1. Introduction
Language is an important battleground for theorists and advocates, especially feminist theorizing and politics. Earlier discussions highlighted linguistic androcentrism and the invisibility of women (Lakoff Reference Lakoff1975; Spender Reference Spender1980).Footnote 1 Recent work has turned to the semantics and pragmatics of gender terms, exploring the implicit, generic meaning they carry (Leslie Reference Leslie2015; Sterken Reference Sterken2015), as well as examining the interaction between meaning and context and the ramifications for inclusivity and self-autonomy (Saul Reference Saul, Superson and Crasnow2012; Díaz-León Reference Díaz-León2016; Chen Reference Chen2021; Kukla and Lance Reference Kukla and Lance2023). Currently a major focus is pronoun usage. Amelioration proposals abound, aiming to challenge gender essentialist thinking (Baron Reference Baron2020). Although philosophical discussions of such reforms remain largely Anglocentric, scholarly attention to languages other than English is gradually increasing.Footnote 2
This paper proposes a reorientation of how to think about pronoun reform and linguistic amelioration. Rather than offering a specific reform proposal, I advocate a methodological shift toward a cross- and trans-linguistic perspective. My point of departure is Dembroff and Wodak’s (Reference Dembroff and Wodak2018, Reference Dembroff, Wodak, Khoo and Sterken2021) influential call to eliminate gendered pronouns, which I use as a springboard. Building on their insight that linguistic gender marking can reinforce essentialist ideology,Footnote 3 I ask what follows once we move beyond English and examine a language with a very different structure. Drawing on the development of gendered pronouns in Chinese, a language that historically lacks them, I clarify the interplay between language, thought, and social change by focusing on uptake and recontextualization. More broadly, cross-linguistic comparison identifies how different languages encode gender marking and which philosophical claims generalize across languages; a trans-linguistic lens tracks how reform ideas and practices travel across languages and social contexts, highlighting how they are recontextualized, contested, and reshaped through negotiated uptake. By combining a structural comparison of linguistic features and a dynamic account of how ameliorative ideas circulate and are transformed, this approach offers a more philosophically robust analysis of why and in what sense amelioration can be both necessary and difficult, and of language’s role in social change.
Here is the roadmap of what follows. Section 2 offers a sympathetic reconstruction of Dembroff and Wodak’s central arguments and bolsters their core claims with recent work on linguistic hermeneutical injustice (Rosola Reference Rosola2024, Reference Rosola2025; Kapusta Reference Kapusta2025; Klieber Reference Klieber2025). Section 3 critically examines the rise of gendered pronouns in Chinese (Liu Reference Liu1995; Huang 2009/Reference Huang2023) to argue that gender marking is not merely grammatical but a product of sociocultural forces. Section 4 develops a cross- and trans-linguistic framework and evaluates the prospects and limits of linguistic amelioration.
2. Philosophical arguments for pronoun reform
To challenge binary gender assumptions and promote inclusivity, proposals to revise pronoun usage range from using gender-specific pronouns that match an individual’s gender identity, avoiding binary pronouns when addressing genderqueer individuals, to eliminating gendered pronouns altogether. I focus on one of the most influential recent proposals, due to Dembroff and Wodak (Reference Dembroff and Wodak2018, Reference Dembroff, Wodak, Khoo and Sterken2021), whose Radical Claim has become a central reference point in philosophical debates about gendered language.Footnote 4
Dembroff and Wodak offer three main arguments for the claim that speakers ought not use gender-specific pronouns for anyone, regardless of that individual’s gender identity. Footnote 5 The first argument concerns the protection of private information. Consider Alex, a transgender man who has not publicly come out. When Brooklyn refers to Alex using “she,” Alex faces a dilemma: correcting Brooklyn would mean outing himself before he is ready; staying silent allows the misrepresentation to stand and may feel deceptive.Footnote 6 On the assumption that grammar should not place people in morally troubling positions, we should not use gender-specific pronouns so that people do not have to choose between disclosing private information and deceiving others. Note that this point is made independent of any specific metaphysical theory of gender (Barnes Reference Barnes2020; Kukla and Lance Reference Kukla and Lance2023); the argument is perhaps even stronger if gender is understood in terms of reproductive features: as long as we agree that genitals are private, linguistic practices that continually require revealing genital status is problematic (Bettcher Reference Bettcher, Garry, Khader and Stone2017; Dembroff and Wodak Reference Dembroff, Wodak, Khoo and Sterken2021, 368).
Their second argument combines egalitarian and practical considerations. Retaining gendered pronouns for binary individuals and using a catch-all pronoun, such as “they” or “ze,” for all nonbinary individuals is fundamentally inegalitarian. It treats nonbinary people as exceptions, reinforces the binary as the norm, and obscures diverse nonbinary identities. Engineering a distinct pronoun for every gender identity, however, is cognitively implausible, epistemically problematic, and potentially counterproductive. Pronouns are a closed-class category: they are unreceptive to change, and learning even one new pronoun can be challenging (Fromkin et al. Reference Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams2014). Footnote 7 Increasing the inventory of pronouns dramatically also increases the risk of misgendering, because correct usage would require reliable knowledge about people’s gender identities.Footnote 8 By contrast, eliminating all gender-specific pronouns promotes equality, consistency, and feasibility.
The third argument concerns gender essentialism: “Linguistic markers of gender play a role in communicating harmful beliefs about the nature and social significance of gender identities, and that reducing the linguistic markers of gender would reduce the prevalence of such beliefs” (Dembroff and Wodak Reference Dembroff and Wodak2018, 395). Dembroff and Wodak understand gender essentialism not just as the view that gender is biologically grounded, but also as the view that gender is an intrinsic part of who one is that further explains one’s psychological traits, and social roles, among others (Reference Dembroff and Wodak2018, 395).Footnote 9 They think that linguistic markers of gender contribute to gender essentialism directly by conveying essentialist content, as well as indirectly by normalizing such patterns through repetition. While feminist philosophers have long criticized essentialist ideologies, Dembroff and Wodak treat gendered pronouns as both a means of sustaining essentialist beliefs and a site of potential disruption. Because pronoun use is typically automatic, deliberately changing taken-for-granted pronoun practices can disrupt habitual gender ascription, exposing underlying assumptions and turning them into explicit targets for reflective contestation.
Taken together, these arguments aim to show that gender-specific pronouns influence thought and behavior in ways that call for radical revision.Footnote 10 Importantly, although the Radical Claim could be narrowly read as applying only to English, a broader interpretation of its underlying rationale is not unmotivated: the thought that gendered pronouns place speakers in morally problematic situations, prolong stigma and stereotypes, and reinforce exclusion “should generalize to other languages” (Dembroff and Wodak Reference Dembroff, Wodak, Khoo and Sterken2021, 362). The question that naturally arises, then, is how far these arguments travel once we take linguistic diversity seriously.Footnote 11
To clarify, asking how far these arguments travel across languages is not a rejection of Dembroff and Wodak’s proposal. Nor do I take them to be committed to a simplistic view according to which gendered pronouns are necessary or sufficient for gender essentialism, or according to which eliminating gendered pronouns would by itself eliminate patriarchy or binarism. Indeed, Dembroff and Wodak adopt a weak Whorfian stance, according to which linguistic categories and usage can influence but need not strictly determine social cognition (Dembroff and Wodak Reference Dembroff and Wodak2018, 396). On their view, gender-specific pronouns can transmit essentialist views by signaling gender as relevant whenever they are used; when gender is encoded in the linguistic structure, such effects, even if context-dependent and defeasible, can yield enduring consequences.Footnote 12 The point, then, is that the normative force of Dembroff and Wodak’s proposal, to which I am sympathetic, can be distinguished from a further empirical and explanatory question: whether, how, and how strongly gender-specific pronouns make gender salient and transmit essentialist views beyond English.
This question requires caution. For one thing, languages differ considerably in how and where they encode gender. In English, gender marking is limited primarily to third-person singular pronouns; in grammatical gender languages such as French and German, gender is marked more pervasively across nouns, adjectives, determiners, and agreement patterns; in languages such as Malay and Finnish, gendered pronouns are absent altogether. For another, despite growing recognition that language both reflects and shapes thought, the mechanisms and extent of its influence remain open questions. Specifically, the evidential support for the connection between grammatical gender and cognition is more contested than is often acknowledged. As Kirk-Giannini and Glanzberg (Reference Kirk-Giannini, Glanzberg, Anderson and Lepore2024) argue, widely cited experimental studies, such as Boroditsky et al. (Reference Boroditsky, Schmidt, Phillips, Gentner and Goldin-Meadow2003), Vigliocco et al. (Reference Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli and Dworzynski2005), and Maciuszek et al. (Reference Maciuszek, Polak and Świątkowska2019), differ substantially in design and do not yield sufficiently consistent results to licence strong generalizations.Footnote 13
On the other hand, the availability of gender as a frame for social categorization does not show that grammatical gender systems straightforwardly predict a society’s gender ideology. Speakers of languages with pervasive grammatical gender are not thereby shown to be more sexist, and communities whose languages lack gendered pronouns are not thereby free from patriarchy or binarism.Footnote 14 Still, the absence of gendered pronouns can be significant: it may reduce pronoun-specific harms, such as some forms of misgendering, even when other gendered hierarchies remain.Footnote 15 Importantly, the ideological force of gendered pronouns does not follow from grammar alone, but must be assessed in relation to the broader linguistic, social, and historical conditions in which they function.
Recent work on linguistic hermeneutical injustice helps specify some of the mechanisms through which broader conditions shape how gendered language does its ideological work. Drawing on Fricker’s (Reference Fricker2007) notion of hermeneutical injustice, Rosola (Reference Rosola2024) argues that the absence of a nonbinary grammatical gender creates a gap in collective interpretive resources that disadvantages nonbinary individuals in meaning-making.Footnote 16 In grammatical gender languages such as Italian and Spanish, non-binary individuals are forced to be represented within a binary system; they are thus misgendered structurally, not merely due to speaker error. Kapusta (Reference Kapusta2025), building on Dotson’s (Reference Dotson2014) distinction between first- and second-order exclusion, explains how entrenched binary ideology hinders language change. Klieber (Reference Klieber2025) highlights that while inclusive hermeneutical resources already exist within queer communities (e.g., Italian -u, German xier or sier), their broader adoption is suppressed by transphobic power structures. In response, Rosola (Reference Rosola2025) stresses that exclusion and resistance stem from ideology, as well as from cognitive and structural constraints, such as linguistic structure, cognitive effort, habit, and accessibility difficulty.
What is particularly significant about these accounts is that they specify mechanisms through which language “plays a role” in sustaining gender essentialism. They show how grammatical structure, usage norms, and power relations together constrain what can and cannot be said about gender, thereby complementing and enriching Dembroff and Wodak’s view.
Crucially, however, the literature has so far focused primarily on languages where gendered pronouns are built into the linguistic structure: English is a natural gender language; Italian, German, and Spanish are grammatical gender languages. To assess and refine the insights of these accounts, it is necessary to examine languages that lack grammatical gender altogether. For this reason, I turn to Mandarin Chinese, whose grammatical structure and historical development offer a particularly instructive pressure test—not as a counterexample to existing proposals, but as a case for clarifying how their mechanisms operate across linguistic and social contexts, and as such illuminates the reciprocal relations among language, ideology, and social change.
3. The case of Mandarin Chinese
The Chinese language is grammatically genderless: there are no gender inflections on articles or adjectives and it historically lacked gender-specific pronouns. A single epicene third-person pronoun, pronounced as tā, was used for all singular references, regardless of gender, animacy, or humanness.Footnote 17 Currently, written Chinese differentiates between third-person pronouns 他 (tā, “he”) and 她 (tā, “she”), along the lines of “he” and “she” in English. This distinction is a relatively recent development, emerging at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the long-standing absence of gendered pronouns did not prevent patriarchal social organization and binary gender norms from structuring Chinese society. Footnote 18 Building on Liu (Reference Liu1995) and Huang (2009/Reference Huang2023), I show that the call for gender-specific pronouns in Chinese initially arose from contact with Western languages and cultures; the creation, contestation, and eventual social uptake of 她, however, were influenced by a myriad of factors beyond grammar.Footnote 19
Poet and linguist Liu Bannong is generally credited with introducing 她 (tā) as a specifically feminine pronoun in the late 1910s.Footnote 20 Its emergence took place during the New Culture Movement and May Fourth Movement, two broad intellectual and sociopolitical reforms during the 1910s and 1920s that challenged traditional values and promoted individual freedom, science, democracy, and women’s liberation. The increasing need to translate Western texts with grammaticalized gender distinctions highlighted a perceived limitation of Chinese: it lacked direct equivalents for English she, French elle, or German sie. Reformers argued that linguistic accuracy and precision required a visible marker to eliminate such ambiguity. Leading intellectuals such as Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun, and Hu Shi believed that language reform was integral to social reform. Equality would be harder to achieve unless accurate delineation was in place, and women’s achievement would remain obscured if the language lacked precise means to represent them (Huang Reference Huang2023, 153). From this perspective, the absence of feminine pronouns mirrored the marginalization of women in traditional Chinese thinking.Footnote 21 The introduction of 她, marked by the 女 (nǔ) radical denoting femininity, arguably filled both a morphological and conceptual gap: it expanded the expressive capacity of the language, as well as enhancing symbolically women’s visibility.
However, the proposal sparked vehement controversy. Some critics retorted that Chinese language had long functioned adequately: context usually sufficed to disambiguate, and the addition only compromised the language’s simplicity. Others objected that the reform imported Western grammatical distinction unnecessarily.Footnote 22 Still others raised questions about semantic confusion and practical obstacles.Footnote 23 More importantly, some opponents rejected 她 on the ground of gender equality. The goal of gender equality, they argued, is to eliminate all disparities, so introducing a written form that marks the difference is both redundant and regressive. Moreover, the graphic contrast between 他 and 她 is one between the radical 人(ren)—“human”—and the radical 女(nǔ)—“women,” suggesting that women are separate from, or even lesser than, full humans.Footnote 24 Closely related is the noted pattern that many characters containing the 女 radical carry pejorative or diminutive connotations, such as 妖 (“demon”), 奸 (“evil”), and 奴 (“slave”). To be sure, not all 女-radical characters are negative, but this pattern is troubling. Footnote 25 Due to these concerns, some reformers proposed 伊 (yi) as a more suitable alternative.Footnote 26
Despite these objections, 她 eventually gained widespread acceptance. In retrospect, the uptake depended on a number of converging factors. First, the reform aligned with broader social movements and modernist pursuits: a gender-specific pronoun was seen as equipping the Chinese language with a written form that could match the Western languages. Meanwhile, such a pronoun responded to, although in a contested way, rising feminist consciousness and ideals of gender equality. Second, compared to its phonetically distinct rival 伊 (yi), 她 enjoyed visual advantages. It allowed for easy understanding and fit well with existing practices of using homophonous characters, as well as the broader trends toward vernacular language and literature. Third, adoption by influential and prolific writers, endorsement by educational institutions, and inclusion in authoritative dictionaries consolidated its status.Footnote 27 Over time, a combination of modernizing aspirations, feminist ideals, and practical linguistic considerations contributed to the successful addition. Today, 她 has become so entrenched that many native speakers simply take the feminine pronoun for granted, with no knowledge of the historical development.
Now, after a century’s implementation, the spoken pronoun tā remains gender-neutral, referring to all people and things alike. However, in written Chinese, a clear asymmetry has taken hold. On the one hand, 她 is a stable part of mainstream usage. Many media outlets, feminist organizations, and platforms employ 她 not only for semantic precision but also to signal gender equality and foreground women’s presence. In Taiwan, people even use 妳 (nǐ) as a feminine second-person pronoun, alongside the generic 你 (nǐ, “you”), with similar rationales about enhancing visibility and fostering solidarity (Wong and Zhang Reference Wong and Zhang2000).Footnote 28 On the other hand, while 他 continues to refer to all individuals, 她 is marked as exclusively feminine. Corpus studies suggest that 他 dominates written usage, including contexts where gender is unknown or mixed, reinforcing a male-default norm and revealing persistent biases (Cheng Reference Cheng2016; Su et al. Reference Su, Molinaro, Margaret Gillon-Dowens, Wu and Carreiras2016; Dong et al. Reference Dong, Chen and Lin2023).
More recently, there have been grassroots efforts to create written forms for individuals with diverse gender identities. Many nonbinary individuals in the Chinese-speaking community have voiced their dissatisfaction with 他: due to the by now standardized contrast between 他 and 她, the former is associated with an implicit maleness and is no longer fully inclusive. Several alternatives have been proposed, including replacing the radical 人 with “X” to form a novel character “X你,” or simply adopting the romanized “TA,” all pronounced as tā (Davey Reference Davey, Chen and Mucha2024). These suggestions draw on resources outside the established inventory and experiment with new orthographic conventions.
While these innovations have gained visibility online, especially among younger and queer communities, they remain informal and are yet to achieve wider adoption. The obstacles are multiple. Some are social and hermeneutical: nonbinary and genderqueer identities are still poorly understood by the general public (Dembroff Reference Dembroff2018, Reference Dembroff2020), and many see little or even no need for new pronouns.Footnote 29 Other obstacles are linguistic and technical: forms based on modified, new radicals or full romanization fall outside the standard writing system and face resistance from publishers, platforms, and software. Politics also matters. Given the Chinese government’s poor record of supporting LGBTQ+ communities, top-down endorsement or institutional support in the near future is unlikely. In reference to recent discussion on linguistic hermeneutical injustice, innovative, inclusive hermeneutical resources are available, yet they struggle to move from local to shared interpretive repertoire, in part because of conservative social and political forces (Rosola Reference Rosola2024, Reference Rosola2025; Kapusta Reference Kapusta2025; Klieber Reference Klieber2025).Footnote 30 Importantly, these difficulties should not be understood as reasons against inclusive pronoun reform. They show that the availability of a normatively well-motivated new form does not by itself guarantee ameliorative success, but they do not undermine the ameliorative goal.
In sum, the development of pronouns in Chinese both confirms and complicates the current theoretical picture discussed in section 2. On the one hand, the emergence of 她 shows that linguistic forms do “play a role” in ideology—once established, they render gender salient and contribute to normalizing binary distinctions. On the other hand, the Chinese case shows that the historical absence of gendered pronouns does not prevent patriarchy and binarism from being entrenched, and that well-intentioned reforms can nevertheless introduce new asymmetries that reinforce male-default patterns in writing. Finally, recent attempts to develop inclusive written forms illustrate that, even when alternative resources exist, they may fail to become shared interpretive tools since uptake is constrained by factors beyond linguistics. These observations do not settle what eliminating entrenched gendered pronouns would achieve today. They do show, however, that the relationship between pronoun systems, ideology, and social change cannot be adequately assessed by generalizing from any single language alone.
4. Rethinking linguistic amelioration
The rise of 她 is an especially telling “success story” because it comes from a language structurally different from cases that dominate philosophical discussions (English and grammatical gender European languages) and, accordingly, foregrounds under-examined dimensions of what prompts reform and what facilitates uptake. This motivates a shift in how we theorize about pronouns and linguistic amelioration. In this section, I develop a cross- and trans-linguistic perspective and apply it to assess the prospects and limits of linguistic amelioration and reflect on the broader methodological implications along the way.
One clarification is in order before proceeding. We can distinguish two versions of gender essentialist ideology: binarism is the view that there are only two genders, defined by essential characteristics, leaving no room for nonbinary identities; patriarchy refers to the complex social structures that privilege masculine traits and roles and subordinate the feminine. Reform proposals may target binarism, patriarchy, or both. The distinction matters for how we evaluate potential tensions.
4.1 Towards a cross- and trans-linguistic perspective
To begin, the development of gendered pronouns in Chinese supports a qualified claim about the relationship between language and ideology. Language can “play a role” in sustaining gender ideology without being either necessary or sufficient for perpetuating essentialism. The long history of an epicene third-person pronoun tā did not prevent entrenched gender hierarchy.Footnote 31 Once the written contrast between 他 and 她 is established, gender became easier to mark and be noticed. While pronouns do not determine ideology, they can affect salience and trigger gendered inferences.
Meanwhile, the Chinese example complicates any straightforward inference from a language’s pronoun system to ideological progress. The two historical moments in the Chinese case bring out different aspects of this complication. The long history of an epicene tā shows that the absence of gendered pronouns is no guarantee of egalitarian social structure: patriarchy and binarism can be sustained without pronominal gender marking. The introduction of 她 highlights a complementary dimension: a gendered pronoun can be introduced in pursuit of modernist and feminist ideals, including precision and visibility, while its stabilization can nevertheless reconfigure the written system in ways that contribute to a male-default norm. Importantly, 她 did not arise from grammatical necessity; it was introduced for ideological reasons. This reverses the usual assumption that language shapes thought: social and ideological change can drive linguistic change, generating new forms of gender marking and understanding.
A second lesson concerns grammatical and orthographic affordances and constraints for expressing gender. Introducing the feminine pronoun 她 was relatively straightforward in a writing system where new characters can be formed simply by adding the 女 radical. But the ease of engineering 她 does not guarantee intended ideological payoff: the introduction of a separate feminine pronoun contributed to the stabilization of a male-default norm in writing, and it draws attention to the derogatory associations carried by many 女-radical characters. More generally, pronouns are just one of the many sites where essentialist assumptions can be linguistically encoded and reproduced. Cross-linguistic comparison makes this especially vivid: in heavily gender-loaded languages such as German, Italian, and Spanish, gender marking is not only localized in pronouns but spread across articles, nouns, and adjectives (González Vázquez et al. Reference González Vázquez, Klieber, Rosola, Lepore and Anderson2024).Footnote 32 These differences matter for reform: the availability of a new pronominal form tells us only part of the story, since its effects depend on how that form interacts with wider systems of gender marking and interpretation.
A third lesson concerns uptake. The ideological impact of language change is not determined by the surface form alone, such as whether a word looks gendered or neutral. It depends, rather, on how it is used within the linguistic practice and stabilized as social conventions. Consider again the contrast between the relative ease of inventing 她 and the present challenge of devising inclusive pronouns. Experimentation with “TA” or novel characters such as “X你” indicates that the barrier is not the availability of a new form, but whether it can become a shared interpretive resource in the common ground.Footnote 33 This connects directly to recent work on linguistic hermeneutical injustice and resistant hermeneutical resources: what can be readily expressed, recognized, and endorsed depends not only on grammar and processing burdens, but also on institutional gatekeeping, platform infrastructures, and political conditions that enhance or suppress wider adoption (Rosola Reference Rosola2024, Reference Rosola2025; Kapusta Reference Kapusta2025; Klieber Reference Klieber2025). We therefore need to move from mere cross-linguistic comparison to a trans-linguistic framework that tracks how ideas for amelioration travel, how they change in contexts, and what contributes to their success or failure.
4.2 From cross- to trans-linguistic thinking
The framework I propose has two components. First, the cross-linguistic dimension takes seriously how different languages encode gender: some concentrate gender marking in pronouns (as in English), others distribute it across nouns, articles, and adjectives (as in German and Italian), and still others lack grammatical gender but encode asymmetries in vocabulary or script (as in Chinese). Cross-linguistic comparison helps us identify which philosophical claims may generalize, and explain why strategies that look natural in one language may be ineffective or even counterproductive in another.
Second, the trans-linguistic dimension takes into account how ameliorative proposals, ideological formations, and linguistic practices travel across languages and contexts in an increasingly globalized world.Footnote 34 Such movement is not mere replication. When proposals and forms travel, they are recontextualized within new grammatical structures and sociopolitical environments, and their meanings and functions are renegotiated through contested uptake. Amelioration is therefore historically embedded and mediated by agents and institutions. Consequently, the “same” reform proposal, such as eliminating gendered pronouns, can have drastically different implications depending on where and how it is implemented.
For instance, the now familiar practice of declaring one’s pronouns likely originated in English-speaking contexts and has since circulated into other linguistic communities, in which cases they take on different pragmatic roles, such as expectations about politeness. In Italian and Spanish, proposals to neutralize gender marking have also travelled via graphic innovations: “-x,” first introduced in Spanish as a gender-neutral ending, has been adopted in some Italian usage, and “-@” is used to replace gendered suffixes in both languages (González Vázquez et al. Reference González Vázquez, Klieber, Rosola, Lepore and Anderson2024).Footnote 35 In Chinese, exposure to Western languages and cultures has been central in motivating both the use of 她 and current debates about inclusive alternatives. These cases illustrate similar trans-linguistic dynamics: reforms emerge under local pressures, circulate through contact, and are reinterpreted by context-specific uptake negotiation.
This transformative aspect is best understood when language is seen not as a fixed determinant of thought, but one medium among many through which gender essentialism is reproduced and contested. Language is a community-based practice: a site where ideology, culture, and social practices interact to shape attention and interpretation. This is why linguistic forms can influence salience without dictating what speakers can think; if language strictly shapes thought, critical reflection, resistance, and intentional revision would be out of the question (Cameron Reference Cameron1992). Accordingly, linguistic and ideological change are reciprocally related, historically situated, conditioned by the resources of particular languages, and mediated by speaker agency. Social change often motivates attempts to reform language, and linguistic changes can in turn support further social transformation, encouraging new forms of recognition or norms of address, and, in some cases, moving institutional practice and legislation. As such, language will continue to be a critical battleground for those seeking in-depth ideological change.
Overall, a cross- and trans-linguistic perspective recommends doing normative work on pronouns and gendered language in close engagement with the histories of the relevant practices and languages. Since the phenomena are variable and complex, there is no universal recipe for an easy fix. Simple rules, such as eliminating gendered pronouns altogether or always adding new marked forms, are unlikely to generalize across languages and contexts. Instead, ameliorative proposals are better understood in light of (i) the grammatical and orthographic resources and constraints of each language; (ii) the historical trajectories through which gender categories and gendered forms emerged; (iii) the institutional, technological, and political conditions of uptake, and (iv) the agency of speakers, activists, and policymakers who negotiate reforms by adopting, reinterpreting, or resisting them.
We cannot identify a small set of linguistic features as solely responsible for sustaining gender essentialism, nor think that removing them will resolve long-standing social problems. The roles language plays are more varied and context-dependent than what this simple picture depicts. This recognition, however, complicates the very idea of “fixing pronouns” and raises foundational questions about the prospects of linguistic amelioration: how such efforts can be justified, how they can be implemented in particular linguistic communities, and what should count as success. Since these questions are multi-dimensional and extend well beyond pronouns, I can only sketch what I take to be the central considerations rather than offering comprehensive answers.
4.3 The prospects and limits of linguistic amelioration
A cross- and trans-linguistic perspective forces us to be more precise about what makes linguistic amelioration philosophically interesting and politically useful. A first complication is that pronoun reforms can target more than one goal. Recall the two types of gender essentialism—patriarchy and binarism. Attempts to address patriarchy tend to focus on androcentrism and gender stereotyping; efforts directed at binarism typically aim to reduce compulsory gender classification and affirm gender diversity. Though not inherently incompatible, they can generate difficult questions of prioritization: should we make gender more visible to contest male-default norms, or less obligatory to resist binary enforcement? The tension is not accidental; it reflects the fact that different aspects of essentialism may require different linguistic interventions.
A cross-linguistic perspective sharpens this point because the implications in making gender visible or less obligatory vary with how gender is encoded in a given language. Cross-linguistically, amelioration efforts utilize two main strategies, feminization and neutralization. Footnote 36 Feminization counters androcentrism by introducing or emphasizing explicitly feminine forms, from generic “she” in English to 她 in Chinese, where a feminine written form was introduced into a previously epicene written system. Neutralization, by contrast, reduces the salience of gender by replacing gendered forms with gender-neutral alternatives, from “they” or “ze” in English to forms like “TA” or “X你” in Chinese. While each strategy is in principle justifiable, each has predictable risks. Though neutralization can reduce compulsory gender specification and thus support anti-binarist objectives, it also undercuts feminist aims of visibility; while feminization can disrupt the presumption that the masculine is the default, it may reinforce the idea that the unmarked form is the “real” default and the marked feminine is just a derivative.Footnote 37 Importantly, the cross-linguistic lesson is that these strategies do not have fixed costs or effects across languages. Their prospects depend on how a language encodes gender and on how particular reforms interact with existing linguistic and interpretive conventions.Footnote 38 The upshot is not that reform is incoherent, but that a single strategy can hardly advance all legitimate aims simultaneously.
A second source of difficulty concerns feasibility and uptake. Uptake requires negotiation over historically situated norms under conditions of asymmetrical social and institutional power. Some reforms impose non-trivial processing and communicative burdens, creating practical obstacles for wider acceptance.Footnote 39 Reform proposals also require coordination and support across institutional gatekeepers, such as schools, publishers, style guides, dictionaries, media organizations, and digital platforms. Without their endorsement, a proposal may be intelligible to a local community, but remains socially marginal.
From a trans-linguistic perspective, uptake is not merely the implementation of a fixed proposal, but part of the process through which reforms travel, are reinterpreted, and become stabilized or resisted across contexts. This is illustrated by the contrast between 她 and contemporary proposals such as “TA” and “X你”: 她 was facilitated by visual alignment with existing graphemic conventions, trans-linguistic contact with Western languages, and institutional endorsement during the modernization movement, whereas “TA” and “X你” face different challenges because they depart more radically from established conventions in a less receptive political environment. Moreover, successful implementation may nevertheless yield mixed ideological effects. Even the much celebrated Swedish inclusive pronoun hen still triggers masculine mental representation (Renström et al. Reference Renström, Lindqvist and Gustafsson Sendén2022, Reference Renström, Lindqvist, Akbas, Hekanaho and Gustafsson Sendén2023). Therefore, structural availability and implementation are no guarantee of socially stable uptake or intended ideological impact, nor do they settle how burdens of accommodation are distributed.
Given these complexities, one might be skeptical, perhaps even disillusioned, about the prospect of linguistic reform. Critics may contend that tinkering with pronoun usage is simply misguided and that advocates for gender equality and inclusion would do better to focus on more substantial forms of social and political change. Ideological diversity will continue to exist among speakers of the same language,Footnote 40 and language that appears neutral can still be harmful in the mouth of bigots. This can happen in two ways: formally neutral or inclusive language can still operate within biased interpretive practices or be used by hostile speakers in ways that communicate exclusion. Structurally, the Chinese case illustrates how a formally gender-neutral spoken pronoun can coexist with written and interpretive patterns that default to masculine reference. Pragmatically, even inclusive terms may be used dismissively, sarcastically, or with scare quotes that signal rejection rather than recognition.Footnote 41
A further worry is that since revising language can verge on regulating thought, reforms may seem to pose a threat to intellectual autonomy and democracy. Finally, if there is no straightforward correlation between linguistic gender-marking and gender equality, then perhaps philosophers should stop treating pronoun reform as a promising route for advancing social change.
In my view, however, this skeptical conclusion is too quick. The fact that reform proposals provoke intense debates shows that linguistic change is no small matter. Because language is tightly interwoven with broader sociopolitical structures, it is unsurprising that efforts to challenge long-standing conventions are met with conservative resistance. More importantly, the difficulty of implementation is not just a practical obstacle but a condition of legitimacy. Queloz and Bieber (Reference Queloz and Bieber2021) argue that the “implementation challenge” reflects commitment to liberal democracy.Footnote 42 Kitsik (Reference Kitsik2023) similarly warns against epistemic paternalism, recommending explicit persuasion, education, and open exchange of information as appropriate mechanisms for change.Footnote 43 Ideally, proposals should be justifiable publicly rather than imposed top-down, and the disagreements they generate can create valuable opportunities for collective reflection. Disagreement is in fact characteristic of norm negotiation in pluralistic communities and essential for achieving broader ameliorative objectives.
Moreover, the value of linguistic amelioration is not exhausted by uniform acceptance. Even when a proposal fails to become a settled convention, it can still make background norms explicit, render default assumptions contestable, and force reflection on who bears the burden of misrecognition and of accommodation. Revision proposals are linguistically transgressing relative to long established practices—including grammar, morphology, and other interpretive resources in the common ground. But they aim precisely to “disrupt the functions of the language system, so as to affect change” (Sterken Reference Sterken, Cappelen, Plunkett and Burgess2020, 422). Whether they secure eventual uptake or not, the debates they prompt can engage different parties to reflect on the rationale and consequences of their linguistic practices, along with how different changes may generate “representational and worldly benefits.” (Sterken Reference Sterken, Cappelen, Plunkett and Burgess2020, 430). This way, both proponents and opponents can review their own habits, privileges, and identities, leading potentially to ideological transformation (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012; Pinder Reference Pinder2022).
Still, not every controversy is worth pursuing. It does not follow that the more a proposal challenges existing linguistic norms, the more effective it will be in drawing attention to underlying gender ideologies. Extreme proposals, especially those facing significant practical constraints, are unlikely to be fully implemented and may provoke backlash and outright dismissal that hardens resistance. Since uptake is partly affective and depends on coalition-building, deliberately advancing predictably unworkable reforms is likely to be counterproductive. In practice, compromise is often necessary, and the prospects of amelioration turn on whether reforms can be framed and implemented in ways that are publicly intelligible, motivationally acceptable, and institutionally supportable.Footnote 44
In short, given a cross- and trans-linguistic perspective, we can be cautiously optimistic. Pronoun reform alone is not a self-sufficient remedy for gender essentialism, but it is not merely lip service either. Since language is a dialectic between structure and speaker agency (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet Reference Eckert and McConnell-Ginet2013; Eckert Reference Eckert2019), it is a meaningful route for destabilizing entrenched norms. However, because linguistic changes are typically gradual, incremental, and more likely to endure when they become organic, we should not expect ideological shifts to happen immediately. Crucially, reform proposals should be analyzed and assessed in terms of how they are justified, which aspects of essentialism they target, what trade-offs they impose, how they can be integrated given the resources of particular languages, how they can secure uptake, and what benefits they can plausibly deliver in the long run, rather than in terms of whether they can eliminate essentialism once and for all. On this understanding, the prospects of linguistic amelioration may be modest but nevertheless genuine.
5. Concluding remarks
I have argued that philosophical work on pronouns and gendered language should be more responsive to linguistic diversity and context-situated practices. Starting from Dembroff and Wodak’s radical proposal to eliminate gendered pronouns in English, I offered a sympathetic reconstruction of their view and connected it to recent discussions of linguistic hermeneutical injustice. The history of 她 in modern Chinese shows that gendered pronouns are neither necessary nor sufficient for sustaining essentialism, and that gender marking can be introduced as part of broader projects of modernization and feminism. This supports a modest “language plays a role” thesis and undermines any simple inference from the presence or absence of gendered pronouns to the strength of essentialist ideology.
On that basis, I developed a cross- and trans-linguistic perspective on linguistic amelioration. Cross-linguistic comparison makes clear that different languages afford different reform strategies and that no single reform can address all dimensions of patriarchy and binarism. Trans-linguistically, I emphasized how ideas of reform travel across contexts and are reshaped through recontextualization and contested uptake, under constraints that are at once grammatical, institutional, and political. Even when uptake is partial, debates can make default assumptions explicit and thus open to collective evaluation. In this sense, proposing linguistic change is an important route through which ideologies are made visible, negotiated, and sometimes transformed.
The overarching methodological points are the following. First, philosophers should take linguistic diversity seriously when analyzing the relationship between language and thought, especially when grounding ameliorative proposals in such theorizing. Second, language is not an isolated system, and metalinguistic awareness is required for seeing it as part of a broader social fabric and our own role as agents. If language can affect attention, interpretation, and action, then beginning from any one language can potentially bias both diagnosis and prescription.Footnote 45 The dominance of English in contemporary academic philosophy is impossible to miss, and I do not reject English as the discipline’s de facto working language. We should, however, avoid treating any single language as methodologically transparent, for doing so can inadvertently invite overgeneralization from language-specific features and overstate the reach of our analysis.Footnote 46
Gendered ideology can be sustained through many linguistic sites besides pronouns, and the prospects of any reform depend not only on what a language makes easily expressible, but also on the historical paths by which its gendered expressions arose and the social conditions that stabilize uptake in practice. If we are committed to challenging gender-based stereotypes and discrimination, and if we find patriarchy and binarism problematic, then addressing these issues through language calls for a way of doing philosophy that is empirically cautious, historically and politically situated, and linguistically pluralistic.
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2026.10106
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Meaning and Reality in Social Context II, the 2025 Academia Sinica Conference, and IAPh 2025 in Tokyo. I am grateful to Shiu-Ching Wu, Sandy Goldberg, Sam Berstler, Esa Díaz-León, Quill Kukla, Norman Teng, Chia-Ming Chen, Tse-Mei Wu, Ellie Hua Wang, Ken Shan, Shen-yi Liao, Nikolaj Pedersen, and Yuko Murakami for helpful comments and discussions; to the audiences at these events for their feedback; and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions. This research was supported by the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan, under Grant NSTC 113-2410-H-001-051-MY3.
Hsiang-Yun Chen is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Her research focuses on philosophy of language, philosophical semantics, and analytic feminism, particularly the semantics of pronouns and gender terms, conceptual amelioration, and epistemic injustice. Her work has appeared in Ergo, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Philosophia, and Techné, among others.
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