Re: Gender Neutral Pronouns

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Mar 02 2002 - 19:51:00 MST


At 01:41 AM 3/3/02 +0000, Christian wrote:

>Andrew Clough <aclough@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> Until now I've been using (Ve / Vim / Ver / Verself) to represent people
of
>> unknown gender/no gender.
>
>Note that Greg Egan, who introduced this pronoun set in his novel
>_Distress_ and related stories, applied it to people of the *asex*
>gender, which is very different from using it for an indeterminate
>gender.

Exactly.

I devised a set in THE WHITE ABACUS, which I invited people to appropriate;
it turns out I was less than exhaustive, grammatically (mixing up his/hers
with his/her), as this linguistic analysis argues:

http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~erikaml/writings/essays/neutrality.html

Damien Broderick



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