Tag Archives: grammar

Slaying the Gender Binary – with E!

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(The new novel, E Unum Pluribus, is narrated by Jack Shirley, an office intern whose gender behavior doesn’t always fit the expectations common in contemporary Amero-European culture.  Anticipating that Jack’s character may arouse comment, this is one in a series of posts sharing the author’s thoughts around those expectations.)

A previous post on this site* made the case that the best way to move beyond the simplistic convention of binary gender is not to start recognizing an array of new genders, each of which may desire its own names and terms – names and terms which could one day prove as dysfunctional as it would seem in this decade to call a group of people ‘beatniks’ because the males trim their beards into goatees and the females wear long, straight hair with blunt-cut bangs.

Rather than coming up with more ways to divide people from each other by slotting us into new groups, a more promising approach is to recognize and honor the deep truth that every individual is unique through use of gender-free nouns – person, human, individual – and gender-freeing pronouns as the initial and default assumption for all of us.

(I use the pronouns E, em and eir in my examples not because they are the only possibilities, but because I find them the most natural to speak.  I type the ‘E’ in upper case to make being referred to as ‘E’ feel every bit as respectful as referring to oneself using ‘I.’  Ultimately, of course, it is up to the entire community of English language users to decide what words become common, as it is with every other evolution of our shared language).

E is about everyone being an individual first and foremost, before they are a member of any group.

E means accepting that there will be some individuals who do not readily fit one’s own expectations for ‘man’ or ‘woman’ – or who actively choose not to aim for either of those expectations – and in those cases continuing to use gender-free language to facilitate respectful communication without any party feeling either dishonest or compelled against their principles.

E is about empowering every individual regardless of whether their appearance or behavior complies with anyone else’s idea of what they are ‘supposed to be.’  About treating persons equally regardless of how much they seem like us, or different from us.  About not assuming that the choices we make for ourselves would be better for them than their own choices. 

E is about treating all persons equally, regardless of their chromosomes, the reproductive cells their body puts out (or doesn’t), the secondary sex characteristics others see on them or how others may criticize those characteristics.

E isn’t about eliminating ‘man/men’ and ‘woman/women.’ It just means using those and their corresponding gendered pronouns only if/when it is clear that is how the individual in consideration wishes to be identified. 

E does nothing to prevent persons who wish to be recognized as ‘man’ or ‘women’ from using the multitude of possible cues to make that clear.  (Nor does it discourage persons making themselves recognizable as proud military veterans, as nerds or geeks or football fans or soccer moms; a prairie wife, Amish farmer, Orthodox Jew, Evangelical Christian, conservative, progressive, queer, jazzman, Deadhead or… the list goes on forever.) 

E is a reminder and a tool to treat any more specific identity as part of being an individual, a person, a human being; not a substitute.

E is for every one of us!  

*Previous post: Getting to Binary, https://robinandrew.net/2026/09/04/getting-to-binary/

P. S. – E Unum Pluribus is a speculative fiction exploring one way in which our current ‘culture wars’ may bring an end to the U. S. A., and what might come in its wake. With a thrilling plot driven by politics and economics (as well as gender, class, language and even the origins of faith) the novel is currently being serialized online and anyone can read it, at no cost, by navigating to thehome page of this wewbsite and selecting E Unum Pluribus from the top menu, or via this link: https://robinandrew.net/2026/01/01/e-unum-pluribus/

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Getting to Binary

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(The novel, E Unum Pluribus, is narrated by Jack Shirley, an office intern whose gender behavior doesn’t always fit the expectations common in contemporary Amero-European culture.  Anticipating that Jack’s character may arouse comment, this is one in a series of posts sharing the author’s thoughts around those expectations.)

The previous post on this website* – If Gender Ain’t Sex, What is it? – made the case that every individual human presents a unique array of gender cues in varying degrees, that those cues do not result directly from the specific anatomical features which are considered to determine the sex of each human, and that it is very common – and entirely ‘normal’ – that some individuals’ expression of some gender cues falls within a range casually regarded as indicating ‘the opposite sex.’

Why, then, do so many institutions and practices (at least in the English-speaking world) continue to observe the convention that every human belongs to one or the other of only two human genders, fixed at birth and mutually exclusive? 

One (generous) reason: framing any issue as a binary choice between opposites simplifies the viewer’s life, reduces a possibly baffling array of choices and generally avoids the work of treating unique instances differently to suit their differences. 

It would be quite possible, for example, to frame all discussion of daily timing purely in terms of the dark time and the light time.  I’ll meet you in the light, or I’ll meet you when its dark.  I woke up in the light or, or if it was earlier, I woke up in the dark. Perfectly true, but not very useful.  Even without resorting to clocks and timekeeping, it would be a whole lot more useful to refine things a little by adding words like sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk. Still, there would be instances where dark and light are not as consistent as all that.  A moonless night is clearly part of the dark time, but I’ve been out at 3 AM under a full moon and once my eyes adjusted, it was definitely more light than dark.  A great opportunity, in fact, for performing some ‘daytime’ activities before the sun gets too hot.

Speaking of a hot sun, how about the rainbow world of color?  Despite the ability of the human eye to distinguish between at least a million colors, artists and designers sometimes simplify them all and speak of just the ‘warm’ colors and the ‘cool’ ones.  Thousands of shades of red, yellow, orange and such are ‘warm,’ blues and greens and all the rest are ‘cool.’  No need to mess with scores of pesky names like carmine, maroon, egplant, ultramarine, cobalt, cadmium, peach, chartreuse and American Flag blue. So much more efficient, so much potential wasted.

Or age: one could define all persons up to and including some arbitrary age as ‘young’ (I’d pick 74, but you might choose another number…) and everyone over that as ‘old.’  Simple, convenient, with no gradations, no ‘sort of,’ but not very useful or true, given how differently individuals age and perform.  Intelligence?  Anyone with an IQ of 134 or higher is a ‘genius,’ anyone with a lower score is ‘dumb.’  Politics?  “Anyone to the ‘left’ of me is a communist, anyone not to the left of me is right” – in both senses…

The point is: you can turn any observable phenomenon into a binary by ignoring or defining-away all the things that make it more complex.  Any such simplification though, reduces options, misses possible benefits of more complete understanding and works against the inherent variability (freedom) of whatever or whoever is being binaried. Except in the very few cases where such brutal efficiency is truly required (separating the many species of wild mushrooms into ‘deadly’ and ‘non-deadly’ ones, for example), it leads mostly to WFA (waste, fraud and abuse).

Which is the case with our traditional binary gender system. Its survival depends upon us all ignoring the many differences between individual men and between individual women as well as the many characteristics which some or all men have in common with some or all women (and vice versa) in return for the simplicity of treating every person as a member of one or the other blunt and arbitrary category. Aside from the mental labor of constantly deciding what to see and what to pretend not to see, this process causes confusion and pain and reduces the achievement potential of all those individuals who do not closely conform to other persons’ ideas of what is ‘normal’ for a man or a woman. 

Another (and less-generous) reason:

As the examples in the third paragraph above suggest, whenever humans posit a binary distinction, it eventually results in one binary being considered the default; superior, preferable or, in any of a thousand other ways, the better of the two.

Day is preferable to night, to the extent that most of us choose to sleep through much of the latter.  Being young is widely preferred over being old, intelligence over its lack, and being right about anything is way better than being wrong (once one defines away the possibility of both sides being partly correct and partly mistaken). As to the human genders, libraries have been written and voices driven hoarse pointing out the many ways in which gender stereotypes and practices premiate ‘men’s’ activities and achievements over those of ‘women.’

Separate but equal is no more attainable an outcome in human gender than it ever was (or is) in relations between those considered to be of different races.

So…what’s your solution?

It is not at all difficult to imagine a language which recognizes the complexity of human gender.  A person born with a penis but who exhibits sufficient characteristics considered suitable for a woman might choose to be called a ‘male woman.’  A person born with a vagina but who exhibits characteristics considered to be inconsistent with womanhood might choose to be called a ‘feman.’  An intellectual who expends little energy on personal appearance, the search for a romantic partner or popular spectator sport culture in order to focus on their own scientific interests (think the character Sheldon, on TV’s the Big Bang Theory, for example, or the character of Amy from the same show), might self-identify first as a ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ and let others worry about the man or woman part.  I’ve heard individuals of either gonadotype refer to themselves as ‘queer’ in apparent rejection of gender-box-ification.

Easy as that may seem, such typing is too often imposed by others in order to ridicule or discriminate against gender offenders. It also runs the risk of multiplying genders endlessly or encouraging ‘identity group’ politics, a no-no in today’s culture-war environment.  Better to allow any such alternative gender identities to grow slowly and organically from the desires of their members and so facilitate pride in their alternative identification. Much as the use of ‘gay’ grew from that community’s coalescence, or as I’ve read some non-hetero female writers use ‘fem’ and ‘butch’ in non-derisive reference to particular members of their community.

Another approach – encouraging users of the English language to utilize non-gendered pronouns (E, em, eir, or similar) whenever an individual’s gender preference is not definitively known – can be a big step toward acknowledging and freeing up the infinite variety of human nature and gender expression – a good start on getting away from the binary.

P. S. – E Unum Pluribus is a speculative fiction exploring one way in which our current ‘culture wars’ may bring an end to the U. S. A., and what might come in its wake. With a thrilling plot driven by politics and economics (as well as gender, class, language and even the origins of faith) the novel is currently being serialized online and anyone can read it, at no cost, by navigating to home page of this website and selecting E Unum Pluribus from the top menu, or via this link: https://robinandrew.net/2026/01/01/e-unum-pluribus/

Please feel free to share this post as widely as you like

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Opening Image: author photograph of Torso of Standing Buddha, AD 618-906, Tang Dynasty, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK

*Previous post: https://robinandrew.net/2026/08/28/if-gender-aint-sex-what-is-it/

Novel Words – fictional pronouns for the actual future.

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John McWhorter published an Opinion piece recently* about the evolution of pronouns, with particular attention to a new character gaining attention among users of the Mandarin language (X也, shown in image above, combines features of the characters for both he and she, rather as some persons do). Along similar lines, a new novel, E Unum Pluribus, speculates a future American city/state called Confluence in which government edict directs all official communications to employ non-gendered pronouns. The novel’s events make clear that Confluence’s government has plenty of faults and weaknesses, but this one of its policies merits some consideration.

For generations the convention in English was to use ‘he/him/his’ as default and inclusive of all, regardless of their sex/gender. Appropriately, that has now been perceived as favoring male identity over female; simultaneously reflecting historic inequality and perpetuating it. Replacing all those instances with ‘he or she,’ ‘his or her,’ etc. is hardly workable, especially in spoken communications, and still carries a hint of misogyny by placing one gender ahead of the other, whereas ‘she/he’ risks offending insecurities on the other side of the identity coin.

Recent efforts to innovate ‘they’ as a singular pronoun for persons who choose to declare themselves non-binary run aground first on its pre-existing function as plural, generating confusion where they intend clarity. That usage also seems to open the door to a trickle of additional new pronouns as various groups or orientations demand similar recognition; one need only read the snarky online critiques of how LGBT has grown to LBGTQIA2S+ to know that is not a path to tolerance so much as a guarantee of further friction. Worst, in this opinion, ‘they’ singular requires persons who prefer not to be stereotyped as either ‘he’ or ‘she’ to state that publicly, thereby outing themselves and very possibly inviting prejudice, at least at this point in our societal evolution.

The fictional founders of Confluence have taken another approach; directing official communications to use ‘e/em/eir’ for all individuals. This treats everyone with equal respect and does not require the clunky ‘my pronouns are…’ , which can itself incite prejudices. The specific form, ‘e,” ‘em,’ and ‘eir’ are brief and efficient, similar enough to other pronouns that they quickly feel familiar but with sufficient difference to avoid confusion**.

By applying equally to all possible personal preferences ‘e’ equalizes all in one swoop while tacitly expressing the truth that for virtually all public or official interactions there is no proper reason to indicate what genitalia an individual bears or with whom they choose to become intimate. Those are – and should remain – irrelevant.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, by the way, modern English already has gender neutral pronouns – ‘they’ does not presume the gender of a group or any of its individuals. ‘It’ can be used for all objects – unlike French, say in which some nouns require feminine constructions and other nouns masculine, despite the objects having no actual sexual function or accoutrements. Most prominently, ‘I’ is the same for any individual regardless of sex, gender or other characteristic. It is really only in the second person singular that our language’s evolution has codified an unfortunate and outdated discrimination.

In the world of E Unum Pluribus, that governmental edict for official communications also does not mean ‘e’ is used by everyone all the time. Non-official conversations use gendered pronouns wherever a subject’s preference has become clear, sticking to gender-neutral when an individual’ presentation is itself gender neutral. As in real life, casual usage and common courtesy have the final word in how language evolves over time.

(For what it’s worth, future posts on this site may selectively incorporate ‘e/em’eir’ pronouns to explore just how functional they are – or are not.)

*“This Novel Word Speaks Volumes About How an Entire Language Works” N. Y. Times online edition, 2026-01-22

** E Unum Pluribus does not claim to have invented the ‘e/em/eir’ construct.  Variations on what are sometimes called ‘Spivak pronouns’ have been noted at least as far back as the late 19th-century.

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a tale of murder and conspiracy set a decade or so in our future in one of many small sovereignties sprung up in wake of the USA’s self-destruction. The novel explores multiple themes – language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its depiction of how much we all stand to lose if we continue to retreat into factions which each act only for their own needs and interests.

The manuscript is available in six instalments, starting at:

E Unum Pluribus

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