Facebook to users: pick a gender

This is kinda off topic, but it combines two subjects close to my heart—gender and grammar, whoopee!—so I can’t resist. Broadsheet reports that when Facebook sends a newsfeed about your friend’s latest picture tagging, instead of “Pat Smith tagged themself in a picture” you’ll now read “Pat Smith tagged himself” or “Pat Smith tagged herself.”

Darn but that old third-person singular is still giving us feminist grammarians grief. I’m not crazy about singular use of “they”—it violates my love of precision in language and often creates confusion—but I’m inclined to think it’s about as good a solution as we’re gonna get. We do need a solution, because “he” just isn’t a generic pronoun. And weird invented pronouns just sound, well, weird. Language after all is a social game; as Wittgenstein said, you can’t just go off and create a private language. Unless everyone suddenly embraces a new pronoun you can’t create a new one.

This is why Facebook’s effort to accommodate those who don’t wish to be boxed into gender categories by allowing users to enter whatever they want in the gender category doesn’t cut it. If you enter “shim” for example as your gender, you have immediately labeled yourself oddball. Which is not the same as staying gender neutral.

I’m sorry Facebook has taken this step. Everywhere else in life we’re forced to announce our genders, and now we’ve lost one place to opt out of that game. As a parent, I’m acutely aware of how ferociously gender is policed in children. People get really uncomfortable when they guess wrongly that my blue-bedecked baby is a boy, even though neither the baby nor I care. And heaven forbid a boy child should wear pink. And when my partner and I chose not to find out the kids’ sex before birth, people were more startled by that than when they learned we were choosing to have the children at home. Which is precisely why we chose not to find out. Let the kids—and us, their parents—be free of the rigid pressures and expectations of gender at least until they’re born.

You didn't think I was going to be able to bring this back to parenting, did you?