Well, I probably ought to start with my backlog! Between our traditional Family Christmas Book Exchange and my birthday, it’s pretty common for me to have a lot of books on the “next to read” pile on my bedside table, this time of year1.
I’m enjoying Time’s Mouth, but it’s taking some time to enjoy fully. Note that my previous paragraph may be misleading: not all of these books were (recent) gifts, and not
all the books I recently received as gifts are shown here. Trust nothing: or all you know an AI made the entire image based
on the prompt “eclectic pile of books Dan might like”.
Aside from that: a book that I’d really like to re-read2
is Antkind by Charlie Kaufman.
Antkind is quite something. Here’s a synopsis: film critic “B.”, its protagonist, discovers an independent filmmaker who’s spent literally his entire life producing a film with
a three-month runtime. The filmmaker agrees to show it to B., but only if thon3 watches it in a single sitting: the film is scripted to provide opportunities for breaks for sleep, toilet
trips, eating and so on. B. watches it and discovers to be a masterpiece and the most impressive piece of art thon has even seen.
In local news, a man was killed today when he was crushed to death by a book after he fell asleep reading it.
Despite the arduous effort required to watch the film, B. decides that it’s a sufficiently important and significant piece of work, with great artistic merit, that it needs to be seen
by the world!
Thon takes the print for distribution… and then promptly loses the entire thing in a fire. All but one frame, with which – with the addition of thon’s own memories of their single
viewing of the movie – B. attempts to reconstruct and recreate. The process drives thon somewhat insane, and the story begins (continues?) to be told by an delusional and unreliable
narrator in a an increasingly surreal-to-the-point-of-absurdity setting.
Somehow, despite everything else that might make this book confusing, the biggest headscratcher for me was this footnote reference. There are no footnotes nor endnotes in the entire
volume. It’s the only such reference in the entire story. It could be a printing error or the result of some editorial cuts… but it appears in a section about the impossibility of
perfectly recreating a piece of art, which makes such an “mistake” strangely fitting: is it a deliberate piece of meta-humour?
I remember getting to the bit set in the far future, where there’s a war between the employees of a fast-food chain and an endlessly replicating army of robot replicas of Donald Trump…
and as I reached that part of the story I thought to myself… wait, how did I get here? Every step along the way felt like it was part of the same narrative, but if you compare
what’s happening right now to what happened at the start of the story then you wouldn’t believe for a moment that they were in the same book.
It’s truly bizarre and I’m looking forward to my re-read of it4…
just as soon as I can face lugging the mammoth tome off the shelf.
1 Gotta admit, this was a convenient blog post to be writing from bed during a Saturday
morning lie-in.
2 I keep promising myself I’ll re-read Antkind some day, and possibly blog
more-deeply about my thoughts on it, but it’s been sitting on my bookshelf gathering dust since I first read it, shortly after its release. It’s too heavy to comfortably read in bed,
is part of the problem! Maybe I could get the ebook version…
4 But I’ll probably stop at reading it twice, unlike the protagonist who would, based on
thon’s description of their usual film review process, read it seven times in several different ways (forward, backward, etc.).
Prior to 2018, Three Rings had a relatively simple approach to how it would use pronouns when referring to volunteers.
If the volunteer’s gender was specified as a “masculine” gender (which particular options are available depends on the volunteer’s organisation, but might include “male”, “man”, “cis
man”, and “trans man”), the system would use traditional masculine pronouns like “he”, “his”, “him” etc.
If the gender was specified as a “feminine” gender (e.g .”female”, “woman”, “cis women”, “trans woman”) the system would use traditional feminine pronouns like “she”, “hers”, “her” etc.
For any other answer, no specified answer, or an organisation that doesn’t track gender, we’d use singular “they” pronouns. Simple!
This selection was reflected
throughout the system. Three Rings might say:
They have done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was hers.
Would you like to sign him up to this shift?
Unfortunately, this approach didn’t reflect the diversity of personal pronouns nor how they’re applied. It didn’t support volunteer whose gender and pronouns are not
conventionally-connected (“I am a woman and I use ‘them/they’ pronouns”), nor did it respect volunteers whose pronouns are not in one of these three sets (“I use ze/zir pronouns”)… a
position it took me an embarrassingly long time to fully comprehend.
So we took a new approach:
The New Way
From 2018 we allowed organisations to add a “Pronouns” property, allowing volunteers to select from 13 different pronoun sets. If they did so, we’d use it; failing that we’d continue to
assume based on gender if it was available, or else use the singular “they”.
The process has some further complexities to cover the fact that we say “they are” but “he is“, but this broadly covers it.
Let’s take a quick linguistics break
Three Rings‘ pronoun field always shows five personal pronouns, separated by slashes, because you can’t necessarily derive one from another. That’s one for each of
five types:
the subject, used when the person you’re talking about is primary argument to a verb (“he called”),
object, for when the person you’re talking about is the secondary argument to a transitive verb (“he called her“),
dependent possessive, for talking about a noun that belongs to a person (“this is their shift”),
independent possessive, for talking about something that belongs to a person potentially would an explicit noun (“this is theirs“), and the
reflexive (and intensive), two types which are generally the same in English, used mostly in Three Rings when a person is both the subject
and indeirect of a verb (“she signed herself up to a shift”).
Let’s see what those look like – here are the 13 pronoun sets supported by Three Rings at the time of writing:
Subject
Object
Possessive
Reflexive/intensive
Dependent
Independent
he
him
his
himself
she
her
hers
herself
they
them
their
theirs
themselves
e
em
eir
eirs
emself
ey
eirself
hou
hee
hy
hine
hyself
hu
hum
hus
humself
ne
nem
nir
nirs
nemself
per
pers
perself
thon
thons
thonself
ve
ver
vis
verself
xe
xem
xyr
xyrs
xemself
ze
zir
zirs
zemself
That’s all data-driven rather than hard-coded, by the way, so adding additional pronoun sets is very easy for our developers. In fact, it’s even possible for us to apply an additional
“override” on an individual, case-by-case basis: all we need to do is specify the five requisite personal pronouns, separated by slashes, and Three Rings understands how to use
them.
Writing code that respects pronouns
Behind the scenes, the developers use a (binary-gendered, for simplicity) convenience function to produce output, and the system corrects for the pronouns appropriate to the volunteer
in question:
<%=@volunteer.his_her.capitalize %>
account has been created for
<%=@volunteer.him_her %>
so
<%=@volunteer.he_she %>
can now log in.
The code above will, dependent on the pronouns specified for the volunteer @volunteer, output something like:
His account has been created for him so he can now log in.
Her account has been created for her so she can now log in.
Their account has been created for them so they can now log in.
Eir account has been created for em so ey can now log in.
Etc.
We’ve got extended functions to automatically detect cases where the use of second person pronouns might be required (“Your account has been created for
you so you can now log in.”) as well as to help us handle the fact that we say “they are” but
“he/she/ey/ze/etc. is“.
It’s all pretty magical and “just works” from a developer’s perspective. I’m sure most of our volunteer developers don’t think about the impact of pronouns at all when they code; they
just get on with it.
Is that a complete solution?
Does this go far enough? Possibly not. This week, one of our customers contacted us to ask:
Is there any way to give the option to input your own pronouns? I ask as some people go by she/them or he/them and this option is not included…
You can probably see what’s happened here: some organisations have taken our pronouns property – which exists primarily to teach the system itself how to talk about volunteers – and are
using it to facilitate their volunteers telling one another what their pronouns are.
What’s the difference? Well:
When a human discloses that their pronouns are “she/they” to another human, they’re saying “You can refer to me using either traditional feminine pronouns (she/her/hers etc.)
or the epicene singular ‘they’ (they/their/theirs etc.)”.
But if you told Three Rings your pronouns were “she/her/their/theirs/themselves”, it would end up using a mixture of the two, even in the same sentence! Consider:
She has done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was theirs.
That’s some pretty clunky English right there! Mixing pronoun sets for the same person within a sentence is especially ugly, but even mixing them within the same page can cause
confusion. We can’t trivially meet this customer’s request simply by adding new pronoun sets which mix things up a bit! We need to get smarter.
A Newer Way?
Ultimately, we’re probably going to need to differentiate between a more-rigid “what pronouns should Three Rings use when talking about you” and a more-flexible, perhaps
optional “what pronouns should other humans use for you”? Alternatively, maybe we could allow people to select multiple pronoun sets to display but Three Rings would
only use one of them (at least, one of them at a time!): “which of the following sets of pronouns do you use: select as many as apply”?
Even after this, there’ll always be more work to do.
For instance: I’ve met at least one person who uses no pronouns! By this, they actually
mean they use no third-person personal pronouns (if they actually used no pronouns they wouldn’t say “I”, “me”, “my”, “mine” or “myself” and wouldn’t
want others to say “you”, “your”, “yours” and “yourself” to them)! Semantics aside… for these people Three Ringsshould use the person’s name rather than a
pronoun.
Maybe we can get there one day.
Three Rings is already capable of supporting people who use no pronouns, but we don’t yet have a user interface to help them specify this! Maybe it’d look like this?
But so long as Three Rings continues to remain ahead of the curve in its respect for and understanding of pronoun use then I’ll be happy.
Our mission is to focus on volunteers and make volunteering easier. At the heart of that mission is treating volunteers with
respect. Making sure our system embraces the diversity of the 65,000+ volunteers who use it by using pronouns correctly might be a small part of that, but it’s a part of it, and I for
one am glad we make the effort.
I had a bit of a realisation, this week. I’ve long sometimes found it especially challenging to maintain a mental map of the preferred personal pronouns of people who don’t use “he”,
“she”, or “they”. Further than that, it seemed to me that personal pronouns beyond these three ought to be mostly redundant in English. “Them” has been well-established for over six centuries as not just a plural but a singular pronoun, I thought: we don’t need
to invent more words.
Over time – even within my lifetime – it’s become noticeably more-commonplace to hear the singular “they”/”them” in place of
“he or she”/”him or her”, or single binary pronouns (e.g. when talking about professions which have long been dominated by a particular gender). So you might hear somebody say:
“I will make an appointment to see a doctor and ask them about my persistent cough.”
This seemed a perfectly viable model.
It seemed to me that “they” was a perfect general-purpose stand in for everybody who was well-served by neither “he” nor “she”.
I’ll stress, of course, that I’ve always been fully supportive of people’s preferred pronouns, tried to use them consistently, ensured they can be
represented in software I’ve implemented (and pressured others over their implementations, although that’s as-often related to my individual identity), etc. I’ve just struggled to see the need for new singular third-person pronouns like ze,
ey, sie, ve, or – heaven forbid – the linguistically-cumbersome thon, co, or peh.
I’d put it down to one of those things that I just don’t “get”, but about which I can still respect and support anyway. I don’t have to totally grok something in order to understand
that it’s important to others.
Hang on, there’s a problem with this model.
But very recently, I was suddenly struck by a comprehension of one of the reported problems with the use of the singular “they” to refer to people for whom the traditional binary
pronouns are not suitable. I’ve tried to capture in the illustration above the moment of understanding when I made the leap.
The essence of this particular problem is: the singular “they” already has a meaning that is necessarily incompatible with the singular “they” used of a nonbinary
subject! By way of example, let’s revisit my earlier example sentence:
“I will make an appointment to see a doctor and ask them about my persistent cough.”
Here, I’m saying one of two things, and it’s fundamentally unclear which of the two I mean:
I do not know which doctor I will see, so I do not know the pronoun of the doctor.
I will see the same doctor I always see, and they prefer a nonbinary pronoun.
The more widespread the adoption of “they” as the third person singular for nonbinary people becomes, the more long-winded it is to clarify specifically which of the above
interpretations is correct! The tendency to assume the former leads to nonbinary invisibility, and the (less-likely in most social circles) tendency to assume the latter leads to
misgendering.
Okay, so I guess we do need a third-party singular pronoun that isn’t “they”.
The difference is one of specificity. Because the singular “they” is routinely used non-specifically, where the subject’s preferred pronouns are unknown (as with the doctor, above),
unknowable (“somebody wrote this anonymous message; they said…”), or a placeholder (“when I meet somebody, I shake their hand”), it quickly produces
semantic ambiguities when it’s used to refer to specific nonbinary individuals. And that makes me think: we can do better.
That said: I don’t feel able to suggest which pronoun(s) ought to replace the question mark in the diagram above. But for the first time, I’m not convinced that it ought to be “they”.
Ultimately, this changes nothing. I regularly use a diversity of different singular pronouns (he”, “she”, and “they”, mostly) based on the individual subject and I’ll continue to
acknowledge and respect their preferences. If you’ve you’ve told me that you like to be referred to by the singular “they”, I’ll continue to do so and you’re welcome and
encouraged to correct me if I get it wrong!
But perhaps this new appreciation of the limitations of the singular “they” when referring to specific individuals will help me to empathise with those for whom it doesn’t feel
right, and who might benefit from more-widespread understanding of other, newer personal pronouns.
(and on the off chance anybody’s found their way to this page looking for my pronouns: I’m not particularly fussy, so long as you’re consistent and don’t confuse your
audience, but most people refer to me with traditional masculine pronouns he/him/his)
