He said, she said, ze said.
Ze? That’s not a typo, as you already know if you have followed the expanding national conversation about gender identity and expression. Along with “they” — in reference to a single person — “ze” has emerged as an increasingly common gender-neutral or inclusive alternative to binary male-female pronouns.
Ze may not be a household word yet — maybe it never will be — but its existence reflects a rapid cultural shift taking place in how we perceive and talk about gender. Transgender celebrities grace the covers of glossy magazines. Facebook made headlines last year when it unveiled a list of more than 50 terms that users could pick from to describe their gender identity; the social-media platform has since switched to a “Custom” option in addition to “Male” and “Female,” allowing users to create their own descriptors. And at some colleges, students, faculty members, and administrators have begun to adjust and expand campus protocols, including those used for registration and personal-data collection, to include the small but growing number of people who identify as trans or are genderqueer, meaning they have a fluid gender identity or do not want to be classified as either male or female.
Some institutions, like the University of Vermont, have been doing this for years. Others are just getting started. Many have been slowed down by technological hurdles, as software systems need to be updated or reworked to accommodate chosen names and pronouns. And a few have discovered that not everybody agrees there is a need for more options in the first place. The Graduate Center of CUNY and, more recently, the University of Tennessee have found themselves the targets of unexpected media attention and, in Tennessee, of political blowback just for circulating guidance on the issue of inclusive language.
In Tennessee, the director of the campus Pride Center put up a blog post in August describing the use of gender-neutral pronouns. The reaction from some local politicians was swift and negative, and the post was quickly taken down. One state legislator complained that people didn’t go to the state university to “be brainwashed into some gobbledygook,” The Knoxville News Sentinel reported. Another lawmaker said, “It seems to me the biggest lack of diversity we have at the University of Tennessee is people of common sense.” The legislature’s education committee has said it would hold a hearing on the issue.
A university spokeswoman said the controversial post was simply meant to explain how gender-neutral pronouns could be used by those who want to use them. “We want to make sure all students feel welcome here,” she told The Chronicle.
The Tennessee controversy is, so far, rare. Many colleges just haven’t tackled the issue yet. “Higher-ed institutions are all over the map on this,” says Dot Brauer, director of the LGBTQA Center at the University of Vermont. The university was an early adopter of gender-inclusive changes; it installed its first gender-neutral bathroom signs in 2003, and in January 2009 added a chosen-name-and-pronoun option, including gender-neutral alternatives, to its information database. “It’s not just trans students who would like to tell you what name to use when calling out their name in a classroom,” Brauer says.
Students and faculty members might prefer not to use their legal names for a variety of reasons. The name might not reflect their gender identity; it might be hard to say or spell (a particular challenge for some international students); or perhaps they just like a nickname better. Changing a name legally takes time and money, however, which can be in short supply. Chosen-name policies like Vermont’s get around that.
Few colleges come anywhere close to being as inclusive as Vermont, though. College campuses include more and more students with LGBTQ identities, but campus bureaucracies are often slow to catch up. Antidiscrimination clauses are common, chosen name-and-pronoun policies less so.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘We want to use inclusive language for our trans students,’” says Shane Windmeyer, executive director of Campus Pride, which works to built LGBTQ awareness and support. It’s another thing to create a system for inclusion. “Colleges need to look at their processes, making sure that they think about how they collect data on each student as a unique person.” Campus Pride’s Trans Policy Clearinghouse estimates that about 150 colleges have set up systems to record chosen names. Only a handful have a chosen-pronoun option.
Harvard University is one of them. Michael P. Burke is registrar of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which comprises about half of the students at the university. Four years ago, at the request of the Harvard Trans Task Force, his office gave students the option to specify a chosen name and gender marker at registration. As of this fall, it added an option for pronouns as well. Federal regulations require colleges to report whether students are male or female, so Harvard asks that at registration, but “you may define your gender marker any way you wish right below that,” Burke says. The name and pronoun information is relayed to faculty members and advisers.
About half of the approximately 10,000 students who registered this fall specified their pronouns, according to Burke. (The other half did not specify any pronoun.) Slightly more than 1 percent answered something other than she/her/hers or he/him/his. “It wasn’t very difficult to collect the information,” he says. “It’s more challenging to provide it on rosters and so forth.” But that’s a technical issue, not a cultural one.
From what Burke has heard from other members of the Association of American Universities, relatively few colleges have confronted the pronoun question yet. “We talk about these things a lot, and there aren’t many schools doing it,” he says.
This summer, Ohio University approved a policy that allows students to specify both their chosen name and their gender pronoun. “Every individual has the right to be addressed by a name and pronoun that corresponds to the person’s gender identity,” the policy notes. “A court-ordered name or gender change is not required, and the student need not change their official records. It is expected that faculty, staff, and students will make every effort to call students by their preferred name and utilize students’ requested pronoun usage.”
Brooke Hastings, a first-year electrical-engineering major who identifies as nonbinary, took advantage of the new policy as soon as it went live. Being able to register a chosen name and pronoun with the university saves Hastings the expense of making a legal name change and the hassle of speaking to each professor individually. And the policy makes life even more comfortable on what Hastings describes as an already inclusive and welcoming campus.
The policy has been in the works since 2013, according to delfin bautista, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Center, which is part of the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. (The lowercase name is bautista’s choice, along with the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “theirs.”) The working group that created the policy at Ohio included people from several areas of academic administration and, crucially, the IT department.
“The hurdle that we had to overcome wasn’t ideological differences, it was technological challenges,” bautista says. Several software systems, including those used in admissions and financial aid, the registrar’s office, and academic advising, had to be reworked to make the change happen smoothly.
As of September, more than 100 students had listed a chosen pronoun, and more than 400 had listed a chosen name. If there have been objections to the new policy, bautista hasn’t heard them.
The policy was designed with trans and genderqueer students in mind but has expanded to include others. International students, or those from cultural backgrounds whose naming traditions aren’t familiar or mainstream yet, can also benefit from being able to specify a preferred name.
Gabriel C. Javier is assistant dean of students and director of the LGBT Campus Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which also uses a chosen-name system. “I see it as a universal-access issue,” he says. As of June, about 4,300 of the approximately 44,000 students and 20,000 employees on the campus had designated a chosen name.
The center at Madison was an early leader on the issue of expanding the available range of gender pronouns, posting a Gender Pronouns Guide on its website in 2001.
Enabling people on a college campus to declare the names and pronouns they use carries symbolic as well as practical significance, but it’s only one part of a much larger issue.
“It’s not just one thing that’s going to make a campus inclusive or feel safe,” Javier says. “It’s a campus commitment that makes a thing like that come alive.”
