun, and the New York Times once reported that the growth of shortened text speech, through the advent of Twitter, had placed a greater emphasis on finding an answer to the question.

Sure, we have decades of evidence that suggests genderless pronouns won’t stick. But today, the issue has been politicize like never before and our once-traditional view on language has been replaced with a more liberal one. We are willing to mould words and phrases to suit very specific circumstances.

If xe, xem and xyr were to every have a chance, now is the time.

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