What pronouns do you use? The pronoun-sharing practice from an (im)politeness perspective

1 Introduction

The trend of indicating one’s pronouns after one’s name in bio signatures (in emails and/or on social networks) or the practice of sharing one’s pronouns in what are called “pronoun rounds” before a meeting for instance, has recently spread beyond the LGBTQIA+ communities where the pronominal phenomenon emerged.^[1] Recommendation as to the best way to start a conversation with strangers can be found on online guides: “you could say: ‘Hello, my name is Charlie and I go by ‘he, him, his’ pronouns. What pronouns do you use?’ or ‘How would you like me to refer to you?’”.^[2] The question eliciting third-person pronouns is an indirect way of asking for someone’s gender identity that Judith Butler defines as “a deeply felt sense of how one fits in the gendered scheme of things, the lived reality of one’s own body in the world” (Butler 2024: 185). The aim of such a question is to avoid inferring gender identities from mere appearances.

This quite recent mode of address, showing concern for interactants’ gender identity, has not yet entered the linguistic repertoire of every (western) individual’s “moral order” (Haugh 2013: 57)^[3] and there is no way of knowing how the practice will evolve, especially as, at the moment of writing, the use is being discouraged in the US: following a White House edict on January 31st 2025, federal employees were asked to remove their pronouns from their signature “by the end of the day”.^[4] Because pronoun-sharing is not yet fully part of normative politeness, construing the whole practice as a new politeness norm may sound premature. Politeness has indeed been defined by Sifianou (1992: 83) as “consideration for the other person, according to expected norms” (my emphasis), and Terkourafi (2011: 176) sees politeness norms as effecting “social regulations in as much as they contribute to the reproduction of the social order that gave rise to them in the first place, legitimizing and consolidating it further”. The trend under study is at best “a norm in the making” so it can hardly be evaluated “according to expected norms” (see previous quote by Sifianou) and it certainly does not “reproduce” or “consolidate” the social order (see previous quote by Terkourafi). Yet I contend that the pronoun-sharing practice needs to be analysed from an (im)politeness theoretical perspective in close association with the related notions of care (for Gu [1990: 241], to be polite is to be “face-caring”), attentiveness (Fukushima 2004, 2009, 2011; Fukushima and Haugh 2014; Haugh 2019), respect (Haugh 2010) and civility (Sifianou 2019, 2024). To demonstrate that this practice deserves to be theorized within an (im)politeness framework, we need to adopt the perspective of those who perform the social action as well as those who evaluate it. I will rely on 806 answers given to a survey we set up in February 2024 about people’s reasons for sharing or not sharing their pronouns. To cross data, this corpus is completed by 265 occurrences of the pattern “someone’s pronouns” drawn from the world web, the English Web 2021 (enTenTen21)^[5] via the SketchEngine tool.

After giving some demographic and methodological details about the survey (Section 2), I will study what sort of a pragmatic act the new pronominal statement embodies, highlighting the apparent oddity of using third-person pronouns (after one’s name) as an indirect way to have others refer to oneself correctly in one’s absence. I will demonstrate that the different evaluations of the practice occupy a wide spectrum going from what I call “inclusive politeness” to “ideological impoliteness”, via “surface civility” (Sifianou 2019) or “civil hypocrisy” (Sorlin and Virtanen 2024a, b). Section 4 will more specifically show in what sense this practice can be considered “polite” from whose point of view and at what price. Section 5 focuses on the impoliteness of the same social practice as perceived through the eyes of those I have called “the rejecters” openly dissociating from the practice that they see as destroying basic conversational maxims and, behind them, the “moral order”. Because the phenomenon gives rise to widely differing ideologically-laden evaluations, I contend we need a “third-order perspective” on the phenomenon in Haugh’s (2024) terms and advocate for a Critical Politeness Theory, acknowledging the subjective position of the researcher and their critical metadiscourse on what matters when it comes to consideration of other fellow human beings.

2 A brief overview of the survey

The survey was conducted via googleform with my colleague Ann Coady^[6] and sent through our personal and professional networks. We received 806 exploitable answers from people using mainly English. We did not ask them where they came from but what varieties of English they used, and these were mainly North American and British/Irish/Scottish (and Australian English for 27 of them). Our respondents ranged from 18 to over 65 years of age. 488 of them identified as cis women (a label we offered among many others and that was sometimes contested, see below), 9 as trans women, 179 as cis men and 12 as trans men. 138 other respondents chose the label “queer/non binary/gender non conforming”. 25 either chose their own labels or did not answer at all. Using professional networks to dispatch the survey biased the results, as the vast majority of our respondents were academics or students (and left leaning on the political spectrum). Yet, despite the biases, the responses are instructive for our purposes as they show a wide variety of evaluation of the same phenomenon. We asked the following questions, without delving further into circumstances of the sharing.

• Do you share your pronouns? (453 out of 806 said they do not share)

• Sharing pronouns in a NON-PROFESSIONAL context: If you share your pronouns in non-professional contexts, please specify the situation.

• Sharing pronouns AT WORK: If you share your pronouns as part of your job, please specify the situation.

• If you DO share your pronouns, why do you do so?

• You can add any details or explanations here if you wish

• If you DO share your pronouns, how do you feel in situations where others do NOT?

• If you DO NOT share your pronouns, why not?

• You can add any details or explanations here if you wish

• If you do NOT share your pronouns, how do you feel in situations where others DO?

• Have you seen these pronoun sharing practices in languages other than English? If so, please give details.

• Which label best currently describes you?

• Is there anything that you feel we have missed about pronoun sharing practices or anything that you would like to add?

We had a drop-down menu from which respondents could select preferred answers, but we made sure they could also add details and explanations. This article mostly exploits these free answers.

3 A pragmatic oddity?

What could be puzzling in this new trend is the use of third-person pronouns that Benveniste has invited us to see as the “non-personne” (Benveniste 1966: 225–236), as it is excluded from any speech roles in the interactional I-you dyad. This should not surprise us too much though, as the third person is the one grammatical item that marks gender in English. Besides, we sometimes need to use the third-person pronoun to refer to someone in their presence. It may happen in a class when we are addressing a student, referring to another one: “what do you think about his/her/their remark?”. Another instance is parliamentary debates which are replete with third-person references targeting present parliamentary colleagues through expressions such as “Is my right hon. Friend aware how heartened my constituents are that he has managed to prise open that door to duty free in Europe, which the Tories wanted to slam shut?” (Truan 2021: 38).^[7] In these instances though, the third person is used as third-person address in addition to third-person reference (see Ilie 2003). Brown and Levinson (1987: 201) also give an example of third-person address in the context of royalty and nobility: “Would his Highness prefer tea in the pink or the lavender room?”.^[8] The specificity of the pronoun-sharing practice is that the third person reference applies to the speaker themselves – but not in a Caesar-like way though, as the reference is not directly to themselves but on offer for others to take up. So what kind of indirect pragmatic act does this social act perform?

The pronominal indication could be seen as a pre-emptive move, giving the reader/addressee information in advance that will keep them from potentially making a gender mistake. Indeed, pronouns next to names in bio signatures or shared prior to any interactions are providing addressees/hearers with linguistic and social knowledge that will keep them from performing a face-threatening act that is now called “misgendering”.

This may be where the oddity lies, pragmatically speaking. For in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) seminal work on politeness, the speaker is the one who uses politeness strategies in order to mitigate the face-threatening act they are themselves performing, such as requesting something from a secretary, for instance. In the pronoun trend, the addressees are those that must avoid face-threatening acts by making appropriate use of the (gender) information provided by the speaker. If sociolinguists speak in terms of indexicality (Silverstein 2003) – the pronouns being used to index social meaning beyond deixis – pragmatically speaking this preemptive move is meant to save all faces involved. It is “other” face-saving as it will keep the addressee from feeling awkward or uncomfortable as a result of accidental misgendering, and it is “self” face-saving as it saves the pronoun-declaring speaker from being misgendered. Some of the respondents to a question in the survey asking them “If you do NOT share your pronouns, how do you feel in situations where others DO?” speak in terms of gratitude. Being given information preemptively is interpreted as a linguistic gift saving them for losing face or performing an uncomfortable faux pas:

In turn, the use of the right pronoun by warned participants in subsequent interactions may have unsuspected effects on the receiver’s feelings. In an interview, being questioned on the pronoun practice, after saying they are almost too old for this, Judith Butler comments on the use of “they” by the young people each time they referred to Butler when addressing other people:

[pause] I’m almost too old for this. [crowd laughs and claps] But I said almost because I do feel like the youth gave me ‘they’ and I thought it was a beautiful gift. I was like, “Look at that: ‘they’. Cool. Great”. Feels exactly right. […] [S]omebody comes along and says well ‘they’, it’s like thank you. Beautiful gift. […]^[9]

Using a “feel right” pronoun thus goes beyond using a mere linguistic form. It is performing a face-enhancing act under the form of a verbal gift of a specific kind. This “positive social act” (Danziger 2022) promotes sociability through the recognition of somebody’s feelings. As will be further developed in Section 4, the relation between “face” and “feelings” was already present in Goffman’s seminal work on face, connecting face-work to “feeling good” or “feeling bad or hurt” (Goffman 1981: 6). As opposed to this feel-good effect of the use of the pronoun “they” for Judith Butler, using the wrong pronoun can seriously affect the wrong-faced receiver and go as far as endangering their health. Reading the comments on and from gender non-conforming people in website articles extracted via SketchEngine makes it clear that using the wrong pronoun is not a mere grammatical error, it can affect bodies in a harmful/painful way.^[10] These preferred pronouns are an important part of their identities, so using the wrong terms can be hurtful or offensive.^[11]

However, if for some it does not “cost” anything to refer to a person with the correct pronoun,^[15] not everyone sees this inclusive practice as a beneficial practice for minorities. On the contrary, in one response to the survey, the practice is even conceived as hurtful to minorities:

In contrast to what was analysed above as a preemptive face-saving move, the respondent in (3) explicitly states the counter-productive linguistic act of reducing gender to pronominal labels.

In the same vein, a linguist like Deborah Cameron (2016) has mixed feelings about the empowering force of stating pronouns next to names, judging it as “symbolic” rather than revolutionary, notably when the statement is not made face to face. For her, pronouns are certainly not a matter of life and death: “It doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to use the pronouns an individual prefers. But I will do it as a matter of courtesy rather than conviction; and if I fail to do it, I’ll consider that an oversight rather than a crime. Pronouns may be a great deal, but they’re not a matter of life and death” (Cameron 2016). I have pointed out above the potentially hurtful effect of the misuse of pronouns if one aligns with the perspective of the primarily concerned, which could come as a qualification to Cameron’s statement. Besides, the Trevor Project on LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health has shown misgendering to have an effect on the health of those concerned, assessing that respecting pronouns amounts to lowering suicide attempts by 50 %.^[16] It, therefore, all depends on the perspective one adopts. Yet Cameron’s remark is interesting from a pragmatic point of view. She construes the practice in terms of “civility”/“courtesy” paid by all interacting partners, indicative of a desire to have the conversation go smoothly and respectfully, displaying “good faith”: “It’s a symbolic affirmation of the partners’ intention to conduct their subsequent dealings in good faith and with mutual respect” (Cameron 2016). This has relevance from a pragmatic perspective (see next Section).

Even for those who do not agree with the practice, the cost implied by the use of the correct pronoun seems minimal. However, for others still, as exemplified in responses from the questionnaire that will be analysed in the next sections, the cost is very high. The whole practice is rejected as it hurts their conceptions of binary gender and biological sex, bringing them to opt out of civility/courtesy altogether. The least that can be said is that the same linguistic practice triggers very different reactions. I contend that these diverse positions deserve a common evaluation under the aegis of (im)politeness theory. The notions alluded to in this section need to be more rigorously pragmatically defined. This is what Section 4 aims at doing.

4 How “polite” is the pronoun-sharing practice and to whom?

5 A multi-faceted evaluation: from inclusive politeness to ideological impoliteness

For those that I call the “rejecters”, being asked to share or use pronouns is interpreted as an impingement on their “negative face” (Brown and Levinson 1987)^[38] or “equity rights” (Spencer-Oatey 2002). Spencer-Oatey describes “equity rights” as:

a fundamental belief that we are entitled to personal consideration from others, so that we are treated fairly: that we are not unduly imposed upon or unfairly ordered about, that we are not taken advantage of or exploited, and that we receive the benefits to which we are entitled. (Spencer-Oatey 2002: 540)

For rejecters, granting gender nonconforming people equity rights (entitling them to “personal consideration from others, so [they] are treated fairly” [Spencer-Oatey 2002: 540]) is depriving them (rejecters) of their own equity rights not to be “unduly imposed upon or unfairly ordered about”. Besides, rejecters do not think pronoun sharers are “entitled” to receive the “benefits” they think they are entitled to. As Conrod (2019) points out, some people may not like being corrected in their use of pronouns: “dictating what pronoun a speaker should use is an imposition on their negative face” (Conrod 2019: 154). In our survey, such dislike for correction does not come up, but it is certainly another way people might feel the practice is impolite towards them. But in a similar way, respondents see this requirement to share or use pronouns as a face attack in the name of freedom of action and speech. They consider themselves “pressured” to follow a new norm that is “imposed” upon them:

In other words, what is evaluated as (genuine or hypocritical) civility by some is assessed as impolite by other respondents: rejecters feel they are being unduly “coerced” into complying with a newly imposed social action. The feeling of being “pressured” goes all the way to feeling that a minority group wants to “convert” them all:

Gender nonconforming people are further blamed for their intolerance and narcissism. Instead of being a means to promote inclusivity, the pronoun sharing act is on the contrary deemed divisive and intolerant: “I think it causes more tension or split in society, which is the opposite of what I think should be the aim of a progressive, inclusive and tolerant society” (respondent 615). Sharers are blamed for signalling “in-group” membership that disintegrates the social fabric. For a society to remain united, without tensions, progressive and tolerant, it requires the vulnerable minority not to put their claims forward for it shows self-importance:

What they reject is a new form of political correctness clearly signalling a “political stance act” (Du Bois 2007) and some “allegiance” to what they call the “gender ideology”:

Discarding the practice on ideological grounds, rejecters perceive the new trend as politically charged (respondent 710: “hyperwoke”; respondent 27: “too political”). This is how they justify their refusal to make the effort they regard as “excessive” in Airton’s (2018) sense:

I propose the label “ideological impoliteness” to capture the face-attack that pronoun-sharing constitutes for rejecters. As always with ideological evaluations, the ones denouncing ideology think they are themselves under no ideological spell and are entirely neutral in matters of gender, as their conception is “true” because it is “obvious” and taken for granted. In the name of what they see as too ideological, they justify their own impoliteness towards pronoun sharers by refusing to put the “excessive” effort needed in the use of the pronoun required.

Interestingly, the rejecters’ statements reveal a strict adherence to Grice’s (1991) conversational maxims, as they abide by the maxims of Quality (1), Quantity (2), Relevance (3) and Manner (4).

1. Rejecters are on the side of truth and “evidence”:

People are being pressured to add pronouns when their sex is blindingly obvious. […] Being asked to say she/her for someone who is clearly male creates cognitive dissonance. At worst, it’s an attack on our reality and the evidence of our own eyes (respondent 49)

1. Stating pronouns is an infringement of the maxim of Quantity according to which one must give just the amount of information necessary, no less no more:

If a male-presenting, with a traditional male-sounding name shares his “he\him” pronouns, I would consider that redundant information (respondent 343)

[I feel] lightly encumbered by being given the information if I didn’t ask for it (respondent 272)

1. Stating gender is irrelevant for rejecters:

I don’t need to share my pronouns. It’s obvious what gender I am (respondent 11)

1. Pronouns make things more confusing, not less:

I think it’s sometimes confusing as I have to look twice to understand that, as the name suggests, it’s the gender I assumed it would be (respondent 435)

Rather than interpreting the act of sharing on the part of the primarily concerned as a preemptive act to avoid misgendering, they regard the practice as a negation of “obvious truth” and infringement of basic conversational maxims. What this strict adherence to Grice’s CP seems to reveal is that the rejecters do not see the pronoun sharing as a civil act of shared humanity beyond exchange of information.

In his study on “consideration” in (Australian and New Zealand) English, Haugh (2019: 208) uses a feature on SketchEngine thesaurus that can discern clusters of words “based on a statistical analysis of their shared collocational behaviour”. The term “considerate” reveals four of those clusters. Three of them may seem unsurprising, as they have been used in studies of the word “polite”: “Respectful”, “Attentive”, and “Accommodating”. The last one is the adjective “Open-minded”. For Haugh, this is “less obviously related to polite”, revealing that “considerate” also pertains to the realm of morality (Haugh 2019: 209). I find the association of “consideration” with open-mindedness particularly interesting in the context of the culturally and politically-charged (im)politeness I have just described: by refusing to be considerate of the reason why people (need to) share their pronouns, rejecters refuse to open up their minds to the complexity of gender, ruling it all out as “ideological”. But as Butler recalls, “the practice of ruling out alternate possibilities” when they already exist “is surely an ideological move!” (Butler 2024: 76).

In my own theoretical evaluation of the social act of sharing pronouns, I have chosen the label “inclusive politeness” as regards the attention paid to others’ face needs and the label “ideological impoliteness” in reference to rejecters who proclaim themselves victims of impoliteness, which, in turn, justifies their own impoliteness towards sharers as they opt out of civility. These theoretical evaluative labels belong to what Haugh (2024) calls “third-order evaluation”^[39] of (im)politeness defined as “reflexive ideological discourse”. My evaluative “metadiscourse” both recognizes that evaluations of (im)politeness are “rooted in multiple perspectives” (Haugh 2024: 220), depending on which point of view one takes, and acknowledge my own subjective position as a scholar. I agree with Haugh that (im)politeness can no longer be seen as a uniformizing “grand theory” that can be “reduced to a few key variables” (Haugh 2024: 222), and that the researcher’s own subjective position needs to be explicitly situated. I need to question my position as an analyst: as a French gender conforming (white) woman, I do not have an emic perspective, as would gender nonconforming people or scholars, and yet my third-order theoretical evaluation inevitably has some bearing upon the data, which makes me no neutral, objective observer. Certainly the label “inclusive politeness” reveals something about my sociocultural perspective on what the world should be. In other words, the way I have theorized the recent social action of pronoun sharing is informed by how I observe the phenomenon and my own ethical orientation.

The pronoun-sharing practice reveals that what can pass for politeness for some is turned into impoliteness for others. In an “us” versus “them” irreconcilable dichotomy, the rejecters blame the other side for depriving them of their freedom of speech while, in so doing, deny pronoun sharers the same authority as to what they can say or not. In my third-order evaluation, I construe (im)politeness as a locus of (un)wanted renegotiation of the status quo and see my own subjective position as conducive to the creation of what we could call Critical Politeness Theory (CPT). Such a theory would emphasize the relation between vulnerability, ideology and rejection, by more explicitly positing politeness as ideologically and culturally charged among participants competing for meaning and existence. (Im)politeness usage always exposes a historical moment in the shaping of norms. CPT would offer a critical point of view on (im)politeness use and take it upon itself to highlight what is ethically owed to another human beings in terms of civility, tolerance and respect as “caring” or as “equality and accepting differences” (Haugh 2010).

6 Conclusions

I have tried to demonstrate that the current practice of pronoun-sharing deserved a pragmatic analysis and that regarding this particular social action, evaluation of (im)politeness will depend on what perspective we wish to (dis)align with. I argued that from the viewpoint of the primarily concerned, it could be construed as a preemptive anti-face-damaging act offered to save all faces. It is interpreted as such by voluntary allies who are not only ready to acknowledge gender nonconforming people’s rights to gender self-determination, but share their own pronouns in order to normalize the inclusive politeness practice. Others agree to attend to sharers’ positive faces by using the correct pronouns, but may do so out of hypocritical/surface/reflexive civility. There is thus such a thing as “deep” inclusive politeness and “surface”/hypocritical inclusive politeness that merely signals virtue. Lastly, from the perspective of those who feel offended by the gender ideology shaking their profound conception of gender, the practice is perceived as an infringement of their equity rights: as they consider pronoun-sharing impolite to them, they opt out of politeness by ruling out the practice altogether. Acknowledging the offered pronoun would be signalling agreement with inclusive politeness. To them, pronoun sharing is an impolite ideological imposition, requiring “excessive” unjustified effort.

Taking the pronoun sharing trend as an ontological and epistemological object of study brings to the fore how ideologically-charged consideration of (im)politeness might be. Since the practice is still a norm in the making, it is the site of social and political affirmation and contestation. Beyond politics, the social action of sharing pronouns may be evaluated as showing “consideration” and “concern” for other vulnerable human beings. The rejecters refuse to see it as a matter of civility because they evaluate the practice as a face attack on their (religious or political) gender beliefs. Because of the power relationships involved in the practice (who has authority over pronouns?), I have propounded a Critical Politeness Theory which, in the manner of Critical Discourse Analysis, would investigate (im)polite evaluations in relation to socio-political contexts with a focus on how (im)polite norms are contested or invented. Such a critical perspective would encourage scholars to explicitly recognize their own situatedness in relation to the topic under study.