When I teach, I try to decentre my students’ gender. I, like many other teachers, try to make it not matter whether my students are female, male, neither or both – to make it not matter for me, or for other students in the classroom. Because every time we mention that someone is a man, or a woman, we recreate this difference and act as if it matters when considering each others’ ideas. And usually we do so even without asking whether the student cares for these labels that we give them. I want to find ways in the classroom of expressing fewer assumptions about gender, and ways of de-emphasising it altogether.
Of course, our gender does matter in society in many ways, for instance because women’s contributions are often valued less. And the life experiences that this leads to should definitely be brought into classroom conversations. Also, whether I succeed in my aims is a different story. Making gender irrelevant, even if only for a moment, is a difficult thing to do. We have each piled up a lifetime of gender socialisation to the contrary. But precisely for these reasons, I try to level the playing field at least somewhat and direct our attention to what a student says, rather than to their gender.
In order to help myself and the other students a little, I am trying to teach myself to refer to each student using their name, or else the word ‘they’.
However, always using their name can lead to awkward situations.
I remember a conversation with a colleague about a student, that went something like this:
colleague: ‘How was her essay?’
– ‘Esmeralda’s essay was pretty good. Esmeralda managed to combine theory and case-study in a wonderful manner. Esmeralda introduces the theory very clearly, and then tells us about an experience Esmeralda had Esmeralda-self, that shows how we may have to modify the theory a little if it is to take into account the lives of Esmeralda and students like Esmeralda.’
By the second sentence, my colleague was no longer listening (I doubt that I was, myself) and gestured with a slightly concerned look on their face: ‘What are you doing?’
Thankfully, there is that English pronoun ‘they’.
But I also teach in Dutch. Dutch has the awkward property that there is no separate word for ‘they’. There is no distinct pronoun to refer to the third person in a ungendered manner. All there is, are the plural words ‘ze’ and ‘zij ‘, but these happen to be the same as the singular female pronouns! The only way of making clear you are using the ungendered words is by using them in combination with a plural verb.
And so I stumble on:
colleague: ‘And how did she do in classroom discussions?’
– ‘Oh, they were doing very well.’
In English, that sounds just fine, but in Dutch, it led my colleague to doubt my sanity once again:
‘No, I did not mean the rest of the students. Just Esmeralda herself!’
– ‘As I said: Esmeralda were making an excellent contributions [I totally lost it now]. They did not only say a very interesting things, but they also listened carefully to the others students, as well as to us, the teacher.’
If plurals confuse me now, of course speakers of Dutch will get used to them eventually, like people do in English. The real problem is that the distinction between female ‘zij’ and ungendered ‘zij’ is still not very clear in practice.
Other solutions have been tried by Dutch speakers. Use of the plural object word ‘them’, for instance:
– ‘Them has a few questions to their teacher.’
This word – ‘hen’ in Dutch – was voted pronoun of choice for non-binary people in a poll organised by the Dutch Transgender Network (TNN).
On a side note, this shows how similar innovations are coming from multiple directions at the same time. Trans activism and feminist activism (and the two overlap) diagnose closely related social issues and can fruitfully look for solutions together.
The Network’s news item on the poll suggests that for them, the pronoun ‘hen’ is expressly not meant to be used for (cis or trans) men or women: ‘Just like cisgender men and women, trans men and women prefer binary pronouns (he or she).’ But I do not know whether that reflects the opinion of all who participated in the poll, or all members in the Network. I think that even a ‘binary’ feminist – whether man or woman, cis or trans – might very well opt for a non-binary pronoun. I am therefore very grateful that the Network is coordinating this effort at language change. I believe that the results can be used for a more general feminist cause as well. Our language only starts to change once a critical mass has gathered, and through their communication with the media, the Network may well be creating quite some of this mass.
Back to my daily practice and ‘hen’.
The somewhat conservative language lover in me does lament that ‘hen’ would then be used for both object and subject in a sentence, which I find ugly:
‘Them sees them.’
… and laments that it is also the Dutch word for chicken: ‘hen’.
But I have decided to give it a try.
At first, it feels uncomfortable when I say it. Disrespectful even. As if I am mimicking someone else’s slang. But after a brief while, I already feel that discomfort wear away a little. That matches my general belief that even grown-ups can get used to new words very well, even to new pronouns. I only have to think of my own introduction to singular ‘they’ at the age of eighteen. This came after years of school- and BBC-trained insistence on ‘he’ or ‘she’. Yet within a few years’ time, I was accustomed to ‘they’.
Do read my colleague Marc van Oostendorp’s contrasting opinion in newspaper Trouw. Marc van Oostendorp reminds us that the human linguistic faculty is a conservative one: that it is hard for people to shift their use of function words like ‘she’ or ‘he’. And it is true, of course, that my own mental shift to ‘they’ took place within the English language, a language in which the new word was already considered normal by many other people.
Still, could we not create our own social pockets of normality? In our classrooms, our student essays, our blogs? Like I said, it only works once we gather enough critical mass for a specific solution. But once that’s there, that solution will no longer feel artificial, it will start to feel normal.
Marc themself has offered an alternative, one that is both democratic and linguistically informed: ‘vij/her/zaar’. (You can figure out how Marc got there if you know a little Dutch.) Though they did so jokingly, it sounds pretty good, and I would happily consider it.
As I would happily consider getting used to ‘hen’.
There is another obvious alternative in Dutch: using ‘that’ or ‘that one’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘she’.
‘Esmeralda might leave class early today. That has a vaccination appointment. or: That one has a vaccination appointment.’
As gender linguist Ingrid van Alphen has said before: ‘that’ does sound very demonstrative. And it may lead to confusion, because currently it is often used to refer to the object of a previous sentence, rather than its subject:
‘Esmeralda has a turtle. That one likes to go on walks’
Whereas previously it was clearly the turtle who liked walking, when using the suggested strategy this could just as well refer to Esmeralda. Still, it may be worth a try.
And how about simply leaving out the consonants of ‘hij’ and ‘zij’ and say ‘ij’?
Our own Radboud graduate Féline Visscher explored all the options in their thesis in 2017.
Debates about gender-neutral, ungendered and gender-inclusive pronouns have been going on for many decades, perhaps many centuries already. My aim in this column was not to add any new suggestions or arguments. Instead, I am hoping that we can transform some of all that thinking into practice. The Dutch language authority the Taalunie has created a gender-inclusivity committee that will, in years to come, advise us via their website. But why not start right here, right now, in our classrooms, our offices, our workplaces?
Are you a student on a Dutch-spoken course? Try out some innovative pronouns yourself, whether any of the above or others. And tell your teachers – tell me – which you would suggest for our everyday practice here in the classroom. Or for when us teachers praise your essays.
This column was originally written for the Women on the Timeline project, organised by students of the Radboud University Nijmegen, which can be found in Raffia Magazine, on Instagram: @w_o_t_t, and on Facebook: @WomenOnTheTimeline.
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