On January 7, 2025, the National Labor Relations Board uploaded an Inclusive Writing Guide. The new administration, scrubbing federal websites of anything that hints of DEI, sometime between January 20 and the end of the month it took it down.
The guide, after addressing how to avoid confusion when using they/them as a gender neutral pronoun (a pronoun, the guide notes, that has been used on and off as a singular pronoun since the 14th century; a pronoun, not noted in the guide but well-known nonetheless, that Shakespeare used at times as a singular pronoun), the guide takes up neo-pronouns bits of speech like ze/zir/zem, xem/xem, ey/em, and ve/ver. It notes there are about two dozen neo-pronouns in use today and that these have been around since the 18th century. The first recorded use of ze/zir, it states, dates back to 1864. All this to say, neo-pronouns, whatever we might feel about them, are not new.
When students come into my Spanish class, grammatical gender seems strange and difficult to them. Even if a speaker of modern English might give these inanimate, unsexed objects, a car, a ship, a computer, gendered names--Henry, Marge, Franklin, Alexa, or whatever--, to think that nouns might have a grammatical gender seems odd. And, there are languages where nouns don't have gender, languages where they have two, and still others, like German, where they have three: male, female, and neuter.
English, having been a Germanic language, originally had grammatical gender. But, it lost gender in the wake of the colonization/invasion of Britain by various linguistic groups. Both the loss of gender and the simplification of verb conjugation is, for some reason, part of creolization--you can see this in more modern examples like Haitian Creole and Papiamento. But I digress.
After the 17th-century, Mexican nun Sor Juana became famous, a poet from Perú arrived in Mexico and sent her some clay jars and a playful (in the ribbing sense) poem that suggested it would be better were she to become a man. She responded, and as is wont with her responses to boorish men, she undoes his arguments. Near the end of the poem, she makes a statement that modern scholars from Octavio Paz to Georgina Stabat-Rivers have made much of, often for their own ends, and I will too. Margaret Sayers Peden's lovely translation of this section reads:
As for the counsel that you offer,
I promise you, l will attend
with all my strength, although I judge
no strength on earth can en -Tarquin:
for here we have no Salmacis,
whose crystal water, so they tell,
to nurture masculinity
possesses powers unexcelled.
I have no knowledge of these things,
except that I came to this place
so that, if true that I am female,
none substantiate that state.
I know, too, that they were wont
to call wife, or woman, in the Latin
uxor, only those who wed,
though wife or woman might be virgin.
So in my case, it is not seemly
that I be viewed as feminine,
as I will never be a woman
who may as woman serve a man.
I know only that my body,
not to either state inclined,
is neuter, abstract, guardian
of only what my Soul consigns.
While nuns do not actually marry Christ, they are called Brides of Christ. In fact, that title took on such significance in Colonial New Spain that there is a considerable body of paintings depicting these Brides in wedding attire. Still, she reminds her
Peruvian poet that as a nun who has taken on a vow of chastity it is inappropriate to look upon her as a man looks upon a woman. Certainly, Sor Juana, the nun, is slapping his hand. Though, given the fact that she wrote a handful of ribald, burlesque sonnets, and given that her poem Foolish Men criticizes male double standards around purity, it is hard not hear a certain coquettishness in her brining up the term uxor and reminding the gentleman that she is not someone who should be viewed as feminine, given that she will never be a women who may as woman serve a man.
Where I want to go, though, is the last stanza:
y solo se que mi cuerpo,
sin que a uno u otro se incline,
es neutro, o abstracto, cuanto
solo el Alma deposite.
Or, as Sayers-Peden translates it:
I know only that my body,
not to either state inclined,
is neuter, abstract, guardian
of only what my Soul consigns.
The body is neuter, abstract, guardian only of the alma, the soul. In Spanish alma is a feminine noun. But because the accent falls on the first syllable, the article looks like the masculine article, el. I say looks like because it is not. It is a feminine article that looks masculine. The definite article in Spanish comes from the demonstrative pronoun ille/illa. In feminine nouns where the tonic stress falls on an a in the opening syllable, the a at the end of illa merges with the opening syllable of the noun leaving ill which becomes el. Still, the way Spanish has developed its articles, leaves a word like soul, el alma, looking like a feminine noun with a masculine article, like a word that does not care about gender binaries, or a word that embraces all.
In 2016 I wrote the draft of a poem that used the pronoun zhe to refer to the protagonist. And the following day I wrote another. And the next as well. I wrote about 16 poems that summer. Not all of them used zhe. Some used they, some you, and one used her. But zhe, one of those non-gendered, neo-pronouns, was the pronoun to which I returned most often.
I am cis het. My pronouns are he/him/his. But I have written a book of poems where the protagonist's pronouns are zhe/hir. This protagonist is God´s chosen, which means an outcast, a scapegoat. One who, to quote Isaiah 53 "hath no form nor comeliness... no beauty to be desired... despised and rejected... a person of sorrows, and acquainted with grief... one from whom we hid our faces... one whom we did esteem stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted." This first grouping was written in 2016, two if not three years before I, along with many others, added pronouns to my email signature, four years before I added pronouns to my Zoom handle. This was several years before a friend suggested I read Gabrielle Calvocoressi's great Rocket Fantastic.
The following year, I wrote a few more zhe poems, and a few more in 2018. That year I compiled the grouping into a chapbook and sent it out to the Sunken Garden Prize over run by Tupelo Press. It was warmly received but did not win. I kept writing more poems and did not send it out again for a few years. In 2019, I sat on the porch of the hermitage where Thomas Merton stayed and read one of my latest to a group of Kentucky writers. Among those present was, Fenton Johnson,
and we talked about pronouns and then emailed about pronouns. And more poems were added and the order was rearranged, then rearranged again.
The book, as many of mine do, has made the rounds of various publishers, maybe not as many I should, I am not the best at knowing where to send things. Still, last summer, Katerina Stoykova at Accents Press has picked it up and it will be out this July.
My reasons for using zhe/hir, for using gender neutral, neo-pronouns as the principle way to refer to the protagonist of this book are theological and not political... granted, the two are so intertwined with each other that both conservatives and progressives confuse them and begin to use the one to justify their exercise of power in the other realm. And it feels often, at least within American Christianity, that both conveniently forget that Jesus standing before Pilot answered, "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:37). But that is another post altogether. My reasons for using zhe/hir are because God comes to us, regardless of who we are, regardless of our pronouns, regardless of how we express our identity, and calls us to acts of love through service, calls us to an emptying of self and to a sitting and breaking bread with others regardless of who they are.
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