He? She? It?

Have you ever been in a conversation, and you find yourself getting mixed up with he/she or his/her? For example, you’d be talking about Donald Trump and you’d say “her hairstyle”? I suspect not a lot of native English-speakers encounter this problem. For some reason—and I’m going to bravely propose a theory here—it seems that Filipinos have this peculiar predisposition because of a particular characteristic of the Filipino language: the existence of gender-neutral pronouns.

In Filipino (or Tagalog, the dialect from which Filipino is based), a person can be described (indeed, gossiped about) without necessarily divulging the person’s gender, much less their identity. So a watercooler discussion might go, “Sinabi niya yon?!” ["He/She said that?! "] and the nitty-gritty details of the latest office headline might be talked about, but the identity (and hopefully the reputation) of the people involved will never be known. Such is not the case with English; you can only use “he/she” or “the person” so much. At some point, you’ll start to sound like a user’s manual or a spokesperson for political correctness.

So what I think is happening is that, in my mind, my verbal response is first formulated in Filipino—where my natural tendency is to use non-incriminating words like “niya” or “siya“—but during the translation process to English, a cerebral conflict ensues whereby my brain doesn’t know whether to use “he” or “she”, and before I remember who exactly we’re talking about, the wrong word has spilled out of my mouth. You would think, having a 50/50 chance of getting this right, that I’d at least nail it half of the time. Of course not. And consistent with Murphy’s Corollary of things going wrong with the maximum effect, I’d get the “he/she syndrome” as I’m about to deliver a punchline to a joke.

But what I’ve learned to be the most reliable substitute is to simply remember the person’s name. And before you underestimate the importance of this skill, consider this: when you’re in a meeting and you forgot everybody’s names, how would you refer to the person across you who just happens to be a transvestite? Ha!

Which was exactly what happened to me (no kidding!)—except that I knew the person’s name