https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9649-8274
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ABSTRACT
This paper characterizes a phenomenon I call ‘binarism grammatical lacuna’ (BGL). BGL occurs when non-binary sex and gender identities are forced to choose between being he or she by the grammar of a language owing to the sex/gender binary. Although hermeneutical injustice (HI) lies at its core, given that non-binary communities come up with hermeneutical devices to overcome unintelligibility and these tools are discredited, a variety of epistemic injustices, besides HI, intertwine in BGL. I address contributory injustice, pragmatic competence injustice, testimonial injustice, and testimonial smothering. Section 1 introduces the phenomenon by portraying it as an ensemble of epistemic injustices. Section 2 elucidates the variety of HI at the core of BGL by examining the case of mainstream Spanish, and section 3 reveals it as producing the primary harm of HI. Section 4 studies the relationship between grammar, ideology, and language use, calling attention to the fact that grammatical lacunae are performatively reenacted in daily speech acts. Section 5 explores the agential dimension of BGL, examining responsibilities. In addition to addressing some of the forms of epistemic injustice that might intertwine in BGL besides HI, I portray non-marginalized users of binary grammar when addressing non-binary people as hermeneutical misfirers.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Bernardo Santano and John Hyman for their comments on early versions of the manuscript. Special thanks go to two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their productive pieces of feedback and to the Executive Editor of the journal for his support throughout the peer-review process. I would also like to dedicate a few words to my students, with whom I have had very stimulating conversations about what is generally called ‘inclusive’ language. All of us benefited much from the organization of the Workshop Women Philosophers, which was celebrated at the University of Seville in November 2020. Any errors are my own.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For instance, in Hekanaho (Citation2020, 131, 147), the generic use of they is accepted by 94% of respondents, while the non-binary use of they is accepted only by 67%.
2. This percentage is confirmed by the data obtained in the context of non-academic surveys, such as Lodge (Citation2021).
3. Sometimes the intersex status of participants manifests in survey results even if the questions are not sensitive toward their realities. For instance, 2.7% of respondents to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey indicated that they were intersex (James et al. Citation2016, 126, footnote 16) when answering questions concerning medical surgery and 3% of respondents opted for intersex as a gender category (44). However, one cannot derive specific information from the survey regarding their use of pronouns.
4. Free & Equal, United Nations campaign for LGBTI equality, Intersex factsheet, available at: https://www.unfe.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/UNFE-Intersex.pdf. The large gap in estimation is due to lack of consensus on the diagnosis of intersex: the first figure refers to one specific intersex trait, genital variance, while the second figure, welcomed by the intersex community, also addresses other intersex traits. In any case, given that one’s intersex status might not be detected until later in life or might not be detected at all, the number of intersex people might be higher than current estimates.
5. ‘Intersex’ can refer to a biological reality, ‘but may also serve as a term for gender identity, depending on the person’ (Hanssen Citation2017, 288).
6. For example, while 67% of respondents in Hekanaho (Citation2020, 147) accept the non-binary use of they, only 34% accept the non-binary use of the neopronoun ze and only 33% the non-binary use of the neopronoun xe. Percentages regarding usage are also eloquent: while 80% of non-binary participants report going by they, only 10% report going by neopronouns (Hekanaho Citation2020, 221). Other research confirms that they is more commonly used among non-binary communities than neopronouns (see Cordoba Citation2020; or The Trevor Project Citation2021a, Citation2021b, Citation2020).
7. That said, I have been able to locate more studies conducted in Argentina with a focus in Argentinian populations than elsewhere. I understand it as a sign of the fact that the presence of morpheme -e in the collective hermeneutical repertoire in Argentina is larger than in other Spanish-speaking countries, such as Spain.
8. Most commonly focusing on remedying the invisibility of women, they rarely include figures showing the actual use and acceptance of ‘elle’ (see Battista Citation2021, 132–134).
9. Take the following examples: among a sample of 943 university students, 76% report being willing to use inclusive language instead of masculine generics (Gómez Carrillo, Tójar Hurtado and Mena Rodríguez Citation2021, esp. 385); in a survey conducted by María Luisa Jiménez Rodrigo, Marisa Román Onsalo and Joaquín Traverso Cortés (2011, esp. 180), the weight of the custom of using masculine generics is identified by 61% of those surveyed as a significant burden to the use of inclusive language.
10. See Battista (Citation2021, esp. 136–137) or D’Andrea and Mendoza Posadas (Citation2021, 321).
11. The research is available here: https://www.iic.uam.es/digital/analisis-del-uso-del-lenguaje-inclusivo-en-twitter/.
12. It is revealing that in one of such studies, it is not the usage and the acceptance of pronoun ‘elle’ that is measured, but of the English pronoun ‘they’, even though those surveyed are Spanish speakers (see Nogueira Citation2021, esp. 198).
13. This study does not measure general use of morpheme -e, but use of specific employments of morpheme -e, as Bonnin and Coronel (Citation2021, 3) believe, together with Kalinowski (Citation2020b), that ‘non-binary non-standard forms (such as suffixes -e and -x) cannot be described – at least for the time being – as a part of a linguistic variety, but rather as a discursive strategy’, given that there is ‘a limited, but very active, number of users’ and ‘a very limited number of lexical forms employing -e and -x’. They consider that ‘the latter feature is very important: 72.37% of the non-standard non-binary tokens used in Twitter correspond, in fact, to only four words: todxs/es, amigxs/ues, ellxs/les, and chicxs/ques’ (Bonnin and Coronel Citation2021, 3–4).
14. 74.2% of the total respondents find it acceptable in the vocative, whereas only 64.9% consider it acceptable in the middle of the sentence; likewise, there are more people who consider it weird (24.6%) or directly unacceptable (10.5%) in the middle of the sentence.
15. ’[N]on-binary respondents would use it in a vocative position in 87.1%, followed by 64.6% of women, and 48.2% of men’; ‘in non-vocative positions, attitudes are less positive, as expected: 72.4% of non-binary, 52.9% of women and 38.5% of men’ (Bonnin and Coronel Citation2021, 7).
16. Generic masculine remains the form most widely accepted, independently of its position in a sentence: more than 80% find it acceptable, more than 11% weird and more than 7% unacceptable (Bonnin and Coronel Citation2021, 7–8). The contrast with acceptability of generic masculine in English is revealing, see Hekanaho (Citation2020, esp. 131) and the discussion on pages 6 and 7 of this paper in respect of the acceptability of generic ‘he’ versus the acceptability of singular ‘they’.
17. 11.5% of non-binary respondents find generic masculine unacceptable independently of its position in the sentence, and 20.3% find it weird in a vocative position and 24.6% in the middle of the sentence. In contrast, 8.3% of female respondents find it unacceptable and 13.2% weird in a vocative position, and 8.5% consider it unacceptable and 13% find it weird in the middle of the sentence; and 4.1% of male respondents find it unacceptable and 7.6% weird in a vocative position, and 4.2% consider it unacceptable and 6.8% find it weird in the middle of the sentence. In respect of adoptability, ‘54.9% of non-binary respondents would use generic masculine in a vocative position, followed by 75.8% of women and 83.3% of men’; and, in a non-vocative position, ‘52.1% of non-binary would use it, followed by women (75.5%) and men (84.9%)’ (Bonnin and Coronel Citation2021, 8).
18. Observe that there is only a small number of non-binary people who go by it (9.3% according to Lodge (Citation2021) or 4.2% according to Hekanaho (Citation2020, 221)). Moreover, this pronoun is perceived as dehumanizing by part of the non-binary community (Hekanaho Citation2020, 221). Besides, Spanish speakers are likely to be more reluctant to use ‘ello’ than English speakers to use ‘it’, as in modern English, unlike in Spanish, ‘it’ is used to refer to people, for instance, young children, even though only under some circumstances.
19. Regarding the correspondence between grammatical gender and the sex of the referent in the case of animated beings, see also Royal Spanish Academy (Citationn.d.), esp. meaning n. 8, ‘género femenino’ and ‘género masculino’.
20. Unfortunately, there are no exhaustive studies concerning the perception, reception and/or acceptance of the use of morpheme -e by language users who do not accept or use it. The results of this sort of surveys could certainly help us understand the phenomenon under scrutiny (D’Andrea and Mendoza Posadas Citation2021, 323). Among those that I have been able to locate, the focus is again on ‘inclusive’ or ‘non-sexist’ language and the use of masculine generics. In Nogueira (Citation2021, esp. 194–197), for instance, 8.35% of respondents explicitly reject inclusive language: 6.73% value it negatively, considering it unnecessary or incorrect, and the remaining 1.62% do not consider it a better option than the generic masculine. With a larger population sample, in UADE (2020), 7 out of 10 respondents prefer masculine generics, 7 out of 10 disagree with the use of inclusive language in official communications of the government and universities, 8 out of 10 disagree that its use becomes mandatory at the institutional level, and 6 out of 10 express complete accordance with its prohibition at the institutional level. Gómez Carrillo, Tójar Hurtado and Mena Rodríguez (Citation2021, esp. 180) show that there is a clear difference between men and women: most male respondents attribute little relevance to the use of inclusive language. The figures put together by Bonnin and Coronel (Citation2021, esp. 5–7), regarding acceptability and adoptability of the employment of morpheme -e for certain words in a sample of the Argentinian population that, as they acknowledge, cannot be generalized to the total population of Argentina, also show that men have more negative attitudes than women, and these more than non-binary respondents.
21. This is related to the fact that ‘inclusive language’ in Spain is mainly oriented toward making women visible (D’Andrea and Mendoza Posadas Citation2021, 321). See footnote number 7.