The drop-down menu gave me 4 choices: he/him, she/her, they/them and other. “None” was default, and unacceptable.
I clicked “other” and it gave me a blank field to fill out. I wrote “person”. But this tyranny of linguistic deficiency in modern English wouldn’t take “person”.
If I didn’t speak English at all, “person” is the only pronoun I’d know from the other languages I speak, all of which have no gender pronouns. She came home is the same as he came home.
There are thousands of languages, especially in Africa, that long got rid of this narrow he/she binary. They evolved their idea of human identity to primarily “person” (beyond gender, non-somatic). Don’t ask a colonized African about this; their brain will glitch.
I think European consciousness had also evolved this same wisdom until the years of brutal conquest (Holy Wars) forced the idea of superior vs inferior genders upon them. Their local languages were corrupted as they adopted dominant male deities and inferiorized their female beings. English became a language of domination. Languages of conquest are devolved, depleting, lost, angry and divisive when it comes to ideas of human identity.
There’s hope. At the rate at which modern English is building up new pronouns under Inclusive Language studies, I suspect this well-intentioned effort will soon get to that light-bulb moment when they discover that the human identity is really an endless spectrum-
-impossible to codify. Male, female and infinite in-betweens become just person. Then you won’t have cultures that think a she is worth less than a he on the job market and that kind of primitive thinking that shockingly exists in the 21st century. And I won’t have to be forced to pick a pronoun that will play against my best interests on a contractor form.
For now, I checked my little box of pronoun confinement and shipped it off to the land of Submit where the lords of bureaucracy pretend to dish out equal-opportunity to all persons.
