Zie and Hir

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Clarissa

October 3, 2014

Can somebody explain to me the point of using “zie” and “hir” when telling stories from one’s life? For instance, when you write something like this:

I went outside and saw a neighbor. Zie was walking hir dog. Zie always walks the dog early in the morning. Hir dog is huge and scary but zie keeps taking hir dog everywhere.

The text becomes very hard to read, especially when we are talking about a page-long story. But if people are doing this, there must be a point. I (somewhat, to a point, although not even then) understand the use of these zies when attempting to avoid the repetitive “he or she.” But in a story like this, why not just pick a pronoun randomly and stick to it?

I just reread a story 4 times and still have no idea what happened. All I know is that the “zies” make me want to sneeze.

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23 responses to “Zie and Hir”

Evelina Anville

October 3, 2014

I agree. I hate “zie.” I think people use the term for two reasons:
1) To ensure anonymity. Since the gender is so obscured, readers will have a harder time (presumably) knowing who the writer is describing.

2)To respect gender neutrality. We don’t have a gender-neutral third person pronoun in English and so I think “zie” is attempting to be respectful that gender does not exist (or does not always exists) as a binary. I respect the theory. But I “”zie” is so clumsy, awkward, and unpleasant to read that, in practise, it just renders prose unreadable.

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ladyleahjane

October 3, 2014

This is why I’m a big advocate for singular “they”.

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1. Stille (@aperfectbalance)
  
  October 3, 2014
  
  Yeah, I understand having gendered pronouns in heavily grammatically gendered languages, but the absence of a genderless third person singular in otherwise-non-mandatorily-gendered English slightly grates on my nerves sometimes.
  
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  1. Stille (@aperfectbalance)
    
    October 3, 2014
    
    I should say, having mandatory gendered pronouns
    
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Stille (@aperfectbalance)

October 3, 2014

I prefer using singular they for the same purpose – telling a story in which I don’t think the gender of the people involved is in any way relevant. Another possibility is that the neighbour mentioned in the story is genderqueer and uses zie/hir pronouns.

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Dreidel

October 3, 2014

But ‘they” is not a singular pronoun,and using it as such is VERY sloppy grammar.

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1. Stille (@aperfectbalance)
  
  October 3, 2014
  
  Even if its usage as a singular pronoun was, indeed, a contemporary thing (and I haven’t read enough about the subject to be able to have a proper opinion), it wouldn’t be the first time a plural pronoun also becomes a singular pronoun in English. I don’t see many people referring to each other as “thou” outside Ren Faires nowadays.
  
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2. ladyleahjane
  
  October 3, 2014
  
  Chaucer, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde all used singular they in their writing. It’s neither sloppy nor newfangled.
  
  Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct
  
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3. Rhoda
  
  October 4, 2014
  
  No, it’s not and the prescriptivist approach is outdated.
  Most of the time singular they works fine.
  For example;
  A: “I went to the doctor to get it checked out.”
  B: “Oh. What did they say?”
  Using ‘they’ means you can be gender neutral while at the same time not making every single conversation about gender. What’s “sloppy”about that? It would sound more cumbersome to say “What did he or she say?”
  I understand in academic writing you might err on the side of formality and use ‘he or she’ but in everyday life singular they is perfectly adequate.
  
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Clarissa

October 3, 2014

My position is: stories we write online are fiction. It is not usually great or even good fiction, yet that’s what they are. People I write about are not really people. They are my characters. And there is nothing wrong with calling a character “he” or “she.” Or Josh and Jessica.

Unfortunately, there are many people who don’t understand that these stories I write are fiction and persecute me with corrections of minor details (“But it wasn’t Tuesday, like you said! It was Thursday! But it wasn’t in Mardid, it was in Seville! But this wasn’t your professor who said it, it was mine!”). This is beyond annoying. It is like people expect these online accounts to reflect their version of reality. And that is obviously impossible.

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Shakti

October 3, 2014

The idea behind those pronouns is to avoid gendering. People who use zie and hir find it to be more trans-friendly and find that just randomly using a pronoun causes the reader to gender the subject.
For example, Ursula LeGuin uses “he” in The Left Hand of Darkness. I kept picturing everyone as a man even though it’s about a planet of sequentially hermaphoditic humans.

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1. cliff arroyo
  
  October 6, 2014
  
  I think LeGuin stumbled badly with ‘he’ in TLHoD I had the same problem.
  Interestingly I’ve read since several SF novels featuring species that use …. different sexual arrangements than human beings and usually they make up a pronoun for sexless or third (or more) sexed beings and it works completely fine and is not awkward at all in the context of the novels.
  
  I can basically understand why she didn’t do that (you can’t be ahead of the pack in _everything_) but kind of wish she’d release a new edition with invented or edited pronouns.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    October 6, 2014
    
    I still haven’t been able to process the story in question, so I don’t know if it’s sci-fi. All I know is that I couldn’t read it. And in trained to read complex texts. If you can’t make a simple blog story understandable, that just isn’t right.
    
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  2. cliff arroyo
    
    October 6, 2014
    
    I agree that the excerpt you gave was unreadable (I couldn’t get through it)
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      October 6, 2014
      
      And the whole story is like this! Imagine if I start writing my blog in this manner. I wouldn’t blame you if you left and never came back.
      
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Fie Upon This Quiet Life

October 3, 2014

I hate “they” as a singular pronoun. I abhor zie/hir, too. Instead on neutralizing gender, to me, it puts a spotlight on it, that indicates THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH GENDER. (Sorry. But that’s the flash I get in my head, always, when I see this.) But in my humble opinion, there is nothing wrong with gender.

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David P. Bellamy

October 4, 2014

I remember “co” as a third person pronoun with unspecified gender. This seems to be nicer than “zie” and “hir” to my sensibilities.

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el

October 4, 2014

\\ We don’t have a gender-neutral third person pronoun in English

It also doesn’t exist in neither Russian nor Hebrew.

“Zie” and “hir” sound weird and annoying to me. Even “a person” and “person’s” probably would have sounded better. I would guess that such attempts to respect gender neutrality don’t work since most English speakers see it as PC (in the bad sense of the word.)

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thevenerablecorvex

October 4, 2014

Is it possible that their neighbour was genderqueer in some way?

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 4, 2014
  
  There is no indication of that in the story, so who knows?
  
  Maybe this was a way of adding some spice to the story. I have no idea because I still haven’t managed to figure out the story’s plot.
  
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xykademiqz

October 5, 2014

I am a big fan of “they” used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. It is widely used in speech and is easy to understand . As Leah Jane says, it’s hardly a novelty and has a long history in the literature. I am honestly irritated when I hear that “they” is a plural pronoun and cannot be anything else.

In German, for instance, “sie” stands for third person singular feminine pronoun, also for third person plural, all genders. It is also used as a respectful you (capitalized, “Sie”), following the grammatical rules for the plural pronoun. The pronoun does whatever it needs to do.

Similarly, I am really irritated by the use of “I” instead of “me” in the accusative case, widespread by people terrified of misusing “me” so that they are now misusing “I” (When I hear sentences like “PLease report back to Jenny and I,” I wanna kill myself.) However… Language is a living, plastic thing. If the “accusative I” becomes widespread enough, then it will become the norm, and the fact that I have my panties up in a bunch about it will, as it should, become totally irrelevant.

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cliff arroyo

October 6, 2014

Another big fan of ‘singular’ (epicene) ‘they’.

I also think that a language with grammatical gender (which is mostly abritrary) doesn’t need a gender neutral pronoun as much. But it would be a big gap to not have that in English and ‘they’ works very well almost all the time.

I also tend to think that “accusative” no longer is an accurate descriptor for “me” but that’s another wild-eyed rant).

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Shakti

October 6, 2014

Relevant: A Linguist on the Story of Gendered Pronouns

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