Gender reveals have been exploding in the news recently, but there are also a growing number of gender conceals—using a pronoun to hide someone’s gender. Historically, two English pronouns have been used to mask a person’s gender: it and they. But so far the definitions of it and they don’t include the gender conceal.
First let’s look at they. The Oxford English Dictionary lists three senses for singular they:
- referring collectively to members of a group (everyone, everybody)
- referring to an individual generically or indefinitely (someone, a person, the writer)
- referring to someone who is nonbinary or gender-nonconforming (Sam Smith’s pronouns are they and them).
I think it’s time to add a fourth sense:
- referring to someone whose gender needs to be concealed (the whistleblower…they).
Using pronouns to disguise gender goes back at least to the eighteenth century. In 1794 a writer in Massachusetts explained to a critic why she and her co-authors used the potentially ungrammatical singular they to refer to a specific but unnamed individual: “We wished to conceal the gender.” In 1861, the novelist E. D. E. N. Southworth has a character in a novel explain to her mother, “when we speak of anyone in the third person without wishing even to divulge their sex, we say ‘they.’”
Gender concealing pronouns are important today as well. In 2018, when the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed describing how administration insiders felt obliged to thwart President Donald Trump’s impulsivity, the Times used singular they to guard the author’s anonymity:
“It was clear early on that the writer wanted anonymity, but we didn’t grant anything until we read it and we were confident that they were who they said they were.”
The author of that op-ed, who now calls themself Anonymous, has a new book coming out about chaos in the Trump White House, A Warning, and like this example from the Huffington Post, most stories continue to conceal the author’s gender with singular they as a way of protecting the their identity:
Passages from “A Warning,” set to be published Nov. 19, were provided to HuffPost by a source who did so only on the condition that their anonymity be protected and that the passages from the book would not be quoted from directly.
Then there’s the pronoun it. Although singular they is the pronoun of choice for the big gender conceal, in the past some writers used the pronoun it to mask a person’s gender. It is not typically used to refer to humans, though for some time it could refer to infants whose gender was unknown. The Scottish Philosopher James Anderson observed in 1792 that in the rare case when it refers to an adult, the pronoun expresses “a high degree of contempt.” The OED adds that calling someone it is either derogatory or, if the context warrants, humorous. The following examples suggest that it may deserve an additional sense, ‘gender concealing.’
In the TV version of Colin Dexter’s “Last Bus to Woodstock” (ITV, 1988), Chief Inspector Morse and Detective Sergeant Lewis interview Mrs. Mabel Jarman, who saw murder victim Sylvia Kaye waiting with a friend for the Woodstock bus. Jarman initially refers to Kaye’s friend as she, but then, unsure of the gender, switches to it, pronouncing the word as if it were distasteful. At the end Jarman calls the friend creature as well, another unflattering term. Here’s a transcription of that scene:
Chief Inspector Morse: What was her friend like?
Mrs. Jarman: I never really saw her. She was behind Sylvia Kaye, and it was raining. She had her hood up.
Morse: What was she wearing, the other girl?
Jarman: Did I say it was a girl?
Morse: Uh, no.
Jarman: I thought she was older. A woman? I might be wrong of course. . . . She, if it was a she—I’ve been thinking about it and I’m not absolutely sure—it [pauses and nods head emphatically] was wearing jeans, a raincoat—navy blue—and pumps.
Morse: Pumps?
Jarman: On its feet. Gym shoes.
D. S. Lewis: Training shoes?
Jarman: Oh, young man—they’re all the same to me.
Morse: What did they say to each other?
Jarman: Uh, now I think I have an important clue for you. . . . Off they went to hitch. Sylvia Kaye got picked up, and left her friend by the roadside. Then she said, Sylvia, I mean, “See you in the morning.” Then it caught the bus.
Morse: The same bus that you were on?
Jarman: Yes. I was downstairs. It went upstairs. I got off first, so I can’t tell you where the other creature got off, Inspector. But you see, they must work together.
[Inspector Morse, “Last Bus to Woodstock,” series 2, episode 4 (1988), at approximately 30:41; screenplay by Michael Wilcox, based on the novel by Colin Dexter; italics added; lightly edited to remove extraneous dialogue.]
Mrs. Jarman makes an emphatic point about Sylvia Kaye’s mysterious friend to D. S. Lewis and Chief Inspector Morse, who is out of frame. According to the OED, pump, a type of shoe, goes back to the 16th century; it was applied to tennis shoes in North America in the 18th century and is in current regional use in Britain to refer to a gym shoe, trainer, or plimsoll.
Using the creature and it to refer to the companion occurs only in the TV version. In Colin Dexter’s 1975 novel, Jarman says “I’m sure they were both girls,” and the purpose of the scene is to introduce the clue that the two would see each other in the morning. But tracing the mystery companion will later help Morse solve the case, and screenwriter Michael Wilcox uses gender-concealing it both to deepen the mystery surrounding the companion and to give Fabia Drake, who plays Mrs. Jarman, some lines worthy of her talent.
In using it rather than singular they or even he or she, Wilcox may have been influenced by similar instances of gender-concealing it in earlier mysteries. In Strong Poison (1930), Dorothy Sayers used person and it in a scene at an artsy party attended by her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. The pronoun it gently satirizes a violinist characterized by Sayers as “of indeterminate sex,” who is playing music that the reader is also meant to disapprove of:
At the piano, which stood just inside the door, a young man with bushy red hair was playing something of a Czecho-Slovakian flavour, to a violin obligato by an extremely loosejointed person of indeterminate sex in a Fair-Isle jumper. . . . The violinist put down its instrument and stood up, revealing itself, by its legs, to be female.
The fiddler, whose gender is only briefly concealed, is unconnected to the main story line. But in The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), Bruce Montgomery, writing as Edmund Crispin, uses person and it to conceal the gender of someone who may be the killer:
In the big entrance hall, lit only by a single bulb in the roof, the night porter dozed uncomfortably in his box, and so failed to see either the person who flitted silently up the big staircase to Peter Graham’s room, or what that person was carrying on its return.
Montgomery, whose detective Gervaise Fen is an Oxford don solving murders in his spare time, was a stickler for grammar and may have used it to avoid singular they, which he would have considered ungrammatical.
It can be gender-neutral, as it is in Last Bus to Woodstock and The Case of the Gilded Fly, or gender-ambiguous, as it is in Strong Poison. But it serves primarily to mask gender. A gender concealing pronoun, whether it or they or something else, may further the plot; it may save the person referred to from embarrassment; and in the most-recent examples of Anonymous and the CIA whistleblower who alerted the public to Trump’s attempt to bribe Ukraine, it may even protect their physical safety.
Another set of third person pronouns, he or she can also conceal gender, but there are two problems with disjunctive pronoun pairs: he or she, him or her, and his or hers are universally despised as too awkward, too long, and more recently, too damn binary. In the first tweet below, by CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, gender-concealing him or her immediately gives way to singular they. In the second, Jemimah, a law student, tweets the gender-masking pair he/she three times before giving up in favor of they.
There’s yet another gender conceal option: a coined pronoun like hie, ze, or hir. These pronouns are typically gender-neutral or nonbinary. So far I’ve found no example of a coined pronoun masking gender, but there’s no reason they couldn’t serve that function as well.
Using a third person pronoun to conceal gender may be rarer than the other functions of gender pronouns: declaring a specific gender; including everyone regardless of gender; ignoring gender altogether; or indicating that the referent is nonbinary. But the examples presented here suggest that there should be an additional sense added to the definitions of it and they, and perhaps even the disjunctive he or she, when circumstances require concealing the gender of the person referred to.
