He is a woman. She is a man
Ajaz-ul-Haque
Mard Honi Chahiyai, Khatoon Hona Chahiyai
Ab Grammar Ka Yahi Qanoon Hona Chahiyai
(Change grammar; make HER a man, HIM a woman)
-Anwar Masood (Urdu poet)
In my childhood things were simple. God was one, genders two, tenses three, seasons four and senses five. God is still one but the rest has changed. Genders like wonders of the world are seven. Tenses turn back and forth in the new time machine and you don’t know you are in the past, present or future? Seasons are more than four since global warming thinned the line between hot and cold months. Senses have a sixth sibling and now we use this one to declare the other five dead.
Grammar was a toolkit of rules and (to avoid a clash) our teachers would use one tool at a time. A singular wouldn’t disturb a plural. (We never asked if goat is goats as plural, why sheep is not sheeps). A masculine wouldn’t enter the privacy of a feminine. Nouns were nouns, verbs wouldn’t leak into adjectives (and if they would they would inform our teachers first). Pronouns were plain. He was he, she was she and no girl would ask that if you say `he’, do you mean `me too’. She knew she too had a share in `he’ as a common pronoun. There were no gender cops to bully the language and its users. You could call yourself gay (as cheerful) and it wouldn’t upset your sexual orientation. Homos were sapiens only and straight was straight without signifying your heterosexuality.
That good old limited-option-world is long past. We are into a modern, rather postmodern, perhaps post-postmodern gender-bending world where pronouns are stretched like rubber-bands depending on the gender you mean.
Is it fair to use `He’ as a pronoun for all human species irrespective of their gender. The question which till now was simple is no longer simple. A line was said and heard so often. `A man is known by the company he keeps’. It never provoked a woman to believe that `she is not known by the company she keeps. `Man’ then was a catch-all term for humans. `He’ was a generic gender for both used in all classical languages. Women then wouldn’t feel excluded from the human world. When we said `Aam Aadmi’, it included `aam aourat’ too. Today the lines are drawn. Loud and clear.
In this hyper-sensitive `genderisation’ of words, students of language face some typical questions. Why women have menopause? English language heaps tragedies upon tragedies. Why a woman `manhandles’. Should it now be `personhandle’ to allow both genders their right to handle something manually. Wait. Manually is masculine. `Womanually’, no `humanually’ works better.
There are examples where an abnormal gender sensitivity spoils the very beauty of language. The repeated use of He/She though makes us legally correct, but it is an aesthetic disaster. This way we kill what the language lives for. Flow. Flare. Rhythm. To fix this bug, language masters thought of a third option. No `he’, no `she’, use `they’ as a collective pronoun to include both male and female. Now genders are too many to be classified as two only. `He’ and `She’ are insufficient vessels to contain the genders of the modern age. That good old muzakkar-moannas age is long over and now the gender variety has gone beyond the biological boundaries. In the new era of LGBTQAI+, the sign plus denotes an open-ended possibility of yet-to-be-explored genders. Like in voting for candidates we have an option NOTA, we may soon have a gender option denoting None Of The Above. A plain binary of gender (with a shade of undefined kind in between) has now spiraled into mysterious many. We have he-males, she-males and we don’t know which pronoun signifies which gender. Now men have husbands, women have wives. Now the gender conscious language police insists on writing a `pregnant person’ as the new birth techniques may plant a womb in a father thereby reversing the parenthood paradigm where we don’t know who is who. Would it be a father mothering a baby or a mother fathering it. In this gender chaos, the good old, neat and clean language is finding it hard to stay sane. Language gets maddeningly complex when we subject it to this gender hysteria. Well sexual orientation is a matter of choice and has been recognized as a right and we don’t slip in that territory of personal discretion. We respect all genders but when the meaning of exclusivity, prejudice and offense are being extracted from plain expressions of language, beauty takes a backseat, absurdity wins. An incidental and unmindful use of masculine pronoun elicits a hysterical response from the other side. Chauvinism, sexism and misogyny are too massive conclusions to be drawn from too small and too casual acts of speech. The threshold of offense is getting lower and lower. Even a joke can land you in trouble. Many social, moral, emotional constructs have fallen apart because of this mockery of language.
So back to grammar. A singular `they’ is now the roof under which all are safely housed. Fair enough. But there is a catch. The singular pronoun `they’ can’t be paired with a singular present `is’. `He is’ and `She is’ is fine, but `they is’ is not. `A person decides whether they want to go’. The sentence is grammatically correct as the use of `they’ is delayed. When you begin the line with a singular `they’, the immediate use of `are’ cancels the singular effect and renders the singular `they’ automatically plural. Now what to do. Language court can settle the gender dispute this way. If using `He’ as a unisex pronoun constitutes offense, using `she’ is a safer option. If HE does not mean SHE too, let SHE mean HE too. She without `S’, reads `he’ and with `S’ it remains `she’. Both parties will be satisfied. It’s like a male-cum-female package where one word serves as two words. Killing two birds with one stone is an old story, we can kill two genders with one pronoun. Men may not mind being bracketed as `she’, if it means restoring language the beauty.
`Man’ as verb throws a masculine message because that is what it means. Change the biology or change the dictionary. Either pump a wishful meaning into words or be content with the meaning the poor word has to offer. A word like `workmanship’ signifies the `skill with which a product is made or a job done’. It defines the quality of doing, not the gender of the doer. Gender activists may have, but the language has no problem accepting a woman’s workmanship. Why do we emancipate the world and leave the `womancipation’ part. Likewise the word manage is not what only a man does. Even man as verb is used for something you run, operate or defend. Your helplines are manned by the staff that include women too. There is no question of gender insecurity by using `he’ or `man’ provided we take language from a much wider, deeper and a maturer perspective. As a language user, I too prefer using gender neutral expressions, but when the choice is between a free literary flow and a stiff gender code, I go with the first. Male or female no matter who, it’s language first.
English language is endlessly supple and incredibly maneuverable. There are ways and ways to bend a word without making gender as focus. Use `chair’ as a gender-neutral term for `chairman’ or `chairwoman’, `humankind’ for `mankind’. `Human resource’ is a better substitute for `manpower’. Rename a `manhole’ a `maintenance hole’, it will still welcome all who fall in it. Make `air hostess’ a `flight attendant’, `fireman’ a `firefighter’ to avoid any deliberate gender reference. Businessman must be called entrepreneur to let all genders mind their business. Call a `gunman’ a `shooter’ to accommodate females too in this noble mission. But let `manipulate’ be unchanged for that sounds better with the first syllable.
Without being parochial, let’s study language as language. Male female whatever whoever, wherever and whichever, language is the common faith of all creative artists. It’s a shared human legacy. You don’t read a male author or a female author, you read a book authored by someone you don’t mind who. Of-course gender is a subject in Literature, in Sociology, in History, and there are cases where if you miss the gender you miss the story. But we can’t fit the whole ocean of Humanities in a mere masculine-feminine cup. In this gender ping-pong, leave the trivial, focus on the real.
Send men to mental asylum and husbands who behave like animals to animal husbandry, but don’t let this he-she noise drown the music of language.
