"He/she/they/ze" Response

     I agree with Dembroff and Wodak's radical claim that we have a negative duty not to use any gender-specific pronouns to refer to anyone. The arguments presented in their paper made sense and they convinced me to agree with their conclusion. I am not really sure how to explain how the argument convinced me, without just resorting to just mapping out the logic of the argument, and that seems uninteresting and impersonal, so I think my time would be better spent discussing my biggest takeaways.

    This paper really made me question why we use gendered pronouns in the English language at all. Prior to reading, although I recognized that intentionally referring to someone by the wrong set of pronouns was disrespectful, I thought that use of gendered pronouns in conversation was fairly innocuous. After reading the paper, however, I realized that it is not the case that the use of gendered pronouns are innocuous (as using the wrong set of them can be deeply offensive and disrespectful), but rather the use of them is simply unremarkable. What I mean by that is I have been using gendered pronouns my entire life, they were simply there in the same way that the sky is simply there. I never put any thought into them, let alone considered their power to hurt people. This article helped me realize that since binary pronouns hurt people (and I am using hurt as a catchall for many things including offend, make feel excluded/other, force people to out their identities in certain situations, etc.), we should do away with them. 

    As I mentioned before I agreed with the authors' radical claim, which means that I believe we should adopt another pronoun that does not presuppose a person's gender. This is an idea that from my own experience it seems like people have trouble getting on board with. I know in my high school the idea of replacing he and she with another word such as "ze" was often made the subject of fun and, often offensive, memes. But why that was the case never really made sense to me. Any objection to it that I heard was often just an appeal to the tradition of the English language. "We have gendered pronouns and that is how it was, how it is, and how it will be." These arguments fail to take into account that language is not set in stone, it can evolve over time. It also fails to realize that foregoing gendered pronouns is already allowed by the rules of our language. What I mean is I could replace every utterance of the words "he" and "her" with "that person," and similarly I could replace "his"and "hers" with "that person's" and it would be perfectly acceptable, perhaps barring a few exceptions that I can not think of. So what if we simply mutually agreed to come up with a new word that meant "that person" and implement it into our language in an effort to simplify the way we identify people using pronouns without presupposing their gender? In essence that is what "ze" is meant to be. It is a harmless solution to the problems that come with the use of gendered pronouns, or at least any harm it does bring is outweighed by the harm that our current pronouns bring. 

    So I we should adopt the use of "ze," or perhaps some other word that will replace gendered pronouns, while not drastically increasing the versatility of the letter "Z" in scrabble.