Gender neutral language in English: Difference between revisions
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| Person of any age | | Person of any age | ||
| Being, human, human being, individual, one, person, somebody, someone | | Being, human, human being, individual, one, person, somebody, someone | ||
| Female | | Female, women and girls in all their diversity | ||
| Male | | Male, men and boys in all their diversity | ||
| Enby | | Enby | ||
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Revision as of 22:22, 11 April 2025
Gender neutral language in English is much easier than gender neutral language (also called gender inclusive language) in many other languages, because its grammatical gender is less pervasive than in other languages where adjectives and verbs have masculine or feminine forms. See the main article on gender neutral language for general reasons to use neutral language, common problems in using it, and its use for nonbinary people.
History
Although English has grammatical gender, it's only a vestige of what it once had. Old English once had grammatical gender for inanimate objects, but this practice started to disappear in the 700s, and vanished in the 1200s. The population of England at that time spoke several languages, and the same inanimate objects had different genders in those different languages. They may have stopped using that part entirely just to make it simpler. English stopped using grammatical gender for inanimate objects, but it still uses grammatical gender for people and personal pronouns.[1] There is enough to make a challenge for nonbinary people who don't want gendered language to be used for them.
Gender-neutral language has become common in English today largely thanks to the pioneering work by feminists Casey Miller and Kate Swift. During the 1970s, they began the work of encouraging inclusive language, as an alternative to sexist language that excludes or dehumanizes women. Miller and Swift wrote a manual on gender-neutral language, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing (1980). Miller and Swift also proposed a set of gender-neutral pronouns, tey, although they later favored singular they, or he or she.[2] There are several books on gender-neutral English, such as Rosalie Maggio's book The Nonsexist Word Finder: A Dictionary of Gender-Free Usage (1989).
Words and alternatives
This is a list of both standard (dictionary) and non-standard (created) terms and pronouns to include nonbinary identities. It should be noted that while some are genderless or third gender, others are multigender. Terms will be marked with the implied gender identity when possible.
Pronouns
See main article at English neutral pronouns.
Titles
For gender-neutral replacements of titles like Ms and Mr, see main article at Gender neutral titles.
Honorifics
Ma'am/Sir
Standard English doesn't have a gender neutral word that's used in the same way as Ma'am and Sir — a formal form of address used in some places to show respect, and commonly required for use by customer service professionals. People have created some words to fill this lexical gap, but they rema