While gender-neutral pronouns have risen in popularity over the last few years, the trans and nonbinary communities have embraced and advocated for their use since the late 20th century. But their existence, and debates around their necessity, have long predated public advocacy from trans communities. Gender-neutral pronouns have been coined and discussed publicly for centuries.
What is the history of nonbinary pronouns?
Since the mid-1800s, dozens of gender-neutral pronoun alternatives have been proposed, advocated for, adopted, and fallen out of favor. Few have caught on widely — but just because you might be seeing xe/xem or ze/zir for the first time today doesn’t mean they’re new.
Critical discussions about the use of and need for gender-neutral pronouns date back to the late 18th century. According to Dennis Baron, a professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He or She, gender-neutral pronouns were discussed frequently among local newspapers and periodicals starting in 1789.
“[‘They’ is] a natural way to use a pronoun to refer to someone whose gender is unknown or irrelevant,” says Baron. “In some cases it was used to conceal the gender of the person they were talking about because they were gossiping or because revealing the person’s identity could put them in danger.” Charles Dickens used they to anonymize gender in The Pickwick Papers, for example.
The singular they was common until the Victorian era, when gender-neutral pronouns defaulted to he as encompassing both the masculine and feminine. People recognized the limits of he and argued that it was insufficient — anyone who read he would immediately think of men, and not women.
“The pronoun ‘hir’ was coined in 1920 by a newspaper in California, The Sacramento Bee,” Baron explains. “They tried using that off and on from the 1920s through to the 1940s.” “Ze,” often assumed to be a more recently coined term, was created by “a writer identified only as J. W. L.” in 1864, Baron writes. In 1858, an American composer named Charles Crozat Converse invented the pronoun “thon” (short for “that one”), which even made it into well-regarded dictionaries — Funk and Wagnalls’ Standard Dictionary in 1903, and Webster’s Second New International Dictionary in 1934 — but never caught on in popular usage. What’s clear is that these pronouns have a long history within languages, one that’s still evolving today.
How do I conjugate and use gender-neutral pronouns in speech and writing?
There are tons of gender-neutral pronouns out there, and certainly too many to exhaustively list in this guide. Here are a few common ones; note that there are variants and different ways to spell many of these pronouns, so what you see here may not match the gender-neutral pronouns you might see in use by others.