Thoughts on Gender Neutral Titles

Titles are an interested etymological study.

Consider that we use the word “human” to describe our species as a whole, “woman” to describe the female of the species, and “man” to describe the male. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say “man” is our whole species, while “woman” is female and “human” is male?

That was how it was done in Old English: “man” was separated into the words “wereman” and “wifman¹” to designate male and female. Wifman became the word “wife,” and wereman became…well, at some point we dropped the idea that males needed to be defined seperately from the species. “Man” became both plural non-gendered and singular gendered, depending on context.

Think about what this does. It implies that “male” is the default, that “man-kind” is the baseline expectation — of a kind to man — and that being a “wo-man” is to be different from a normal-man, i.e. “man.” This encourages viewing females as an “other,” a being that requires special treatment of some kind, leading the way to thinking women shouldn’t read or study, be given the right to vote for how the world is run, or be allowed to speak their mind with benefit of the doubt.

If we want to look at this as oppression towards males, we could say it suggests they’re just the base-line, nothing special or unique. Men are men, but Wo-men are men-plus.² Now, I personally believe whether you think this is absurd, true, or just as likely as the alternative, the fact is that all of humanity, male or female, suffers in a patriarchal society. (I make no claims about who suffers “more” or “worse,” because I don’t know how you would measure that, but until we get a “men’s liberation” movement going, where males start to reject their patriarchal upbringing and fight for their right to be feminine, I’m going to say women have certainly made a better case.)

Either way, gendered language has been a part of our history for…well, almost all of history. Some languages, like Spanish and German, even gender inanimate objects. While this is certainly worthy of many long books on the subject, I’d like to get practical for a moment.

I’m a writer, and I have been writing a book, or perhaps a series³, for some time. In this book, a gender-neutral character becomes a ruler. Are they a King, or a Queen?

Before the obvious question arises, this isn’t someone who has adopted a gender-neutral label; this is someone who is genetically neither male nor female. Whatever molecular bio-truths you hold to, they do not apply to this character, so you can’t say they’re King or Queen based on their genitals. Also, in this setting this non-gendered biology is not uncommon, and there are cultures which do not default to male or female genders when uncertain. King or Queen?

Well, when it comes to Kingdoms, we have some ready-made non-gendered words: Monarch is a good one. Liege has the benefit of fitting the Lord/Lady pattern, and could be used for less-than-monarch nobility. Noble is gender-neutral, but more of a descriptor than a title.

Liege does have royal connotations, however; enough so that a peasant saying “my liege” to a knight sounds wrong to my ears. I decided to create my own titles, both as an exercise and exploration of non-gendered titles.

Lord/Lady

When coming up with a non-gendered English Lord/Lady title, it’s important to remain true to the pattern: The word has to start with the letter L, and have a D sound after the first diphthong. It also needs to avoid the common “male” endings, R and T for example, as well as the common “female” endings, e.g. long E or long A. Ideally, it would also avoid the sounds already present in Lord and Lady, so as not to be “feminine but modified,” or “masculine but not quite.”

There were a lot of options that disqualified themselves out of the gate: just replacing the “o” in Lord with an “a” made Lard, and replacing the “a” in Lady with a “u” made Luddy. Adding/removing the “y” made Lardy and Lud, and those both sound silly. Using an “aw” sound made the word sound too much like either “loud,” or like lady was being said with a heavy southern accent.

Voicing the D, turning it into a T sound, also was a dead end. Lut, Loot, Late…they all sounded weird.

If you vocalize the ending of Lord, you get Lorduh. Comparing Lorduh and Lady gives us a stronger pattern. L-vowel-D-ending. This got closer, but finding the right gendered ending to go with what vowel sound was also interesting. Lude, pronounced LUH-deh, doesn’t work, nor does Ludo, pronouced LOO-doh. Ladi — LAH-die — was closer, if sounding a bit much like a Beatles’ lyric, as was Liden — LIE-den.

I decided the most interesting option (to my ears) was Lean, or possibly Lead.⁴ N is fairly gender-neutral ending sound, as is D. The long E sounded better than the short U or long O sounds. There were certainly other options, like Lonn or Laan, and I experimented with ending vowel-sounds without finding anything that sounded right.

If you want an interesting etymological look at a more well-resarched attempt at non-gendered Lord/Lady, take a look here. I was closer than I thought!

But whether I stick with Lein or Ledan, there are other gendered titles besides Lord/Lady…

Other Noble Titles

Lord and Lady aren’t based on each other. That is to say, in defiance of most english gendered words, they don’t have the same base that is altered for each gender. Consider actor and actress, waiter and waitress, or steward and stewardess. Seamstress suggests that a male would be called a seamster. Sounds like teamster, doesn’t it? Would a female teamster be a teamsteress?

You could make the argument that, at least for my above examples, the root word is the action being taken. A male who acts is an act-ER, a female is an act-RESS. At the same time, an actor-ESS would naturally be shortened to actress when spoken quickly. Is this the “wo-man” thing all over again? Wait-RESS, or Waiter-ESS? A distinction without a difference, in my opinion, and not an issue when we consider titles of nobility:

A Duke or a Duchess is someone who rules over a Dukedom. It’s easy to see that Duke is the root word here, much how whether you are an Earl or an Earless, you rule over an Earldom. Marquis and Marquess, Count and Countess, Baron and Baroness…the “ess” is modifying the male title.

Now, I can’t in good conscience allow this male erasure to continue (heh) by having the gender neutral be another augmentation of the base male title. No, it is clear to me that the gender-neutral term is the base title. A gender-neutral Duchess is a Duke. An Earl could be male or female. I needed to come up with the male versons of these noble titles.

This was a fairly easy problem to solve: just add male-endings onto the base word. Therefore, a female Duchess will henceforth be counterpart to a male Duchen. Earls can be the female Earless or the male Earlen. A Count can be a Countess or a Countier, and the Barons of the world could be Baronesses or Baroners. A Prince can be either a Princess, or a Prinson⁵. Graf is an old German title, similar to a Count; Grafin is the feminine, so Grafer can be the masculine. Or do away with the ending altogether, and have both just be Grafs (Grafen, for the German plural).

Some titles don’t lend themselves to gendering: what would a female Vizier be? A Vizieress? Viziera? That sounds weirder than just calling a female advisor a Vizier. There are other titles that have ready-made neutral roots, however. Whether Marquess or Marqui, you are a Marq (pronounced Mark). Both the Viceroy and Vicereine are Vices, as are the Viceregants and Vicereginas. The Male Emperor and the Female Empress are gendered Empri (EM-pree), and a Tzar could be a Tzaritsa or a Tzarich.⁶

But this leaves us one interesting issue…Occupations.

Occupations

I’ve never liked replacing “men” in occupations with “person.” It makes the word harder/longer to say, and therefore makes its usage a kind of effort. That’s not a bad thing, by any means, but it does mean the only people who use, for example, police-person are those who are willing to both make an effort and to sound a bit off to the casual listener. While these are character traits to be lauded, they are also present in those people who tend to be off-putting about their ideology, so is there a simpler/easier option?

Perhaps? Replacing the “man” is the quickest solution. Combine policeman and policewoman into one simple word…uh…like…

Just dropping the man might work for some words: fisherman becomes fisher, guardsman becomes guard(s), policeman becomes…police? It’s already plural, can it apply to an agender-individual? Can someone be a police?

Actor and Waiter have become gender neutral through the archaic-ness of “actress” and “waitress,” so what about policer? That almost works, and has precedent in Councilors. but what about fireman? Do they become firers? Do Ombudsmen become Ombudsers? Fireman is a good word to focus on; anything that works for that word should work for every word.

What if, instead of replacing the “man,” we just replaced the A? Firemon sounds like they’re a type of either a digi- or a poke-mon. Firemoon sounds like a hippy name. Firemun still sounds too masculine to my ears, and easily slips back into fireman if you’re not paying attention. Firemeen sounds like you’re quoting Frankenstein (the Universal Studios version, not the literary one). Firemine sounds like munitions. Firemoan certainly doesn’t work, and Firemin is…

Well, I’m a writer. I live both how words sound in your head and how they look on the page. When it comes to sound, firemin is certainly different than fireman, but it is pretty close to firemen. Consider how the word “women” sounds; we generally pronounce the word like “wimmin,” much like we pronouce firemen like ‘firemin’. But when we see it written…

It’s not firemen, fireman, firewoman, or fire-person. It’s firemin, and even if it sounds similar, it will still hit our ears differently when we see it written out.

Closing Thoughts

One of the benefits of writing otherworld fiction is you don’t have to worry about changing society to fit your ideas, you can just write it that way. In my fantastical worlds, the gender-neutral/plural of any profession is ‘min,’ assuming I can’t drop the ‘man’ from its end. Will this hit everybody the same way? Probably not. Do I think everyone should adopt this choice? Certainly not. I do think it solves a problem I’ve had with the English language for quite a while, though; and if you have the same problem, consider how you would solve it. I’m sure I’ll change my opinion in the future, and may decide to try something different.

If I don’t, however, and this somehow becomes a syntactic rule of the English language, I want full credit.

Oh, and royalties. Don’t forget the royalties.