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pronouns and language

a few months ago, i wanted to talk about a friend of mine while they weren't around. only problem was, that friend uses they/them pronouns, and i was talking in hebrew

now, hebrew has pretty ubiquitous grammatical gender: adjective and verb conjugation is gendered¹ in addition to pronouns like in english, and it hasn't historically had any neutral gender. there does exist a system for it, but it's not nearly as simple as spanish's "just use 'e' rather than 'o'/'a'", and it's not in widespread use. more concretely, i only know hebrew grammar implicitly by growing up with it, so i didn't have a great time trying to turn this page into a shift in my language use

the nonbinary hebrew project's grammar and systematics page

¹: in most contexts; eg. first-person future isn't gendered, and third-person feminine plural is rarely used

now, i happen to know that, given that the only two feasible options in this context were a masc grammatical gender and a fem one, my friend would've preferred the masc one. the person i was talking with didn't know this, so there was some awkwardness as we figured things out. that conversation moved on, but the interaction stuck with me

obviously he/him, she/her, and they/them aren't the only three pronouns that people use - what about more obscure neopronouns? they may not have an intrinsic meaning outside of the specific phonemes that're used within an english context

of course, the obvious answer is "if you're not sure, ask the person you're wanting to talk about how they'd like to be referred to in that language", but tbh that feels a bit unsatisfying. what if they're not around to be asked? what if they're not familiar with the intricacies of that language's gender system, and thus can't come up with a set of linguistics that matches their identity?

fae/faer, as an example, is a mutation of the english word faerie, which is itself a deliberately archaic spelling of "fairy". the hebrew word for fairy is "fe'a", but would some merger of that with either "hi" (she) or "hu" (he) capture the nuance of "fae" relative to he/she/they? "fae" rhymes with "they" in english, which gives it an alignment with gender-neutrality. so "fe", rhyming with "ate" from the nonbinary hebrew project, might make sense?

getting a guess for a translation of one pronoun out of an entire grammatical gender conjugation table that would need to be created took me, someone who already speaks hebrew, probably 10 minutes - is it really fair to ask every person who uses neopronouns to do that for you, for each non-english language you want to discuss them in?

we could try to build a canonical translation of most neopronouns into most languages, but that's a ton of work and learning new gender conjugations on the fly is less feasible for a language like hebrew than it is for english. maybe using some standard nonbinary conjugations and only switching out pronouns is reasonable?

but even that is only helpful in the best-case scenario, where we're okay with modifying the language to accommodate a gender it couldn't previously express. if we return to the example i started with, which presumes that the language can't accommodate the gender, we can see a different perspective on the problem: the conversion from gender identity to pronoun is inherently lossy, and it can lose different information in different languages

now, there are definitely people for whom neither the masc gender nor the fem one would be preferable - one workaround in this case that i'm familiar with is to alternate between them - but in plenty of cases, there is a preference there which could lead to an acceptable binary gendering if context requires it

i don't think there's anything that can particularly be done to improve this in practice - i'm not gonna go out and ask people to start saying "hi i'm so-and-so, i'm a masc-ish enby who uses they/them pronouns in english but if you're stuck in a language that needs to put me into a binary gender then i'd prefer masc rather than fem" because that'd be really really weird and overly verbose and the specifics of someone else's gender identity are frankly none of your business and it'd also give people an excuse to be like "oh well i don't feel like using singular they, he basically just gave me an excuse to misgender him, so doing that is probably fine"

so where does that leave us? i dunno. but more awareness of the intersection of enbies and non-english languages definitely can't hurt, i guess