The Gender In Our Words

It struck me recently how many (or most) languages have gender assigned to their nouns. In English, not so much, but there is often a cultural association of a vague gender identity in many of our English words even so. But mostly, I got to thinking about how those words in languages other than English came to have their gender, and why.

I’m not any kind of researcher, but I did read some articles about this. And, just so you know, the main reason that I was motivated to do this was because I’ve been thinking a lot about pronouns and gender since I have only recently, after 70 years, recognized myself as living as the wrong gender.

So while reading about all of this, I quickly realized that there was very little correlation between the word and its gender. And even in languages deriving from the same root, some will make that object masculine and other will make it feminine. Some will even make it neuter, or as I like to think of it, non-binary (lol).

There’s a particularly germane article on k-international.com that helped me get a little clearer understanding of how arbitrary gender can be in words, written by Richard Brooks in his language blog, entitled “Why Do Languages Have Gender.” In it, he quoted Mark Twain’s observations of the German language as follows:

A person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, nails, feet and body are all of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word to signify it, and not according to sex of the individual who wears it! A person’s nose, lips shoulders, breast, hands and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears eyes, chin legs, knees, heart and conscience haven’t any sex at all….”

Mr. Brooks did point out that it was important to distinguish between grammatical gender and natural gender, and went on to say that grammatical gender is a way of categorizing nouns and that it doesn’t necessarily match up with “natural gender” of the person or object being described. He went on to say, “Languages also have different ways of assigning gender. Some languages go by the physical characteristics of the object in question (emphasis added). Often, mythology and cultural views on gender (my emphasis again) come into play, too.”

Some of the examples he used really got me thinking how twisted this whole gender thing can be. For example, in Portuguese the word mulherão means “voluptuous woman.” However, in that language, the word is masculine. Even the word “manliness” is feminine in Spanish, Latin, German, Polish Russian, and Hindi. And lastly, near the end of his article, he cited an unnamed study that looked at languages from around the world and found that, “on average, countries where gendered languages are spoken ranked the lowest on the scale of gender equality.” What I got from that is when we, any of us, feel that we get to categorize anything with whatever gender feels right to us without regard to whether it has gender or is the correct gender, we are more likely to resist or deny its, or their, true existence.

So, in case it isn’t obvious, my takeaway from my research and the parts of the article I’ve quoted really boils down to this — gender in things, and to a great extent in people, is really arbitrary in so far as the words we use. We may perceive something or someone as either male or female, but our perceptions are not directly connected to the inherent maleness of femaleness of that thing or person. We unconsciously rely on what our culture has instilled in us as how to categorize our world. Our language traps us into choosing the gender of others, and blinds us to the actuality before us. In other words, what makes us see male and female in all its permutations without regard to its inherent gender.

Now, I’m not denying sexual differences, but even there there can be equivocations for a variety of reasons. What I have come to believe is that there is no real gender other than what we agree to give to something or someone. And when it’s a “someone”, then it should be their prerogative to create or declare what gender they consider themselves. Just as everyone who learns a new language has come to understand, sometimes you just have to memorize which words are masculine, which are feminine, and which are neuter.

Or, you can just ask.