✦ LIBER ✦

A plea for she

✍ Scribed by Jerry G. Blaivas

Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
Year: 1997
Tongue: English
Weight: 5 KB
Volume: 16
Category: Article
ISSN: 0733-2467
DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6777(1997)16:6<519::aid-nau1>3.0.co;2-h

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

As a writer, I am often confronted with the need to make reference to a genderless person such as a surgeon, internist, urologist, etc. It gets boring to repeat the appellation each time and that, I suppose, is the genesis of the words he and she. If you think about it, these words are simply shortcuts or abbreviations for the longer nouns that they represent. That's fine and these words are very useful, but, at present, the genderless substitute for he and she (it) is not socially acceptable. You can't really say ''I went to my doctor and it examined me.'' Even more politically unacceptable is to use the word ''he'' as a generic substitute for ''he'' and ''she.'' You can't say ''I went to my doctor and he examined me'' unless you can prove that the person who examined you was, in fact, a man.

I'm personally content using the word ''he'' to represent both sexes as a shortcut. It makes sense to me; after all, ''mankind'' is still acceptable (I think). Unfortunately, it's not politically correct and whenever I do that, the medical editor changes ''he'' to ''he or she.''

The problem, so far as I can see, is that ''he'' doesn't have a ''she'' in it. However, ''she (''s-he'') does have a ''he'' in it. To solve the problem, why don't we just use ''she'' as the genderless person. Then it would be OK to say ''I went to the doctor and she examined me,'' and we'd all know that she could be either he or she. I'm not serious about this!

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