Legislation: Gender-neutral Language

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, in this interesting debate, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott, has raised and memorably illustrated a problem which has two sources, one in grammar and the other in political history.

First, in grammar, like many other languages, English lacks an epicene third person pronoun that can have anaphoric reference to an ungendered antecedent—that is putting it in plain language. For literally hundreds of years, we have vacillated between solutions that partly fit the bill, especially “he”, which is third person and singular but not, of course, epicene, and “they”, which is third person and epicene but not, of course, singular. It is the danger of this “they” creeping into legislation that concerns the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott, among many others.

I will illustrate this with an example from the policing Bill that is currently going through this House. In one of the Marshalled Lists, Amendment 56LG reads as follows:

“The owner of a dog commits an offence if they … are not able to control the dog in a public place”.

Of course, far more of the amendments employ the traditionally approved solution, using “he”, as in Amendment 58, which says:

“A person questioned … may not be detained … unless … he is a person falling within section 40(1)(b).”

In fact, gender neutrality is only one part of the grammatical problem. We lack also the means of expressing number neutrality. After all, when we speak of “anybody” or “everybody”, we are not concerned with specifically singular entities but, well, with everybody. This is another factor tempting us in the direction of “they”. It is not surprising that many of us avoid the singular/plural mismatch by opting for the plural in both antecedent and anaphora, as in, for example, “Persons who live in glass houses are asking for trouble if they throw stones”.

The second problem issue is political history. When the whole world was solidly male dominated, as large parts of it still are, few people were concerned about the casual assumptions implicit in the generic “he” and kindred expressions such as “mankind” or the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. After all, the word “woman” proclaims that she is merely a subcategory of man, as surely derived from him linguistically as Genesis tells us that Eve was derived from Adam biologically. However, in the past century, when women got jobs outside the home, and then better and better jobs, they started exerting themselves and they increasingly convinced most of us that their grievances included linguistic ones. With striking rapidity, we got used to hearing sentences such as, “Our doctor and her husband were at the meeting”, and we abandoned “policemen” and “firemen” for “police officers” and “firefighters”.

Of course, languages frequently embody glimpses of the past and past beliefs— even the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, might speak of “tomorrow’s sunrise”—so, too, with sexist expressions, including our very own salutation, “My Lords”. If the English, brazen “Every man for himself” sounds particularly blatant, we should not forget that in “Chacun pour soi” “chacun” is not “chacune” and that in “Jeder für sich”, “jeder” is spelled with the masculine “r” and not the feminine “e”.

In my view, it was perfectly reasonable for Jack Straw in 2007 to call for an end to any such male stereotyping in our use of English, specifically rejecting the Interpretation Act 1978 and its reiteration of the convention that masculine pronouns are deemed to include feminine reference. If it ever worked, that convention no longer does, and there have been convincing psycholinguistic experiments showing that sentences such as “Anyone parking his car here will be prosecuted” predominantly call up images of a man doing the illicit parking.

To return to the policing Bill, we find that most amendments are thoroughly sensitive in this respect, with anaphoric reference employing “he or she” or repetition—“a person … that person”. But among the minority using the traditional “he”, there are striking cases, especially in Amendments 93 to 95, where the singular masculine pronoun is used no fewer than 18 times. In all of them, the antecedent of “he” is surely a tell-tale phrase: “the judge”. Since we do indeed have a judiciary that is largely manned by men, it is hard to believe that the use of “he” in these amendments really means “he or she” rather than endorsing one particular male stereotype as a fact of life.

At least the amendments show reassuringly little intrusion of the controversial “anyone … they” formulation. Of course, we hear it daily in this House and read it daily in the press, but it has no place in the language of statute, where its comfortably colloquial imprecision is seriously unwelcome.