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Goodbye, Preferred Pronouns

Victoria Z.
Politically Speaking
4 min readSep 29, 2022
Photo by Justin Case on Unsplash

In my native tongue Chinese, as in English, different characters are used for the masculine and feminine third-person pronouns. But Chinese is more straightforward than English in two ways. First, it doesn’t distinguish between subjective and objective cases. Second, although the masculine and feminine pronouns look different, they sound the same. Because of the latter, native Chinese speakers are not used to deliberating between masculine and feminine pronouns when speaking. As a result, we are prone to mixing up “he” and “she” when conversing in English.

As if this is not challenging enough, the problem has doubled in complexity as the concept of “preferred pronouns” tiptoed into our lives. Since preferred pronouns may not be the same as what immediately comes to mind, we have one more chance to make mistakes even when we think we have uttered the right word. To alleviate the problem, some people considerately offer their preferred pronouns, which is a much-appreciated gesture. However, progressive organizations have taken it one step further. They have started asking everybody to always declare their preferred pronouns when introducing themselves.

I encountered this practice for the first time when I attended the national convention of a nonprofit organization I volunteered for. During the two-day event, every speaker, when introducing himself or herself, was…

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Victoria Z.
Victoria Z.

Written by Victoria Z.

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