Article ID: 23
tl;dr: ``他'' uses the ``人'' (person) radical, and should cover all people, because not all people are male.
In contemporary English, the traditional plaural pronoun ``they'' is often used as a gender-inclusive singular pronoun, alongside the feminine singular ``she'' and the masculine singular ``he''. However, there is no equivalent in Chinese. ``他'' is considered a masculine pronouns in contemporary Chinese, despite its ``人'' radical and its history of traditionally being a gender-inclusive pronoun until the 1920s. This article argues for the reclaiming of ``他'' as a gender-inclusive pronoun.
Prior to the May Fourth Movement and the broader New Culture Movement, ``他'' was a generic pronoun for all entities, including people of any gender, and inanimate objects. In the movements’ efforts to ``modernize'' the Chinese language and culture, a seperate feminine pronoun ``她'' was created by the poet and linguist 刘半农, becoming an established linguistic norm after the Chinese Civil War. (A seperate ``它'' was created for inanimate objects; however this has little relevance to the arguments in this article.)
A distinct feminine pronoun ``她'' along with ``他'' being a masculine pronoun poses three problems: (1) the annoyances caused by the lack of a inclusive placeholder pronoun, (2) the reinforcement of gender binary normatives and the lack of a neutral pronoun, and (3) the marginalization of the feminine from the concept of personhood.
When referring to a placeholder of unknown gender in contemporary English, singular they pronouns are often used, such as in ``someone left their laptop here''. Such colloquial conversations are generally aproblematic as all normative third-person pronouns in Mandarin sound the same: tā. However, in written contexts, many use ``他/她'' ressembling ``he/she''. Aside from how this reinforces gender binary and alienates women (see the next two paragraphs), it is visually unappealing (as half-width slashes look particularly distinct from full-width CJK ideographs and break typographical uniformity) and adds unnecessary syntactic sugar.
Individuals who are not comfortable with any gendered pronoun (such as me until this commit) often prefer singular they pronouns. (I do not wish to turn this article into a detailed discussion of non-binary gender, please read Leah Rowe’s article ``Better respect for non-binary people, in defense of human rights'' if this concept seems unfamiliar.) The status quo of ``她'' being solely a femine pronoun and ``他'' being solely a masculine pronoun reinforces gender binary and leaves no gender-neutral/inclusive pronoun for non-binary people who would prefer such pronouns.
The more fundamental issue with ``他'' as a masculine pronoun lies in its characater composition and etymology. ``他'' is a compound character consisting of a ``人'' (person) radical and ``也'', while ``她'' consists of a ``女'' (female) radical and ``也''. Limiting ``他'' as a male pronoun assumes the male gender as dominant in ``people'', and marginalizes other genders, most prominently the female gender, as groups distinct from ``people''. This aligns with the development of the ``她'' pronoun as a distinct subset of what used to be covered by ``他''. I believe that a character’s composition should not be deceptive to its meaning, and therefore, the ``他'' with the ``人'' radical should describe any person, not just any male person.
Those who prefer a unique masculine pronoun may choose to use one with a ``男'' (male) radical instead. While ``男也'' has not been given a unicode code-point yet, I find this solution to be much more ideal than stereotypical generalizationis with ``他''.