The other day I was asked how to refer, third hand, to a gender fluid person, without knowing how that person was currently experiencing their gender state. I said “English grammar already accommodates that”.
I may well have failed the assignment because I received a look of bafflement.
For other writers finding this topic confusing, I’m going to try and blow away the fog. Because, honestly, it’s really much more simple than dialogue in the gender discussions space (for want of a better term) makes it seem.
Most of the articles about writing on this site lean towards the assumption that the writing intent is fiction. But this topic is applicable in all writing: fiction, non-fiction, blogs, letters, emails, for business clients, for staff, for friends and for enemies…
The way to refer to someone, whether they be a notional person, or someone of unknown/unspecified gender, is basically the same in both writing and speech.
Modern English provides at least three basic words (and their variants): the pronouns who and they refer to someone in the third person, and you refers to someone in the second person.
Both ‘who’ and ‘they’ are used when the person in question is the subject of a sentence, i.e. that person is being described or is carrying out an action.
When the objective case is needed, (for example, when the person is being subjected to an action), ‘who’ becomes whom and ‘they’ becomes them.
The relationships between ‘who’ and ‘whom’ or between ‘they’ and ‘them’ are exactly the same as the relationships between ‘he’ and ‘him’, or ‘she’ and ‘her’.
If the possessive form is needed, you can use whose or their.
Now you may have noticed something about this advice that’s a little… basic. And my response to that is YES.
Yes, it is basic. That’s my whole point — we don’t need to overcomplicate this topic. The reason it feels basic to you is that this is all part of the framework of referring pronouns that has existed in English for a very long time, and it really, genuinely doesn’t matter if the person being referred to is cis-gender, transgender, non-binary, gender fluid, or genderless.
Because all of those pronouns are gender-indifferent, as are words like ‘somebody’ and ‘anybody’.
So, if you’re writing about a character whose gender is unknown, fluid, absent, or not aligned exactly with their biological sex at birth, don’t worry. Keep it simple. Use the basic pronouns that already exist in English!
Let’s get into the examples…
Examples for Understanding Usage in Writing
Who/whom/whose and they/them/their can be used in any situation where the identifying attributes of the person being referred to are unknown, unspecified, or do not matter to the context of the sentence.
This lack of knowledge might be because the person is notional. As an example of this, imagine a restaurant gives this guidance to their staff:
“If a customer arrives one hour before closing time, we will be unable to seat them.”
Here the customer is notional (i.e. we don’t yet know anything about the customer because they are a theoretical person and may or may not arrive at some future time). We can refer to this notional customer using ‘they’. Since we are talking about ‘seating’ that customer, which is a thing we ‘do to them’, the customer is the object of the verb and ‘they’ becomes ‘them’.
Let’s think about an example where a customer definitely wasn’t notional, they were real. They left behind a phone, but for whatever reason nobody working at the restaurant is quite sure whether the customer was male or female.
We have lots of options here. The most obvious one is that the customer’s gender is not really relevant to the scenario, so a gender-indifferent question could be asked as…
“Does anyone know the name of the customer this belongs to?”
But that’s not the point of this particular exercise, so instead let’s make it…
“Does anyone know who that customer was?”
And a more proactive approach from the staff might be…
“I’m sure if we chase after them, they will be thrilled to get their phone back.”
Specific Technique for Gender Fluid Characters
If you have included a gender fluid character in your work in progress, there are techniques you can use to give indications to the reader as to where that character currently falls on the gender spectrum.
I’m going to use my short novel A Storm to the Savage as an example for this section, to make the explanation easier. At the risk of sounding pushy, consider reading that volume if you’d like to see the entirety of how I handled the gender fluid character of Hywen.
In that story, the protagonist Marlay is an intelligence field agent. Her handler, Hywen, is gender fluid. That term is not used in the narrative, but as soon as Hywen is mentioned in the text Marlay effectively tells the reader how Hywen identifies. She states Hywen is “sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes neither, and sometimes both.”
It’s established shortly after that point that Hywen will often give small verbal cues as to who they are at that specific moment, and that someone who is acquainted with them will pick up on this while it is happening.
Thus, throughout the story, if Marlay is uncertain as to what gender Hywen currently identifies as, or if Marlay knows that the answer is “both male and female” or “neither”, Marlay refers to Hywen as they/them. Conversely if Hywen is giving those verbal cues, and Marlay is certain that Hywen currently identifies as either male or female, Marlay will refer to Hywen as he/him or she/her respectively, without making any additional comment on it in her dialogue.
And it’s not just Marlay who does this… so does the narrative text. The trick to this is to make it clear to the reader why the pronouns are changing, without literally saying it. It’s one of those situations where “show, don’t tell” can actually help. If you do not make any attempt to provide some kind of teaching structure when this situation first comes up you will probably confuse the reader, and their frustration may become attached to the character, causing skipped pages.
You may have noticed two paragraphs back I put the word ‘them’ in bold. Why? Because that was a practical example of the advice from the previous section — it was me describing a known person whose present gender identification is indeterminate, using only a basic English pronoun.
As an aside to the grammar part, the character of Hywen is not used as any kind of plot device. They are a hyper-competent, charismatic, and slightly renegade individual, which has nothing at all to do with their gender expression. In this story their gender identity simply is. It’s an attribute no more or less important than hair colour or handedness, and has no bearing on the value or importance of the character.
So why is Hywen gender fluid? Simple really: why should they not be. Let them be who they are.
Remember that one when anyone asks you the same question.
In Conversation
That’s all well and good for use in writing, I hear you say, but what about in real life? What about — GULP — in conversation?
Honestly, it’s much the same. The only real difference is that when you write, you can edit. So it’s much easier to come up with a sentence containing a gender-indifferent pronoun that doesn’t sound stilted and overly-formal. Doing it in speech, especially in a fast-moving conversation, may require forethought and/or practice. But not much, so be confident in yourself!
When you are talking to someone you know or believe to be transgender, non-binary, or genderless, if you aren’t sure how to refer to them, the simplest thing you can do is ask.
You’re not likely to cause offence with that question — it’s more likely that your desire to learn about that person’s identity, and to use their preferred pronoun/s, will be appreciated.
A Final Advisory
English reserves some words which are honorific, connoting respect for people which is not considered necessary for objects.
As an example, consider the past-tense words ‘hung’ and ‘hanged’.
We would write that we hung up our shirt to prevent creases. We would never write that a person was hung until they died. English reserves the word ‘hanged’ as the past tense for people who died by hanging. It is considered disrespectful and objectifying to refer to someone who died by hanging as being ‘hung’.
The modern use of the word ‘hung’ has only served to add weight to this convention.
In the same way, it is not appropriate to refer to people using words which usually relate to objects. You would not normally refer to a person as ‘it’. Even if, in the current context, you are using a de-personifying noun such as ‘customer’, one usually expects that a customer will in fact be a person. People are ordinarily referred to using person-reserved pronouns such as he, she, they, and who, rather than object-reserved pronouns like ‘it’.
There are few exceptions. A person might be referred to using ‘it’ if an author wishes to connote clearly that the character doing the talking is attempting to dehumanise the person they are talking about. I strongly recommend handling that well, so as not to be misunderstood.
Another scenario — common in horror and science fiction — is one in which a person has become something else, something inhuman. The convention of not calling people ‘it’ is so strongly ingrained in us that using the word here is a powerful way to communicate emphatically that all personhood is gone.
But for the narrative description of people who are people… never ‘it’.
The Outdoors Author 