A great controversy has emerged recently in campus publications over the use of the gender neutral pronoun set ze/hir. This has manifested mainly in the Emerald’s obstinate refusal to use ze/hir and the Oregon Commentator’s outright hostility toward any sort of variance from a strict ideology of gender binaries. While the Emerald has merely provided a plethora of examples of dreadful
journalistic style, the Commentator has — inadvertently, I’m sure — demonstrated that ze/hir is a perfectly usable form.
For those who are not familiar with ze/hir, it is used rather than she/her or he/him/his for some people who identify outside of a man/woman dichotomy. Like he and she, ze has several forms that are not particularly easy for the average person to classify grammatically (he, she, ze; his, her, hir; him, her, hir; his, hers, hirs;
himself, herself, hirself), but anyone who can use she and he is capable of integrating ze. Listening to individuals who respect self-identification and pronoun preference makes this
quite clear, as they form sentences like “ze knows that’s hir job,”
“that book is hirs,” and so on. There is a pattern that is consistent and easy to produce.
A description of only the speech pattern of respectful individuals could be perceived as unbalanced; nevertheless, the school administration has shown an obvious inability to deal with gender identity based harassment, which is explicitly forbidden in the University’s nondiscrimination policy.
Fights about pronouns are nothing new. Most, if not all, English speakers use “they” as a third person singular gender neutral pronoun, even though grammarians attempting to reinforce class hierarchies through language have tried for hundreds of years to convince us that this is impossible. Lord Brougham’s Act, passed in 1850, limited the use of “he or she,” and instead included all people under the masculine pronoun. None of this really matters in terms of the structure of the language, though. The reality of what forms people actually produce determines language. Ze/hir is clearly possible for English speakers to use, and is luckily becoming more and more widespread in many communities.
Pira Kelly is a senior linguistics major