How non-binary Chinese people seeking a gender-neutral third-person pronoun for themselves are coming up with solutions, including a new Chinese character
- In modern standard Chinese, the third-person pronouns for ‘he’ and ‘she’ are both pronounced ‘tā’ – it is in written Chinese that gender specification becomes obvious
- A new Chinese character that features in it an ‘x’ is one of the ideas being floated for non-binary Chinese people
In many parts of the world, “What are your pronouns?” and “My pronouns are such-and-such” have become part of the questions to ask and things to say when people meet for the first time. Even in allegedly conservative Singapore, I was surprised to hear a few young people articulating non-binary pronouns and acknowledging gender nonconforming individuals.
Obviously, the de-gendering of “he/him” and “she/her” to “they/them” works only in an anglophone context. How do other languages, for example Chinese, negotiate the third-person pronouns for individuals who do not wish to be pigeonholed into the conventional genders of male and female?
In modern standard Chinese, the third-person pronouns for people are 他 (“he”) and 她 (“she”), both pronounced tā in Mandarin. Unlike he/him and she/her in English, spoken Mandarin does not identify the gender of the person because both pronouns sound exactly the same. It is in written Chinese that gender specification becomes obvious.
Many people, even the Chinese themselves, are not aware that gender-specific third-person pronouns in the Chinese language have only existed for about 100 years. Before the early 20th century, Chinese third-person pronouns were gender neutral.
How do you come out when your language has no word for ‘gay’?
There were over a dozen words that could refer to a third person (other than you and I) in archaic Chinese, but by the turn of the 20th century, the most common one was 他, which, like all personal pronouns at the time, was gender-free and could be used to refer to both male and female persons.
The May Fourth Movement in 1919, a seismic event in Chinese intellectual history, changed that. Among the outcomes of May Fourth were linguistic changes that gave form to the Chinese language that we use today. Liu Bannong (1891-1934), a Chinese poet, essayist and linguist who studied in London and Paris in the early 1920s, invented and promoted the use of the pronoun 她, which specifically identifies the female third person.
The most apparent difference between the male 他 and the female 她 is that the former has a stylised 人 (“human”) on the left, which, in the latter, is replaced by the character 女 (“female”). As 他 was hitherto gender neutral, Liu was criticised for removing the “human” from his newly minted feminine third-person pronoun 她.
Despite the initial resistance, the feminine 她 caught on in a big way and has become an integral part of the language.
It has come full circle in the present day, for non-binary Chinese people are now seeking a gender-neutral third-person pronoun for themselves. Having been pumped up with male energy for close to a hundred years, 他 can no longer be in contention despite its original genderless quality.
Among the suggested solutions is the creation of a new character that features neither “human” nor “female” on the left but an “x”. To be pronounced tā as well, “X也” would be the third-person pronoun that is the preserve of non-binary individuals. Another solution is to use the letters of the Latin alphabet to spell the word “ta”.
“X也” and “ta” are suggestions that are being thrown around by a small number of people. Given that being non-binary is still a very alien concept to the vast majority of Chinese, the acceptance of a newly created pronoun to reflect the lived realities of gender nonconforming individuals will be a challenge.
As for me, my pronouns are he/him. I should get used to saying that when I introduce myself from now on.
