The Third Gender

(lesbi.org.ge)

     For a long time in my life I didn’t question my gender. I saw myself as female, because my body parts were that of a female, and I kind of just accepted that fact. However, I didn’t really think about that, either. I never became the ”girly girl” society expected me to become, but on the other hand, even though I had my tomboy phases, I never felt as though I was born in a wrong body. But, growing up in a conservative society, my gender just wasn’t one of the things I believed were possible to question.

     It was first when I came in contact with the LGBTQ community and organizations and attended some of the workshops and seminars, that I found myself totally baffled by the question – ”Which pronoun do you want us to use when we talk about you?”. Everyone else had their answers ready, they knew who they were, which gender they belonged to, or if they belonged to one, to begin with. Suddenly, I knew the answer – I’m female. The skeptical part of my brain questioned that immediately, but yes, I was and I am female, and I became strangely at peace with that, out of nowhere. I’m never going to accept the traditional gender roles, whatever that means nowadays, but I realized then that the way I feel about my gender matches the body I was given. Good to know. 

     Being the person who isn’t concerned with gender when it comes to such things as love life, but rather with the personality, I used to find myself daydreaming about a world where gender wouldn’t matter as much as it does today. Or wouldn’t exist at all. That way, I thought, I wouldn’t need to explain “what I am” or how it is possible that I can be attracted to both a male and a female person at the same time, not to mention the cases when I was attracted to transgendered people.

(3.bp.blogspot.com)

Well, one more thing I found out in the LGBTQ community is that, for one, that abbreviation includes one more letter – I. What that stands for, one might ask. It stands for intersex(ual), a term defined by Merriam Webster dictionary as “intermediate in sexual characters between a typical male and a typical female”[1]. Another, more detailed definition is found on the website of the Resource Center for Sexual & Gender Diversity at University of California Santa Barbara, and it states the following: 

“Intersex (previously referred to as hermaphrodite) refers to a condition in which an individual may have sex chromosomes, anatomy or physiology that are not socially considered standard for either male or female. Intersex conditions are often visible at birth, but some develop later during puberty. There is no single “intersex body;” intersex encompasses a wide variety of conditions that do not have anything in common other than that they are deemed “abnormal” by the medical establishment.” [2]

     Even though the old term, hermaphrodite, almost exclusively was related to the body, chromosomes and genitalia, the term intersexual has become somewhat an umbrella term for both people whose bodies show signs of both sexes and people who don’t identify with either of the (traditional) sexes.
This concept is rather close to the one I was daydreaming about and I realized the great potential of the third gender, not only for the intersexual people, but for all of the society. Maybe one day all people will be referred to as the third gender and my long lasting daydream will be fulfilled!
However, in order for this concept to first be fully recognized and accepted by the society, some big changes are needed.  One of them is the language, or to be exact – the introduction of gender neutral pronouns.

(mydoorsign.com)

     Not all languages, unfortunately, are flexible in the same degree, so I’m afraid that some of them might never introduce these pronouns. On the other hand, there are some of them (and some societies[3], as well) who have shown to be quite progressive. While English offers a couple of solutions[4], ze/zie and they being the most used ones, some of the Scandinavian languages seem to have found a way to introduce these pronouns without having to change the existing language systems to a greater extent. In Swedish, this pronoun is hen with forms hens/hen or henom, while in Norwegian, even though the debate is still not settled, it’s possible to hear both the Swedish variant and the Norwegian one – hin. Den and en can also be used in both languages. As far as I found out, the similar debate is also ongoing in Denmark, where one of the suggestions was høn.

     Just to be clear, these debates haven’t been either easy or simple, and these new pronouns have met a lot of criticism, mostly from linguists[5], but even inside the LGBTQ community. If we consider that the gender neutral pronouns and languages are not anything new[6] and that there even existed whole societies which didn’t recognize the male-female dichotomy[7], one must wonder – why is it so hard for people of today to accept this “new” concept?

      

     After much thought, I came to the conclusion that there are a few factors responsible for this lack of understanding that intersexuals and gender neutral pronouns keep meeting in the society. If we disregard the general conservatism, widely present and even dominant in some societies, the first thing that comes into mind is the language itself. As it is already known, language plays an important role in forming one’s identity.[8]

That explains why some people might be “protective” towards changes in their mother tongue, but it also explains the reason some people have difficulties accepting the third gender as a concept. As I already mentioned, there are some languages which are based on a strict male-female system. Even though most of them do have a third grammatical gender, neutrum, it is rarely used for living things and would be considered derogatory if used to address an intersexual person.

This strictly binary gender system that lies in the core of the language naturally influences the speakers and reflects on their perception of the world around them. Having one such language as the mother tongue myself, I still have to think twice before I use pronouns for people I know are intersexual. And never the less, I sometimes make mistakes, even though I do my best not to and even though I don’t support the binary gender system. That’s just how my brain got wired while I learned my first words. 

     But I am by no means defending the people who label intersexuals as “lost” or “confused” and these pronouns as unnecessary. My goal here was primarily to try to find one of the reasons for this problem, so that it could be taken into consideration by the gender neutral pronouns’ advocates in the future.

      

(fliptalks.com)

     However, there is a big difference between “understanding” and “accepting” something. Just because someone doesn’t understand something and can’t relate to it, it doesn’t mean that they can’t accept it as a social phenomenon. When it comes to religion, many of us do that every day.

*

·         Special thanks to all of my third-gendered friends and acquaintances, who opened my mind, confirmed my somewhat progressive ideas of gender identities and broadened my knowledge of pronouns!

 

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[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intersexual

[2] Intersex Info Sheet (http://wgse.sa.ucsb.edu/sgd/)

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/10/germany-third-gender-birth-certificate

[4] http://genderneutralpronoun.wordpress.com/

[5] http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/norsk-forskare-ratar-hen/

[6] Some examples are Bengali, Filipino, Finno-Ugric languages, Korean, etc.

[7] http://disinfo.com/2013/03/third-fourth-and-fifth-genders-in-cultures-around-the-world/

[8] Jaspal, Rusi - Language and social identity: A Psychosocial Approach (http://www.academia.edu/200226/Language_and_social_identity_a_psychosocial_approach)