Photo credit: Niv Singer
Picture this: a world in which you must declare your preferred gender pronoun, or PGP, in every single sentence you utter. If you are someone who cares about the notion of gender, this may sound rather wonderful. No one would ever get confused. You’d always know how to address your fellow persons, and they would know how to address you. Conversations might go a little like this:
Me: Hello! How are you, male?
Friend: I’m fine. And you, female?
Me: I’m feeling-female terrible, actually. This someone-male male-banged his female-car into me.
Friend: Oh, poor-female thing…
Me: But anyway, never mind that, I’m okay now. Do you, male, want to go to the female-store to get some male-groceries with me?
Friend: Totally, let’s go, female.
It sounds awkward, sure, but more importantly, you may have noticed that this conversation is completely binary and that almost everything is gendered – nouns as well as pronouns. Here is another example, one that I heard last week:
Loudspeaker at train station: Attention, all male passengers, the 6:40 female-train to Tel Aviv has been female-canceled due to female-problems with the female-infrastructure at Lod.
Many people may be familiar with languages like Spanish or French in which nouns are gendered. The main difference between Hebrew and these other languages, however, is that one cannot speak in first or second person in Hebrew without indicating gender. The word “I” is ungendered, but any verb connected to it in present or future tenses inherently is. Thus, the phrase “I want a cookie” becomes, in literal translation, “I female-want a female-cookie.” (Cookie is a female-gendered noun, which I’m okay with, because yum, cookies.) In the example above, the reason the word “canceled” is attached to the word “female” is because “train” is a female subject, grammatically, and thus most verb conjugations describing that train will be gendered.
In other words, interpersonal conversation is never without the indication of gender. Even if you and another person were on two sides of a barrier and your voices were not indicative of your gender, you would each know the other’s gender within a few sentences because of the verb formulations you’d use.
The most densely populated Hebrew-speaking society resides in Israel, which is where I am as I write this. I grew up here, and though I considered myself a feminist as soon as I learned what being a feminist meant, it wasn’t until I went to college that I began to really think about the issues women have had to deal with inside the constraints of the Hebrew language. The liberal arts college I attended in New York was the kind of place where one could not help learning about gender. Luckily for me, as a card-carrying member of the LGBTQIA community (obviously, there are cards. Super classy. Glitter is optional.), I happened to want to, so I asked a lot of questions and apologized for my ignorance, and listened intently and read a lot until I could discuss the matter intelligently.
Coming back to Israel after a year away and speaking Hebrew day in and day out again has been a bit of a shock. I have been reminded of the many, many issues women deal with here. For one thing, the correct way to address a group of people in Hebrew is usually with male pronouns and verbs, unless the group is exclusively female. So if a lecture hall is filled with women, but one seat is occupied by a man, the professor is supposed to address the crowd with you-plural-male pronouns and verbs. Announcements at airports and train- and bus-stations similarly address crowds with the second-person-plural-male pronouns, because the assumption is that there will be men there (even one is enough to make this mandatory).
This “correct” way of speaking has been handed down from on high, the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which is “the world’s premiere institution for the Hebrew language, and in Israel, its decisions are binding on all governmental agencies.” The About section of the Academy’s website goes on to say: “Although the Academy has the reputation of being Israel’s ‘language police’, it does not police spontaneous speech. The institution considers its decisions binding only for written texts and formal speeches.”
What does this mean in practice? That formal speeches are addressed to men. That academics address their papers to men. That national examinations are usually addressed to men, with a little asterisk at the bottom of the page or the end of the exam booklet with some version of this disclaimer: “This test is geared towards both men and women.” Gee, thanks, I’d always think while sitting my exams in high school. And here I was thinking maybe I didn’t need to complete the test because I’m a woman and hence not in need of education. Furthermore, in day-to-day speech, the general second-person pronoun used in hypotheticals or examples of any kind is also gendered male.
The thing that really gets me is that we’re used to it here. The few women who speak out against these linguistic practices are billed as militant feminists. Knesset Member and former journalist Merav Michaeli is one of these women. She defies the stereotypes many people, here especially, associate with the idea of feminism; for one thing, she’s not married but is not a lesbian (her non-husband, as she calls him, is a comedian several years her junior). Far more importantly, she pisses people off by the fact that she refuses to abide by the arbitrary, patriarchy-backed rules of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. For every time in which the male pronoun should be used to address crowds or state hypotheticals, she uses the female pronouns. Occasionally, she doubles up, using both – for example a sentence might run: You-males and you-females, who male-want and female-want to male-see and female-see change…etc.
This is a step in the right direction in terms of acknowledging the fact that women exist here. There are many more changes which could and should be made, but unfortunately this country bows down to the most religious section of its population, which repeatedly tries (and too often succeeds) to ban immodest images of women in advertisements in places like Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. “Immodest,” by the way, means uncovered elbows, shoulders or knees. This is a whole separate kettle of gefilte fish, but it is demonstrative of the struggles women must face in order to be visible and counted.
While women’s voices still struggle to be heard, there is also a rather wide and vocal LGBTQIA community in Israel, centered mostly in and around Tel Aviv. Recently, in December of 2014, Domestic Union Cards have been introduced, allowing same-sex couples who meet the legal definition of common-law spouses — living together, sharing financial responsibilities — all the same rights as opposite gender couples. (Except, of course, that opposite-gender couples can marry without meeting any definitions except those of male and female according to their genitalia.)
But what about people who are neither man nor woman? Who define themselves as neither male nor female or as both female and male? The concept of genderqueers is not particularly known here, even among many people who belong to the LGBTQIA community. In Hebrew, mind you, the acronym is pronounced LaHaTaB, which stands for Lesbians, Homos, Transgender and Bisexuals. Queer or questioning, intersex or asexual individuals aren’t recognized in any form of acronym that I’ve heard of in Hebrew.
Photo credit: Niv Singer
A friend of mine, whom I’ve known since I was three years old, is part of feminist and queer circles here and studied linguistics at university, and so one day I put this question to her: How do genderqueer people handle the binary nature of Hebrew pronouns? One thing led to another, and I soon found myself conversing with the single Israel-based genderqueer Facebook group.
The way genderqueer Hebrew speakers have solved the problem is interesting, both grammatically and politically. Gramatically, the genderqueer population has basically invented its own. There are a few methods of making speech genderqueer: either one uses general verbs that have no gender – “I feel like eating,” for instance, which in Hebrew would be “it’s coming to me to eat.” Infinitives aren’t gendered, nor is the phrase “ba li,” which literally means “it’s coming to me,” but really means “I want” or “I feel like” doing or having or being something.
Another way genderqueer folks have gotten around the binary nature of Hebrew is to simply harness it and mix it all up with itself. A genderqueer person might then say something like “I am male-going to the gallery and female-buying art.” Or they will say, “I am male-going/female-going to the gallery and female-buying/male-buying art.” Since the feminine endings of words in Hebrew are usually simply an added suffix, genderqueer folks can play with the pronunciations of words to make them ambiguous.
I came into this story believing that there was no plus side to the gendered nature of Hebrew pronouns, but one of the Facebook group commentators, Jane Harris, who was kind enough to engage in this discussion with me, said this: “It’s funny how Hebrew is so empowering to genderqueers and other trans* people who are Out, and allows them to use their own grammatic gender, but so unconvinient to Closeted folks, who get a reminder every time [they] refer to themselves.”
Which brings me to the political importance of how genderqueers use the unyieldingly binary Hebrew language. By using the tactics invented by the community, they are automatically coming out in their speech, implying their ungendered, ambiguously gendered, or both-gendered status. Additionally, anyone who’s genderqueer or trans immediately knows when someone is making a mistake about their gender, because it will be imposed upon them in everyday speech, whether by a government official or the clerk at the grocery store. Then again, another commentator said that when they used mixed-gender pronouns, sometimes people began incorporating that same kind of mixture right back, apparently without even noticing.
The genderqueer community is relatively small in Israel, but it is a thoughtful and aware population. Their working around the limitations of language is necessary for their identity, but it is also a lesson in subtle activism. While Merav Michaeli may use her position to speak from podiums and address dozens of mostly male Knesset members as females in order to make the point that women should be counted just as much as men, the genderqueer folks are inventing a new grammatical structure entirely. Neither Michaeli’s linguistic choices nor genderqueer’s new grammar is recognized by the rules set up by Academy of the Hebrew Language. Just goes to show you that sometimes the only way to right a wrong is to ignore the rules entirely.
Tags: feminism, gender, identity, ilana masad, languages, lgbt
This was so interesting! It’s great to hear a non-English-language perspective on gender identity and pronouns!
I have been waiting for someone to write an article just like this about Hebrew. I lived in Israel for awhile and still speak Hebrew regularly, but have never met any trans* Israelis. I’ve always wondered how they deal with this issue – and the answer is so great, and so, so Israeli. Thanks for this.
Thank you for writing this! as a person living in Israel, Hebrew is (unfortunately) the main language I use every day, and it being gendered bothers me *all the time*.
This article is an excellent way to explain this problem to my non-Hebrew-speaking friends!
Thank you!
I’ve been wondering about this! Hebrew is such a distinctly patriarchal language. I remember figuring out in elementary school that God had to be male, because every prayer addressed to God uses second-person singular pronouns. (And yes, there are female-based names for God, too, but we don’t use them in daily blessings!)
Come join us over here in the hippy-dippy-liberal-Renewal area! We use feminine God(dess)-language all the time! Also, we have rad potlucks and meditation sessions/drum circles and we all hold hands during Mi Shebeirach. Seriously. Get over here. I’ll bring the bagels. 😉
Thank you for this thoughtful article. My heart goes out to Israeli trans people. How hard this must be if one is not out.
And I love your GBTQIA cards aside. I never doubted they would be super classy. But the glitter option brings to mind a question: Is it acceptable to laminate one’s GBTQIA card in order to protect the glitter? Would that negate its classiness?
As someone who would not have this card, but appreciates a classy card in general, I wonder whether or not it could just be made out of glitterized plastic, like a credit card?
I think laminating would be absolutely classy. If one was looking to spread the glitter, though, one might want to make sure the glitter was not firmly glued to the card. Better for the shedding and the spreading of the joy.
How do I obtain said card?! Do we have to make them ourselves?
No. A unicorn appears to you in a dream and leaves a set of a thousand under your pillow.
Ahhhh, this is wonderful and exactly what I didn’t know I wanted to read today. Thank you!
This is AWESOME.
So my fiancee and I are getting married, and we’ve been chatting with some rabbis about how to modify the ceremony. The first thing anyone says in a wedding ceremony is “Welcome,” which is “Bruchim haba’im,” roughly “blessed-male be the ones-who-have-come-male.” So, who’s being welcomed? If it’s just my fiancee and me who are being welcomed beneath the bridal canopy, then the phrase should be feminine instead: “Bruchot haba’ot,” “blessed-female be the ones-who-have-come-female.” But there are men among the guests, and our fathers will also be standing beneath the canopy. So if they’re being welcomed too, it should just be “bruchim haba’im.”
The rabbis, who are all varying degrees of feminist, seem to think that all the guests ought to be included, so we go with the masculine forms.
I keep thinking of what Muriel Rukeyser said Oedipus said to the Sphinx.
I am totally a fan of using female-coded language instead of “neutral” (by which we mean male-coded) language while referring to groups of men. They get so uncomfortable, and then contort themselves awkwardly trying to explain it away.
Nerdy note: if you ever encounter people who are all “oh but pronouns are a closed lexical class, you can’t just make up new ones,” that’s what they said about borrowing too! And yet English did in fact borrow “they” from Scandinavian, so suck on that, haters!
Sorting out gender in another language besides my native English has always confused the bejeebus out of me. Why is a telephone masculine? Why are these shoes feminine? WHY?!? I don’t know how English skittered around that, but man, am I glad it did.
Any linguist want to give us a lowdown on why gendered language is a thing? Because I do not understand why so many languages use it–it seems unnecessarily confusing.
I’m not a linguist, but I remember reading that English skirted the grammatical gender thing by accident. At one point (the 1100s?) a lot of people in the north of England probably spoke both Old English and Old Norse, which both had grammatical gender. However, they didn’t always agree on the gender of the nouns, so linguists think they started dropping the gendered suffixes to make it easier.
http://the-toast.net/2014/06/02/a-linguist-gender…
It was on the Toast!
Having suffered through German, French, and Spanish, all I can say is that the word ‘the’ is far and away the English language’s greatest contribution to civilisation.
not a linguist but have heard linguists speak on this topic. The grammatical gender denotes different classes of nouns — it’s more or less an accident that in a lot of Indo-European languages the grammatical gender divisions align with person-genders (male/female or male/female/neuter), in other language families there are different divisions (mostly animate/inanimate).
Another interesting take I’ve seen on the “plural male” default: I belong to a facebook group for Israeli religious feminists which has invented its own new plural form based on jamming together the plural-female suffix (“ot”) and the plural-male suffix (“im”). The new form is used for the general plural instead of defaulting to male, so that sentences look like “we think-plural-female-plural-male (khoshvotim)…”
I’m sure it will be a long time before that makes it out of half-joking facebook parlance, but it’s another example of people getting creative with the gendered grammatical rules.
It’s definitely not a joke, that’s part of what the genderqueer community is doing, making both single and plural verbs double-up on the suffix.
My computer is being really weird and may or may not have eaten my first comment, so I apologize if I’m accidentally posting the same thing twice.
So excited to see a Merav Michaeli shoutout! Watching her speak always makes me so happy.
An Israeli teacher of mine once mentioned that when she went to be a guest speaker at a coed high school, she led a discussion using only feminine forms. Finally, one of the male students raised his hand and asked if it was ok for the boys to participate too. It really made me wonder about the ways in which using masculine forms as the default effects how women and girls behave and how they’re seen.
First of all, I just have to say that I really did laugh out loud at this: “Attention, all male passengers, the 6:40 female-train to Tel Aviv has been female-canceled due to female-problems with the female-infrastructure at Lod.” It sounds as if the poor all-male passengers are being inconvenienced because Lod has its period. It was also a great example, because it struck me how Hebrew speakers just don’t HEAR the gender anymore; they don’t even notice it. I love that you and others in the community in Israel are raising awareness of it, and looking for ways to change it.
I love this! My mother was Israeli-American and my father is non-Israeli-background and non-Jewish, and I grew up in an environment with no Hebrew speakers. I’m not fluent anymore (long story), but Hebrew is my first language. I learned it from my mother and pretty much only spoke it with her, so I only learned to talk with female-identified people and don’t really know how to talk with male-identified people. I’ve wondered for a long time how genderqueer people use it.
Also, I ended up studying Finnish and a bunch of Turkic languages, all of which have no gender, and it pretty much blew my mind and felt refreshingly revolutionary, probably because of Hebrew early on.
I thought the same thing! Stupid menstruating trains, always mucking things up.
(She said, responding to Liz Blocker, but for some reason being relegated to the end of the comment queue).
This is very interesting. Right now, I’m in a place where one of the major languages isn’t gendered (and I’ve always taken it for granted! Gender-neutral third person singular and plural! In English I get by with “them/they” and my personal arbitrary “her/she”). So after studying Spanish and reading this article, I’m now wondering if there are other non-gendered languages?
This is very interesting. Right now, I'm in a place where one of the major languages isn't gendered (and I've always taken it for granted! Gender-neutral third person singular and plural! In English I get by with "them/they" and my personal arbitrary "her/she"). So after studying Spanish and reading this article, I'm now wondering if there are other non-gendered languages?
Very interesting article. I was hoping you would also address the fact that pre-modern (rabbinic) Hebrew and literature do in fact have additional concepts of intersex, such as the rabbinic Toomtoom and Androgynous categories. I have wondered whether these rabbinic categories can be helpful in modern discourse (repurposed for current sensibilities). Get on it, feminist rabbinics and linguistics buffs!
Thanks for this! Obviously as an Israeli this whole issue is already familiar for me, but this is a good primer for non-Hebrew speakers.
I will say, though, that I sometimes feel like the Israeli feminist focus on the neutral status of male forms in Hebrew is a bit overblown. So what if the exam addresses us as male? To me, that’s just making a cultural assumption that exists in every society into a grammatical rule. English-language exam writers obviously write their exams with a male exam-taker in mind, too.
To me it only becomes a big deal when:
– They-female is used ubiquitously in laundry detergent commercials, cooking books, general parenting advice etc.
– Generally, this grammatical structure reflects/possibly influenced traditional Jewish thinking which is, at its basis, inescapably binarist & gender essentialist. This is really hard for me as a shomeret masoret feminist…
– Although I am in love the solutions and creativity of Hebrew-speaking queers, I’m also upset that they’re deemed to be nongrammatical. Like even a אני ישלם לך עשר שקל bitch like me can’t deny that queer Hebrew is an almost avant-garde thing. And queerness shouldn’t be avant-garde when it’s a natural human state…
PS: I see להטב”קים (LaHaTBaKim – K for queer) used a lot nowadays! Not in mainstream media, but in feminist/LGBT spaces, definitely.
PPS: I wish I had the ability to convey to non-Hebrew speakers the beauty of אוחצ’ות 🙁 https://www.youtube.com/user/AinGvulFamily/videos
I have family in Israel and was raised Jewish, but I never realised just how thoroughly the language is gendered. Eep.
With regard to the marriage thing, the core problem, as I understand it, is that Israel doesn’t have civil marriage. It just has Orthodox Jewish marriage. If you want to get married in any other way, including progressive Judaism, you have to go abroad (Cyprus is popular). And Orthodox Judaism is pretty damned homophobic, so while many of the progressive denominations have introduced same-sex marriage or at least blessings, it’ll never happen in Orthodox Judaism.
So…I’m a native Italian speaker. I speak French as well, and a bit of Spanish, and as far as I understand what is being written here about Hebrew, Romance languages are just or nearly as gendered. It’s not just that nouns have a gender, your gender is evident in a number of verb tenses as well as adjectives. So I would I say, “I went to the market” — “sono andata al mercato” but a man would say “sono andato al mercato” and I would say “I am tone-deaf”– “sono stonata” but a man would say “sono stonato”. And for mixed-gender groups, we use the masculine version for second and third person plural. So, basically, same issue…think a lot of Indo-European languages have versions of this problem, isn’t English rather remarkably gender-free?
I know I’m being pedantic and beside the main point of the article, but I think it changes the context a bit if this is a more universal than exceptional issue.
I teach college, and I teach the students how to write in gender-neutral English (i.e. not to use “man” to mean “humankind” or “he” to mean “he or she”).
One response I sometimes get from those resistant to this idea is, “That wouldn’t work in ______” (Spanish, usually), as if it’s clearly not worth trying to speak better in English until this problem has been solved for *absolutely every language in the world.*
It’s cool to see one of the solutions people in another language use!
can someone direct me to this group? I’d be very interested to be added to it!