He or She (or It)

Are hypothetical persons male, female or both?

There is no problem: the political correctors need only leave things alone.

Are we male or female, hypothetically speaking? Present-day sensibilities demand 'inclusiveness'. In his good (sic) writing guide , Richard Goodman [1] bestows the following advice:

When we read a poem, part of us is asking, is the poet truthful here? Is he or she courageous? Is the poet being him- or herself? Is he or she sincere? Is he or she compassionate? Does he or she have a sense of pity? Is he or she openhearted? [. . . ] Is he or she sensuous? Funny? In other words, does the poet admit fully and openly his or her humanity? [. . .] A great writer will have such control over his or her composition that he or she will force you, the reader, to read it - and hear it - precisely the way he or she wants you to.

And so if the poet writes from the heart, if the poet writes with integrity, then he may well imbue very similar feelings in the reader. This seems to be what Mr. Goodman means by his non-offending, non-gendered, non-sexist advice. Yet I find passages like these a frustrating read: it is like trying to eat, while madly batting away the flies that repeatedly settle on your food. These flies, Latin name Politicus correctus, leave tiny 'his or her' footprints all over contemporary English. If a writer restricts his or her hypotheticals to males, then he or she will outrage his or her reader's sensibilities.

Of course, the flies might well land after the manuscript has left the author's hands. I have experienced this for myself. My own book briefly considered the traffic pollution to which the hypothetical occupant of a motor vehicle might be exposed. And so my original manuscript said this.

A typical person spends six per cent of his time inside a motor vehicle, and this accounts for twenty-five per cent of his total exposure to pollution.

But after the proof-reader had crawled over my manuscript, I found this:

A typical person spends six per cent of his or her time inside a motor vehicle, and this accounts for twenty-five per cent of his or her total exposure to pollution.

On seeing this, I felt the way you do on entering a lavatory to find the previous occupant has not used the toilet brush. Well, I restored my grammar and then despatched the manuscript to the type-setter. But when I received a copy of my freshly printed book, I found this:

A typical person spends six per cent of his/her time in a motor vehicle, and this accounts for twenty-five per cent of his/her total exposure to pollution.

Pace Dr. Johnson, there is no politically-correct precedency between a conjunction and a backslash, any more than there is between a louse and a flea.

This experience puts me in illustrious company. In one of his books, Richard Dawkins [2] imagines an alien expedition to Earth, and their bug-eyed equivalent of Charles Darwin. Perhaps planet Earth will be 'her Galapagos', he originally wrote. This playful remark, that one of the greatest thinkers on an alien planet might, actually, be female, was ruined by the straight-laced copy editor: 'his or her Galapagos', he or she insisted.

Why does the construction 'his or her' irritate me so much? It is stylistically clumsy; it is prissy-minded; it weakens the point; it distracts the reader; the Y chromosome is, moreover, wholly irrelevant to the argument.

My strongest objection though requires some elucidation; for it concerns fox hunting. Do you know, I have never heard hunt saboteurs denounce vixen hunting. The truth is, 'fox' means the whole species, male and female together; but it also means the male alone. In other words, the same word carries two meanings. When I write 'fox hunting', I subject no vixens to Canidaen sexism. Foxes are legally protected, males and females alike. Unlike foxes, however, Politicus correctus should be hunted as a civic duty - not matter whether he or she is male; or whether he or she is female.

Does the English language lack a non-gendered pronoun, other than 'it'? Actually, 'he' has two meanings: the male of the species; and a foreshortened version of 'he or she'. In this second, 'she' is simply subsumed by 'he'; which is then neuter. That words may carry two meanings, according to context, is incomprehensible to the prissy-minded politically-correct. But this duality is common in our language. A fallen soldier and a fallen woman have both fallen, but they have fallen differently.

To avoid these problems, some writers redefine the pronoun 'their', extending it to one person alone. 'The driver of this vehicle must use their own initiative.' 'Will the person who dropped their wallet please go to security.' We have here an amusing irony; for in another sense multiple personalities are roundly scoffed at. 'We are not amused', said Queen Victoria. 'We are a grandmother', said Margaret Thatcher. 'Their' is now singular; but 'we' can only be plural.

As a student, I wrote an essay on some abstruse aspect of political philosophy, referring to a hypothetical person as 'he'. My tutor underlined the offending pronoun, and in the margin wrote: 'use inclusive language'. Are marks deducted for not toeing the party line? While tutors rightly correct a student's grammar, spelling and punctuation, 'he or she' is quite different; for this is political policing. On what authority do our language Stasi operate? Act of Parliament? No. Political correctors are self-appointed guardians of public sensibilities. They are modern-day Mary Whitehouses.

There is also a curious inconsistency: to presuppose maleness is nowadays Verboten, whereas for reasons I cannot ascertain, to presuppose femaleness is considered thoroughly acceptable: I see this frequently. A physics textbook [3], for example, is riddled with examples of hypothetical females. Here are just three of them.

Imagine a freely floating astronaut. The astronaut will begin to drift away from you, and may rotate as she does so. However, if the force is applied along a particular line it is possible to make her drift in a straight line without rotating.

When a doctor measures your blood pressure as '120 over 80' she is referring to the ratio of the maximum (systolic) to minimum (diastolic) pressure.

Draw free-body diagrams for each of the following and describe their motion in each case [. . .] a parachutist at the moment her parachute opens.

As child, I learned that 'God made man in His image'. But recently a theologian told us that 'God made people in God's image'. It is amusing in a tragicomic way, to see the Church of England tying itself into knots, trying to avoid the supposedly male pronoun for God. You see, women - pour souls - might otherwise have their feelings hurt. I take the opposite line to the political correctors: it is patronising to suggest that women lack the intellectual apparatus for abstract thinking. This very complaint was, in fact, made by a female reader in the letters pages of The Author [4].

I am willing to meet the political correctors half way: let us have one pronoun or the other, not both; let the writer decide; it is purely up to her. This is a sensible and sane policy, long practised by the Times Literary Supplement, a periodical I know I can read safely and without exasperation.

Like all muddled ideologies, political correctness lacks self-consistency. On the one hand, male pronouns must never subsume femaleness: we now have 'he or she', not 'he'. On the other hand, male nouns must subsume femaleness: 'actor' is neuter; 'actress' is forbidden. The dual meaning of 'man' is similarly outlawed: in the 1960s, Captain James T. Kirk went with courageous grammar, 'where no man has gone before'; but in the 1980s, Captain Jean-Luc Pilchard went effetely, 'where no-one has gone before'. The same scriptwriters, however, took 'sir' - an exclusively male noun - and redefined it, to denote superior officers of either sex. Muddledheadedness is a cornerstone of political correctness.

Perhaps female chauvinists should cease writing lady luck, mother tongue, mother of invention, motherland and Mother Nature. Oh yes, and schoolboy error. But if any man is offended by these terms, then she should know better.

References

1.     The Soul of Creative Writing, Goodman R., Transaction Publishers (2008; p.11, p. 56).

2.     A Devil's Chaplain, Dawkins R. (2003, p.79).

3.     Advanced Physics, Adams S., Allday J., Oxford University Press (2000, p.57).

4.     The Author, 'To the Editor', Spring, 2002.

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