Microsoft has added a diversity checker to its Office 365 spelling and grammar tool (h/t Tony Thorne (@tonythorne007). You can find it by going to Word’s Preferences menu. Click the Spelling and Grammar option, then Grammar & Refinements. If you check the appropriate boxes in the drop-down menu, Word will scan your writing for age and cultural bias, ethnic slurs, gender bias, gender-neutral pronouns, gender-specific language, racial bias, sexual orientation bias, and socioeconomic bias. The goal is to replace the sensitivity readers that some publishers use to vet manuscripts for conscious or unconscious bias and anything else that might offend an audience.
I unleashed Microsoft Woke, as its right-wing critics might call it, on some passages about gendered and genderless pronouns to see whether it could read for inclusivity better than a human can.
tl;dr: it can’t. But you knew this.
Here’s what happened. The following screencap comes from my book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond he and she (Liveright, 2020), which traces the history and politics of gendered and genderless pronouns.
Word highlighted men and women, suggesting I replace them with a gender-neutral term like people to be more inclusive. But the claim I make in this paragraph is that common-gender pronouns in the 18th and 19th centuries (we call them gender-neutral or genderless pronouns today) were typically conceived as binary. Singular they, used in English since the 14th century, and early coined pronouns like E (1841), thon (1858), se (ca. 1874), heer (1911), hir (1920), and heesh (1930), typically included the two traditional genders, masculine and feminine, something that so-called generic he often failed to do. Early coiners, though they strove for gender inclusiveness, did not provide for anyone whose gender did not fit the traditional binary. Only in the later 20th century did the concept of genderless pronouns expand to include trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid people along with the binary masculine and feminine. Sometimes you just have to use words like men and women. So thanks MS Woke, but no thanks.
The next example is from my discussion of pronouns in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, which appeared in 1928. About a third of the way into the novel, Woolf describes the transition of her protagonist, Orlando, a thirty-year-old man (pronouns he/his/him) who falls into a deep and mysterious sleep and awakens some time later as a woman (she/her). Woolf captures the moment of Orlando’s transition in her narrative, and in the rough draft she illustrates it grammatically as well. Over the course of several sentences she shifts Orlando’s pronouns from he and his to he/she and his/her and finally to she and her. As we see in the screencap, the pronoun transitions get tricky once you get to the reflexive himself: “The sound of trumpets died away, & Orlando stood for a moment in all his/her beauty, stark naked. Then he/she dressed himself.”
Orlando starts out the book as he, becomes he/she at the moment of transition, and continues for the next 200 years as she (Orlando lives for a very long time). But Microsoft thinks Woolf could do better. Instead of he/she, Word advises, “A gender-neutral pronoun here would be more inclusive.” Maybe so, but Word offers no gender advice for the reflexive pronoun himself. If Woolf took Word’s advice, she’d wind up with “Then they dressed himself.”
Woolf did revise the passage, but not in the way MS Word suggests. The printed version of Orlando leaves out this confusion of pronouns: “The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked.”
Finally, here’s a bit from a blog post I wrote about the new French genderless pronoun iel. We’ve seen Word’s context-insensitive takes on inclusivity. Here we see that Word’s grammar checker is not too good at grammar.
First, a bit of history. Lo, the first French genderless pronoun, was coined in 1765 by Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve. It wasn’t until 1841 that an American, Francis A. Brewster, got into the pronoun coining game. Brewster wasn’t particularly “woke”—he was a recent Yale MD who didn’t like the work, wrote a widely-ignored grammar book, and wound up selling insurance. Not the profile of your typical 19th-century progressive. But Brewster did coin E, the first gender-neutral English pronoun, a word meant to include both women and men, though—and this is tantalizing—Brewster called his new pronoun not common-gender or gender-neutral, but “masculor feminine,” from a Latin word meaning ‘hermaphrodite.’
Brewster’s use of masculor feminine is surely the first hint at fluid gender reference in an English grammar book, so maybe Dr. Brewster was just a little bit woke after all. In contrast, MS Woke seems to be asleep on the job. The utility parses was as a helping verb and advises me to call Brewster “waking” instead of “woke.” But that’s wrong. Woke is an adjective, and was is the main verb, not an auxiliary. The passage about Brewster ends with this sentence (not shown in the image above): “Brewster did quit doctoring—he wound up selling insurance.” Here Word makes another category error, objecting to my use of wound up, saying “these words work best when connected by a hyphen.” O Word, do pardon me, wound up is a verb, not a noun.
So much, then, for Word’s “Grammar & Refinements.” Its suggestions are neither grammatical nor refined.
Inclusive language is a big issue today, as it has been at various times in the past. Remember the debates over Ms., chair, and waitron in the 1970s? The continual shifts in neutral terms to describe racial, ethnic, and religious groups? Shifting terms to describe physical and psychological illness and abilities? Inclusive language has always been controversial, and today some staunch conservatives charge that it’s a form of thought-control. But language that excludes can be even more controlling. It's certainly more offensive. Yes, the explicit goal of some writers is to be offensive—Have I offended everyone? is a staple of in-your-face stand-up comedy. But no writer wants to be inadvertently offensive, and that’s where sensitivity reading helps the most.
So I’m all for sensitivity reading. I just don’t think Microsoft Word is sensitive enough to do that. Sorry if I’ve offended anyone in Redmond or on the internets.
