These days, it is increasingly common to introduce yourself with your pronouns, ask for somebody else’s pronouns, or make your pronouns a permanent part of your email signature. In New Hampshire, gender non-binary people can get an X classification on their driver’s license as a gender indicates, rather than M or F. 

To be clear, non-binary people have existed across cultures as long as the male and female gender have. In English, it is easy enough to use them/them, ze/zir, or other gender-neutral pronouns, but what about other languages, especially those that are heavily gendered or rooted in the gender binary?

I am not an expert in romance languages (other than my native English), but linguists are finding ways to get around the gendered nature of some words and pronouns. For example, in Spanish, rather than saying Latino or Latina, replacing the end vowel with an x makes the word gender-neutral: Latinx. It is pronounced the way it’s spelled: Latín-ex. In French, pronouns like iel or ille are contractions of the male and female pronouns. Therefore, not all gender non-conforming people use this term because it still implies the binary. According to the nonbinary wiki, those who fall outside of the binary prefer pronouns like ul, ol, or ael.

Chinese, the language I study, is a unique case. It is not a gendered language like many western languages, but only two pronouns are used to refer to humans as either male or female: ta 他 (male) and ta 她 (female). The only other non-gendered pronoun is ta 它 (it). But as you can see, although the written characters meaning male and female are different, the pronunciation is exactly the same. In Chinese speech, it is usually impossible to tell the gender of the person you’re referring to without other indicators. That’s why you might hear people whose first language is Chinese using he/she interchangeably in English.

It’s also why those in the Chinese LGBTQ+ community have started using the romanization ta (also known as pinyin), rather than using a character at all, to refer to gender-neutral people. For example, if I wanted to say “they are my friend,” written Chinese would look like this: 

“Ta是我的朋友。”

I encourage you to find out the correct gender-neutral pronouns for whatever language you are studying and get to know them well. Learn how to ask for someone else’s pronouns in your language, and learn how to introduce your own.

Jordyn Haime