She/Her/Harms?
Oct 2022
The Inadvertent Effects of Instagram Pronoun Markers on Gender Salience and Advocacy
Ashna Ramiah
In May of 2021, Instagram became the first among its social media giant counterparts to introduce a designated field for users to display their preferred pronouns, a move lauded for promoting greater inclusivity for transgender and gender non-conforming individuals (Yeo). Pronoun-sharing is not a new phenomenon, as the already frequent manual inclusion of pronouns in the “bio” text box of users’ profiles is likely what sparked the new feature. Still, this new Instagram-endorsed field is in accordance with the other new pronoun-sharing norms rapidly adopted in the pandemic era. Workplaces and academic institutions are taking on greater authority in making these practices of advocacy part of their community’s canon by implicitly or explicitly encouraging the inclusion of pronouns in email signatures and meeting introductions — the launch of the Instagram pronoun field sends a similar message.
Acceptance of this norm seems to be effectively spreading: in an online survey [1] I conducted in April of 2022, 70% of 47 adult respondents indicated that they displayed their preferred pronouns in at least one of their social media profiles. 94% percent of these respondents displayed their pronouns on Instagram, while less than 35% displayed their pronouns on Twitter or other platforms. Several participants noted that the introduction of the designated pronoun field had directly prompted their decision to display their pronouns, as they would not have otherwise included pronouns on their profiles. In this way, the architecture of Instagram appears to serve an unprecedented and central role in this shift in online practices. Many individuals, however, have more deliberate ethical and personal intentions underpinning their choice to disclose their gender identities. The most extensively shared intention stems from the reasoning that if most people shared their pronouns, this would create a new social norm that would promote inclusivity of transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) individuals by helping protect them from being misgendered and creating a space where they will not be singled-out or “othered” in being the only ones to share their pronouns. When cisgender and TGNC people alike commit to making space for the existence of diverse gender identities, they also help to generally disambiguate the concepts of gender and biological sex by emphasizing that they do not always correspond and should never be inferred or assumed from physical appearance alone; every user’s grid of photos thus ceases to speak for itself in implying their gender identity. These reasons could be reworded into two broader pursuits among pronoun-sharing advocates as follows:
Pronoun-sharing reduces the number of unpleasant and identity-devaluing encounters that TGNC individuals must face.
Pronoun-sharing helps weaken the rigidly categorical sex-based gender binary.
Furthermore, these benefits appear at first glance to be accompanied by few serious risks or downsides: adding pronouns seems relatively effortless, easily adopted en masse, and unlikely to harm or offend any individual who cares about TGNC equality. Could it be the case that this simple practice is too good to be true? Brian Earp, a bioethicist and philosopher at the University of Oxford known for their study of sex and gender, investigates the merits of similar premises in their essay “On Sharing Pronouns.” Earp introduces an important discussion of the nature of gendered pronouns and of gender as a concept, calling into question the objective virtue of pronoun-sharing. Building off their work, I will draw together linguistic and sociological data, philosophical discourse, and TGNC perspectives in order to call into question whether the Instagram pronoun field and other designated places for pronouns are truly beneficial in these two ways and to show that they may have unintended effects which warrant their removal. This will involve increasingly broader explorations of the nature of pronouns and gender in society before returning to the narrower discussion of Instagram pronoun-sharing.
PRELIMINARY INQUIRY:
The Problem with Gendered Pronouns
To understand why pronoun-sharing could have potential risks, it is important to first understand both the intended nature and actual effects of gendered pronouns in general linguistic use. In grammatical terms, personal pronouns serve to provide brevity by standing in place of things or people already mentioned instead of having to repeatedly identify them (Earp 2). Inanimate objects or concepts are identified as it, while people are commonly referred to as I, we, you, they, she, or he. The last three can be used to refer to a third person, but only the last two of these pronouns encode information about the gender of a subject.
The sharing of these gendered personal pronouns raises a concern about the first pursuit. If our goal is to prevent unpleasant and harmful situations for TGNC individuals, we must be sure that this is one of the best ways to protect them from being misgendered and to avoid placing various unnecessary pressures on them. Earp places emphasis on the idea of privacy, especially for those who are questioning their gender identity or do not feel comfortable disclosing that information (9). If pronoun sharing becomes such a widely accepted practice that in many everyday situations most individuals are either explicitly asked for their pronouns or implicitly pressured to share them (because everyone else is sharing them or because they do not want to seem like they do not care about normalizing the practice), this might cause them to experience unwanted pressures and act in ways that are not authentic with their feelings (9). Closeted or questioning individuals might choose not to share their pronouns and bear shame or unwanted attention, or they might be forced to lie about the way they perceive their own gender identity (9). Perhaps worse, they might feel pressured to out themselves in public and risk derision or danger (9). Earp describes gender as something that may be “even more private than their apparent membership in one sex category or another: to get ahold of it, you have to enter a person’s mind” (11). For these reasons, it is not apparent that a more pervasive pronoun-sharing norm would be advantageous in terms of protecting vulnerable individuals and could even make matters worse.
Moreover, pronoun sharing might not even be necessary to avoid misgendering. One common misconception about the pronoun they is that it can only be used in a plural form — that is, to refer to multiple people — in order to be grammatically intelligible or “proper” English. However, they has been used as a singular pronoun in English as early as the 14th century and has been commonly used ever since to refer to any person whose gender is unknown (Baron). Earp demonstrates this by asking their readers to fill in the blank of the sentence, “Whenever our mystery guest arrives, please show ____ into the living room” (3). They contend that most readers likely instinctively filled in the word them, and that this choice would not provide any ambiguity or unintelligibility. This is important because it means that they can be an effective alternative to the gendered pronouns she and he, which calls into question whether sharing pronouns is a necessary and optimal solution. If instead of referring to all individuals by their preferred personal pronouns we referred to everyone as they, this would eliminate the opportunity for misgendering of TGNC persons. As nonbinary philosophers Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak explain in their paper “He/She/They/Ze,” they is gender-neutral, and by virtue of this it cannot ascribe an “incorrect” gender to a person, because it does not encode gender at all (385). Dembroff and Wodak also note that they is not exclusive to nonbinary or TGNC individuals, and that it cannot therefore inherently misgender an individual by implying that they are nonbinary, transgender, or gender non-conforming (387). By this logic, even people whose gender identities strongly align with their biological sex (or even those who do not believe that the two are disparate concepts) can be fairly and unoffensively referred to using they/them without negating their right to express themselves in highly gendered, non-androgynous ways. On the other hand, the use of she and he can be used to misgender people, and the existence of these two gendered pronouns might causally increase misgendering by highlighting such a dichotomy. Because universal usage of they would provide a substantial advantage over mixed usage of they, she, and he in avoiding misgendering, widespread pronoun-sharing might not be the optimal solution. If everyone were referred to as they, no one would need to share pronouns and no one would be referred to with pronouns of a wrong gender. Instead of simply reducing the chances of misgendering in our linguistic practices, we would eliminate the problem entirely.
The existence and common usage of the gendered pronouns she and he directly necessitate pronoun-sharing if we intend to use language that affirms every individual’s gender identity. In other words, it is not that our disparate gender identities require us to share our gendered pronouns, but that our use of gendered pronouns require us to share our disparate gender identities. These grammar norms allow for misgendering and “rob [individuals] of that choice” in disclosing their gender identities (Dembroff and Wodak 393).
Gendered personal pronouns do not just pose a threat to TGNC individuals — they impose their will upon nearly everyone in everyday life. As explained earlier, she and he are pronouns that clearly encode information about the gender of an individual. As psycholinguists Ute Gabriel and Pascal Gygax explain in their paper “Gender and Linguistic Sexism,” this makes it so that speakers of English constantly have to “pay routine attention to the gender category to which the person or persons to which they refer belong” in order to communicate anything about them. Gendered pronouns actually have profound perceptual impacts, as they make the category of “gender” more cognitively salient or accessible by requiring speakers to consciously or unconsciously process gender each time they must say she or he (Gabriel and Gygax). This causes both speakers and listeners to consider the gender of a subject to be relevant to the meaning of a sentence even when it is not, which has been empirically shown to increase the incidence of gender-based stereotyping and sexism (Gabriel and Gyrax). Dembroff and Wodak use the example of the phrase “She won the Booker Prize twice,” which suggests that “[the subject, Hillary Mantel’s] gender identity is somehow relevant to why she won the Booker Prize twice” (397). Definitions of each word in that phrase would yield information highly relevant to the intended meaning of the phrase (such as what it means to win, what the Booker Prize is, what twice means, etc.), except in the case of she, which would be defined as a pronoun that specifically refers to a woman in whatever sense. Here, the speaker intends to use she as meaning something like “the aforementioned person,” but is forced to deliver the message “the afore-mentioned person who is a woman.” The same would go for if the subject were a male — in either case, gender is just as salient by virtue of the grammar. Unless the speaker specifically wanted to highlight Mantel’s womanhood in their message, there are better alternatives to she in this case: the first name of the subject (Hillary) might imply or be correlated with gender information but does not inherently encode it by virtue of the meaning of the word, the last name (Mantel) does not imply any gender, and usage of they or even the person would not imply or encode gender information at all.
It is not the case that language has any sort of requirement for specifying gender in pronouns, as shown by languages like Mandarin Chinese which do not have gendered pronouns. Speakers of Mandarin “seldom process the gender of referent information through linguistic devices” (Gabriel and Gygax, describing a study by Dong et al.), meaning that the structure of the language actually helps reduce the processes which contribute to sexism and stereotyping. Gendered pronouns can even contribute to self-stereotyping — it has been shown that women and gender minorities become psychologically predisposed to conform to or worry about negative stereotypes of their identities when they are reminded of their own gender through such linguistic cues (Earp 10). Upon examination, it is strange why English would all but require speakers to constantly think about gender, as this serves little purpose in the majority of cases where the sentence has little to do with the speaker’s being a certain gender. There are other traits which constitute a similar proportion of many individuals’ identities such as race, but it would be intuitively appalling to require us to encode the race of an individual each time we referred to them by having the pronouns “ble” and “whe” for black and white people, as imagined in a satirical essay by the scholar Douglas Hofstadter (Earp 13). With all of this, the idea of reinforcing and drawing emphasis to our gendered pronouns in our bios and introductions seems to only worsen this problem.
EXPANDED INQUIRY:
The Problem with Gender
Perhaps there is a bigger issue to be contended with if we are to encourage the use of gender-neutral pronouns in lieu of mass pronoun sharing. The use of gendered pronouns in common practice has become more than just a linguistic device, evolving into a signifier of someone’s identity through multiple lenses. There are still many skeptics who reject the idea of pronoun sharing, thinking it to be a “PC” attempt at encouraging people to act and conform to norms not “natural” to their biological sex, their sex being the trait which really determines whether they are male or female.[2] However, it is clear that there are several things which go into the conceptualization of gender beyond biological sex which even these skeptics would hesitate to reject. For example, there are social roles and norms which often accompany the idea of being male or female (hair length, clothing style, occupation, etc.), even when these rules are broken by biological males and females. Most critics who would equate biological sex with gender would likely balk at the idea of a biological male appearing like and conforming to the social norms of a female or vice versa, so it is clear that they incorporate both biological sex and social norms into their definition of gender (Dembroff, “Why be Nonbinary?”). Many scholars have independently identified different sets of factors which are often used in forming a gender conceptualization — here, I will include the ones most cited:
Biological sex (one’s chromosomes and/or genitals)
Bodily traits (one’s body shape, height, voice, and secondary sex characteristics)
Behavior (one’s choice of dress and hair; one’s actions and way of socializing)
Lived experience (one’s history of having been subjected to certain gendered norms and experiencing certain social treatment based on their biological sex or bodily traits)
Personal identification (one’s self- classification within a certain gender category)
Under the current muddied classification approaches, it would only be possible to achieve a societal consensus about whether a person has a male or female gender only when all five of these factors are in accordance with the same norm; any one incongruency can call their gender into question by someone or another. For example, many transgender women often have their first and fourth factor align with a male norm, though the other factors align with a female norm. Transphobes usually cite the first factor, while those referred to as “TERFs” usually cite the fourth factor (Watson 249). Another example is philosopher Lori Watson, who identifies as female but is often mistaken for being male by virtue of the way they dress, their short hair, and their tall, broad physique (247). Their “violations” concern factors 2, 3, and partially 4. Despite their biological sex, Watson has to undergo the turmoil of being mistaken for a male while using restrooms and meeting new people. Essentialists who equate biological sex and gender would defend Watson’s right to use the women’s restroom and be referred to with she/her pronouns, but many of them would also unjustly believe that Watson has an obligation to dress in a more “feminine” way to conform to the norms of their gender, even if this felt inauthentic for them. It is hard to defend the idea of distinct and consistent gender categories without alienating the people who do not check all the boxes.
It also seems here that there is some redundancy in the phrase “gender norms” — perhaps gender is synonymous with the binary norms associated with these five considerations. As a result, those who deny the existence of TGNC identities and those who encourage pronoun sharing might both be contributing to the reinforcement of normative binary gender categorization. In an ideal world, it would not just be the case that all people would be able to express themselves however they want on the masculine-feminine spectrum, it is that the spectrum would not exist at all; the idea of having masculine and feminine things would be unintelligible. As described by nonbinary teen Kelsey Beckham in a 2014 interview by The Washington Post, “I don’t want to be a girl wearing boy’s clothes, nor do I want to be a girl who presents as a boy. I’m just a person wearing people clothes” (Beckham, qtd. by Dembroff “Why be Nonbinary?”). Beckham does not deny aligning one way or another in terms of factors 1 through 4, but they reject the idea that they should be perceived through that kind of lens — unlike the previous examples, they resist having an alignment for factor 5. This seems to be the most reasonable and effective way to deconstruct the idea of gender in our practices going forward. Rather than encouraging everyone to act and behave according to any different prescribed norms they prefer, we can reject the idea of norms as a whole. In their article “When Asked ‘What Are Your Pronouns,’ Don’t Answer,” evolutionary biologist Colin Wright fictionalizes a world where everyone is encouraged to introduce themselves with their name and zodiac sign. It is true that everyone “has” a zodiac sign by virtue of when they were born, but this does not mean that everyone subscribes to the principles of astrology. Likewise, individuals might have a certain biological sex, behavior patterns, and more, but not subscribe to the principles of gender categorization. They might simply refuse to be perceived through a blue or pink colored lens.
NARROWED INQUIRY:
The Problem with the Instagram
Pronoun Field
When we return to the topic of Instagram profiles, it becomes more clear that the pronoun field is the frame in which these lenses are set. It is an especially dangerous frame. While email signatures and oral introductions can be important to forming impressions of others, they are transitory and can be forgotten or overlooked in favor of perceiving their appearance and personality more holistically by getting to know them over time. Instagram, on the other hand, is becoming an unprecedented tool for entirely and persistently representing a user’s identity. During my time at university thus far, I have noticed friends and acquaintances referring to their Instagram “mutuals” who they have never met in person but have gotten a sense of through a brief scan of their profile grid. In the survey introduced at the start, around 70% of respondents indicated that they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the claims that they often form impressions of others and that others likely form impressions of them by viewing their Instagram profile. This concept can be advantageous in giving users greater freedom to express themselves authentically and curate how they want to be perceived by others, which is often out of their control in person. However, direct or indirect pressures to include pronouns might undermine that authenticity by forcing users to place a marker of how they are normally socially perceived in terms of gender norms, which structures the way their profile and identity are subsequently understood. The pronoun field itself is oriented in a position of high importance, being directly adjacent to the user’s name. This signifies that the user’s pronouns are central to their identity and should be first known in order to interpret the rest of their existence, further elevating gender salience and reinforcing binary gender norms. Survey respondents were also asked to rank several methods for determining a new acquaintance’s gender identity, and the highest-scoring method was checking their social media page.[3] Social media platforms like Instagram are clearly becoming a vessel for disseminating gender information, and their convenience poses dangerous risks of increasing the accessibility of the gender category.
Those direct or indirect pressures contributing to this situation are not insignificant. Several survey responses mentioned the fact that other friends were including pronouns as a primary reason for their own decision to add them. Furthermore, because of the general acceptance of pronoun-sharing as an inclusive practice, few would want to skip out and risk appearing intolerant. Pronoun-sharing is also becoming both a virtue and political affiliation signaling device. A study assessing how individuals perceive the motivations of others who share their pronouns found that cisgender individuals and individuals with a large audience are more likely to be perceived as trying to demonstrate their moral superiority and help their reputations as compared to TGNC individuals who might have a “personal stake” in the matter (Kodipady et al. 28–29).[4] Potentially perceived as “slacktivism” akin to the #BlackoutTuesday phenomenon, pronoun sharing might become devalued as a tool for advocacy because it is a deceptively easy way for users to conclude that they have “done their part” in promoting equality for marginalized identities without taking the time to make substantial contributions. In this way, the efforts of TGNC individuals might even be devalued as well, because they might also be seen as performative despite having more deliberate intentions for inclusivity. If many users include their pronouns for the sake of following a rule or norm or to boost their own reputation, it becomes harder to identify true allies and advocates for TGNC people.
The question then becomes what we should do to best serve the needs of TGNC individuals and to dismantle the rigid gender binary. Earp employs the practice of using they/them for everyone except those known to have a preference for other pronouns (14). While this reduces the frequency of gendered pronoun use, it does not do enough to dismantle the gendered language system among cis people who still largely have preferences, and to prevent transgender individuals — who often have meaningful reasons for their preference — from being singled out. Dembroff and Wodak defend the possibility of achieving universal they/them usage for those with and without pronoun preferences and identify a few general steps to achieving this. They encourage the initial gradual usage of gender-neutral pronouns for cisgender individuals, taking care to use both gender-neutral and gender-affirming pronouns for vulnerable TGNC individuals (387–388). This would normalize the generic practice and prevent TGNC people from being singled out through the sole use of either gendered or nongendered pronouns. They also encourage the adoption of they/them as the default generic singular personal pronoun in institutional and academic settings in order to boost the legitimacy of the practice (388).
These ideas are promising and help set the stage for reduced gender salience. Going further, it is important to keep in mind that TGNC individuals are still at-risk and the majority of people still think in terms of highly binary gender categories, so getting rid of pronoun fields could undo any progress toward an inclusive society by causing individuals to once again fall back on making stereotype-driven assumptions about the gender of others through their appearance, name, or behavior. An adequate solution might be to gradually remove pronoun fields after some time (or move them to a place of reduced prominence on the profile) and to couple this with an increase in acceptance of universal gender-neutral pronouns, which could plausibly be virally disseminated by educational Instagram posts and stories just as rapidly as pronoun sharing norms were. Accompanied by similar advocacy by academia, governments, and businesses, it is not unfathomable that they/them could become a widely accepted standard singular pronoun on and off-line.
There might still be some who are hesitant to go along with this plan. For example, there might be cisgender allies who are willing to go to a certain length in order to promote an inclusive space for TGNC individuals but are not comfortable surrendering their personal gendered pronouns. For these people, pronoun-sharing seems like a “happy medium.” However, their discomfort might fade away with the growth of default institutional use of they/them for people of all genders, as this would reinforce the idea that these neutral pronouns do not deny or negate any one person’s gender, instead saying nothing about their gender at all. For most people, it is likely that an attachment to he or she does not come from the way those words literally “sound,” but rather how they signify the idea of the gender which best represents how they want to be perceived, which can contribute to problematic norms. In this way, public institutions referring to cisgender male, cisgender female, and TGNC individuals alike with the same pronouns might help reinforce the concept that pronouns no longer have to signify gendered ideas; there is no longer a significant practical reason to have a preference for he or she because anyone can express themself in any gender-typed ways while still being referred to as they. If a main concern of many cisgender allies is continuing to be perceived as their gender, they will still be able to achieve this under gender-neutral pronoun use. This will hopefully decrease apprehension when it comes to abandoning pronouns and convince allies to opt out of sharing them.
While there is much left to do before gender has a chance of being a non-concept entirely, gradually retiring pronoun fields and adopting neutral pronouns could be a helpful start toward reducing the salience of gender where it is not necessary. Further motions up for independent discussion might include eliminating gendered non-pronominal words like brother, actress, and queen, and eliminating gendered sections in clothing stores. At the same time, such efforts should be accompanied by continued advocacy for marginalized gender groups in order to prevent gender-based discrimination from being swept under the rug while attention is drawn to a more ultimate goal of gender abolition. For the time being, I am keeping pronouns out of my bio and encouraging those who are comfortable to do the same, while simultaneously advocating mass public change in hopes of imagining a more equitable, gender-blind future.
Notes
[1] This survey was publicly shared among students and faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, and within multiple non-Washington University-affiliated social media sites. Responses were anonymous and open to respondents of any gender identity and/or political affiliation. Ongoing results can be viewed at https://pclgw2ptgrb.typeform.com/report/wd62wKKF/xkKropzwUoPCl5mI.
[2] The existence of intersex individuals directly refutes the idea of two rigidly categorical biological sexes. Furthermore there are sufficient genetic and phenotypic variations even within sex categories which have led experts to believe that biological sex cannot be clearly divided into two neat categories. This explanation is not necessary to the argument that follows but reinforces the rejection of biological essentialism (Dembroff, “Why be Nonbinary?”).
[3] The other methods, listed in order of descending average ranking, were 2) using a gender-neutral pronoun, 3) asking their pronouns directly, 4) inferring gender identity from clothing and hair, and 5) inferring gender identity from physical features.
[4] The study was conducted among nearly 3,000 subjects with 1,467 identifying as female, 1,246 identifying as male, 29 identifying as non-binary, and 14 of unknown gender identity. It was not measured whether these individuals personally choose to share their pronouns in their own practice. All participants read a brief educational passage providing background context about the phenomenon of pronoun-sharing.
Works Cited
Baron, Dennis. “A Brief History of Singular ‘They.’” Oxford English Dictionary, 4 Sept. 2018, public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they.
Dembroff, Robin. “Why be Nonbinary?” Aeon, 30 Oct. 2018, aeon.co/essays/nonbinary-identity-is-a-radical-stance-against-gender-segregation.
Dembroff, Robin, and Daniel Wodak. “He/She/They/Ze.” Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 4, 2018, pp. 371-406, doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0005.014.
Dong, Yanping, et al. “Exploring the Cause of English Pronoun Gender Errors by Chinese Learners of English: Evidence from the Self-Paced Reading Paradigm.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 44, 2015, pp. 733–747, doi.org/10.1007/s10936-014-9314-6.
Earp, Brian. “On Sharing Pronouns.” The Philosopher, vol. 109, no. 1, June 2021, pp. 107–15.
Gabriel, Ute, and Pascal Gygax. “Gender and Linguistic Sexism.” Advances in Intergroup Communication, edited by Howard Miles and Anne Maass. Peter Lang, 2016, doi.org/10.3726/b10467.
Kodipady, Aditi., et al. “Beyond Virtue Signaling: Perceived Motivations for Pronoun Sharing.” PsyArXiv, 1 Nov. 2021, doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/s6ct9.
Watson, Lori. “The Woman Question.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 1–2, May 2016, pp. 246–53, doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334451.
Wright, Colin. “When Asked ‘What Are Your Pronouns,’ Don’t Answer.” Wall Street Journal, 4 Feb. 2022.
Yeo, Amanda. “Instagram Will Now Let Users Add Pronouns to Their Profiles.” Mashable, 12 May 2021.
Ashna Ramiah is from St. Louis, MO and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.