More fascinating still, gender isn’t the only identity that falls along a spectrum: there are even cultural differences between how female and male in the sex/body sense are defined. In the Dominican Republic, there happens to be a high incidence of a rare genetic intersex condition called 5-ARD. Babies with 5-ARD are born with what appear to be female genitalia, but at puberty, their bodies—from their faces to their nether regions—start to masculinize, and by adulthood, they look like hairy, barrel-chested men. In Dominican culture, people with 5-ARD are labeled guevedoces, which literally means “penis at twelve.” In this community, people with 5-ARD are raised as girls, but after puberty, they are considered men for the rest of their lives, and they often take on new, masculine names. For the Dominican Republic, people with 5-ARD are just “girls” whose bodies and minds suddenly become “boys.”
Ten thousand miles away, in Papua New Guinea, there are also noticeably high numbers of 5-ARD. But unlike the guevedoces, these people are not recognized as first a girl and then a boy; instead, they are seen as an entirely different sex, a third sex, both before and after puberty. They are labeled turnim-man and are acknowledged by the community as such, which informs their lifelong identities. So even though these folks have the same bodies as the Dominican guevedoces—the same XY chromosomes, the same ambiguous genitalia—based on the cultural perceptions in Papua New Guinea, they are called by a different name.
In English, we are constantly coming up with new names to describe different pockets of the sex and gender spectrum. We find ourselves in a cultural moment where how we think about gender, and human sociology in general, is being driven by what Zimman calls “self-definition.” Thanks to things like the internet, personal brands, and other modern ideas about individualism, each of us gets to define who we are to the world on our own terms, and we can tweak those definitions over the course of our lives. We’re not annelids or anthropoids, after all; we’re human beings with complex thoughts and experiences that are in constant evolution. Almost nothing about our identities can be defined on such rigid terms—gender included. If you’re a woman, you’re a person who self-identifies as a woman, no matter what your body, mannerisms, or style of dress look like. “That actually bypasses the traditional idea that women see themselves as women because they liked to play with dolls when they were little and that men see themselves as men because they liked to play sports,” says Zimman. These props don’t have to be what defines our gender anymore. “Instead,” he says, “it’s just this very individualized, emotional, visceral feeling of who do I think I am.”
If there are no hard-and-fast definitions of the words woman, female, man, or male, then how do we know when to use them? There is, I’m afraid, no single rule we can all follow here either—in every case, the context and intent of the conversation will factor in. I have my own personal language preferences. For example, if someone wants to call me a “woman writer” or a “female writer,” that’s chill, especially since I write a lot about things that pertain specifically to women. But there are other gendered terms that make me cringe. I happen not to enjoy when people call me ma’am,* which makes me feel drab and old (something women are not supposed to be in our culture), though I hate being called miss, too, which sounds belittling. Men are so lucky they just get to be called sir no matter their age or marital status.
Several years ago I also became conscious of how English speakers use you guys. Often used as an address term for folks of any gender, guys is casual and friendly, and it solves a grammatical hiccup, since English lacks a second-person plural pronoun. Many speakers genuinely believe guys has become gender neutral. However, scholars agree that guys is just another masculine generic in cozier clothing. There’d be no chance of you gals earning the same lexical love, and people who actively avoid gender-biased words like ma’am often still use guys, as if it were any less gendered. Before the 1980s, guys was only ever used to describe men, and once it evolved to encompass women, many sociolinguists were shocked. Steven J. Clancy, a Harvard linguist, once said of the phrase: “Contrary to everything we might expect because of the pressures of ‘politically correct’ putative language reforms, a new generic noun is developing right before our eyes.” The trouble with you guys is ultimately why y’all has become my second-person plural of choice, as I mentioned fifty or so pages ago.
But not everyone is bothered by the same gendered words. Not to mention it would be just plain awkward to correct some polite stranger when they call me miss or group me in with you guys. But what I can say with some confidence is that in general practice, it’s a lovely idea to address people, especially people we don’t know, in a way that doesn’t assume this deeply complex thing that is their gender, particularly when it isn’t relevant to the situation at hand. This can be easily done by swapping in gender-neutral terms like folks instead of guys or ladies, or just leaving out the gendered word entirely—a simple “Excuse me,” instead of “Excuse me, ma’am,” will usually do the trick just fine.
Another useful thing we can do to make our language more inclusive, especially when gender is pertinent to the conversation, is to be much more specific with our word choices. Say we’re talking about reproductive health. Instead of saying something like “women need access to cervical cancer screenings,” we can get more specific and say, “people with cervixes need access to cervical cancer screenings.” This language is taboo, Zimman says, because it’s not participating in a euphemizing of sex. But it’s an example of how speaking in an inclusive way is also more accurate, especially since not all women have cervixes; not all people with cervixes are women; having a cervix doesn’t make you a woman, it just makes you a person with a cervix; and also “people with cervixes” is just a cuter marketing phrase anyway.
Will making these slight linguistic tweaks realistically push people’s attitudes toward gender and sex in a more accepting direction? Can forcing someone to say “hi, folks” instead of “hi, guys,” or to call Yvonne Brill an “engineer” instead of a “woman engineer” really change their perspective of gender at large?
This, linguists admit, is empirically hard to measure. However, what we do know is that even if changing our own language won’t necessarily change our thinking, the language we hear from other people can. For example, imagine if it became the policy at a restaurant to cease addressing people as “ladies” and “gentlemen” or “Mrs. So-and-So” and “Mr. So-and-So” but instead to use the gender-neutral terms guests and Mx.* There could be a server at this restaurant who is totally against the rule. But the manager makes them follow it with the restaurant’s patrons, including young kids, who then hear this language, and that could very well have an impact on them even if it didn’t change the speaker’s mind.
There are places around the world where such policies have worked. In 2017 Vice documented two kindergarteners in Sweden who were AMAB but have gender-neutral names, long hair, and are allowed to play with whatever toys they like, from dinosaurs to nail polish, without gender associations. In Sweden, enforcing gender stereotypes in schools has actually been illegal since 1998. Instead, the government funds gender-neutral kindergartens, where you’ll find teachers saying “friends” instead of “boys” and “girls”; lessons are taught using gender-neutral mediums, like nature and modeling clay; toy animals replace baby dolls; and characters in books are pictured defying traditional gender roles (female pirates; lesbian queens ruling a kingdom; Batman wearing a baby in a sling around his torso). An obituary of a woman rocket scientist in Sweden would, no doubt, never open with “she followed her husband around from job to job.”
That Yvonne Brill obituary, by the way, was penned by the New York Times’s obit columnist at the time, who was, to no one’s surprise, a dude. The journalism business, much like most formal industries involving language, has been helmed by men since the beginning of modern English. But what does language sound like when men aren’t around to influence it? Lucky for us, sociolinguists have studied how our words chang
e when women are both the speakers and the listeners. Experts have entered those precious spaces—the enclaves of our apartments, the dugouts of our softball leagues—where women manage to ephemerally escape the perspectives and expectations of a society run by bros. And what they’ve found is very cool indeed.
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“Mm-hmm, Girl, You’re Right”
How Women Talk to Each Other When Dudes Aren’t Around
In 1922 Professor Otto Jespersen published his tour de force, a book called Language. At the time of its release, Language was the single most exhaustive account of the derivation and development of human speech to date. Then sixty-two years old, Jespersen was a linguist at Denmark’s University of Copenhagen whose specialties included syntax, the study of sentence structures, and early language development. His book was exhaustive—Language covered sounds, words, grammar, the origin of speech (these are real chapter titles). There was even a chapter called “The Woman.”
Jespersen’s “The Woman” chapter addressed women’s everyday speech habits and how those habits differ from men’s. It was his interpretation of “girl talk.” It’s reasonable to think of Language and “The Woman” like a big, prestigious medical textbook that reserved just one section, about two-thirds of the way through, for “women’s” health. As if to say, well, there are bodies and then there are lady bodies, which are at once an entirely different subject and also only worth dedicating about 10.4 percent of our attention to (the precise quotient of Jespersen’s fleshy 448-page tome occupied by “The Woman”). This medical textbook analogy is no hypothetical, by the way; studies of gender bias in med school literature from all over the world have found that even in seemingly objective educational materials, male bodies—like male speech patterns—are typically considered the norm and that symptoms more often found in women are given less attention or ignored altogether. Just look at heart disease, which was the number one cause of death among American women as of 2015 (that’s more than all cancers combined). Women make up more than half of total heart disease fatalities, yet men are still more likely to be diagnosed. Why? Because female subjects are mostly absent from medical textbooks and papers, many doctors simply don’t know how to recognize or treat heart disease in women, whose symptoms usually show up differently than men’s (like nausea and neck discomfort as opposed to chest pain).
So Jespersen’s book was very much like that, but for language. Louise O. Vasvári, language professor at NYU, has less-than-favorable thoughts about his “The Woman” chapter. “He had no chapter called ‘men’ or even ‘young men’ or ‘old men’ or any kind of minority men,” she laments. “Because Language was man’s language, of course, and then you have this one chapter, saying, oh, how interesting, how strange, these women and their language.”
Drawing from his own anecdotal observations of women, not empirical studies, plus a hodgepodge of popular texts (Shakespearean plays, magazine articles, anonymous French proverbs), Jespersen decrees that the way women talk is curiously inferior—less masterful, less effective—to that of men. His conclusions include gems like, “Women more often than men break off without finishing their sentences, because they start talking without having thought out what they are going to say,” “The vocabulary of a woman as a rule is much less extensive than that of a man,” and “The highest linguistic genius and the lowest degree of linguistic imbecility are very rarely found among women. The great orators, the most famous literary artists, have been men.”
“Ridiculous,” Vasvári responds dryly, ninety-five years later. “Totally ridiculous.”
But Jespersen, as it turns out, was only partially ridiculous. What was definitely ridiculous was the man’s lack of any sort of data to support statements like, “Men take greater interest in [words’] acoustic properties. . . . [A man] chews the cud to make sure of the taste of words . . . thus preparing himself for the appropriate use of the fittest noun or adjective.” (Yes, you just read the word cud, which I think is safe to place on the list of the grossest English words, next to moist, panties, and pustule.)
But what was not so ridiculous at all was that Otto Jespersen was one of the first linguists to write about the idea that how people talk, and how our speech is perceived, might have something to do with whether a person is a man or a woman (or somewhere else along the spectrum, as we’d come to discover), and how those gender roles are perceived.
One of the most commonly misunderstood speech styles in the English language is how women communicate among themselves—how they use language when there are no men in the conversation. Thoughts about “girl talk,” as these exchanges are often labeled, are generally informed by the culture-wide assumptions that women are more emotional, less sure of themselves, and naturally inclined to talk about so-called frivolous topics, like lip gloss and the Kardashians. “Girl talk,” suggests that when women converse with one another it’s inherently featherbrained and precious. Not to mention the implication that women all talk to each other in private the same way. When Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor run into each other in the bathroom between hearings, do their sink-side exchanges also count as “girl talk?”
Imperfect label or not, I do believe most women can sense that there’s something special about the way women communicate among other women (and not “inferior” special like Otto Jespersen believed). Growing up in a culture with so many rigid standards and expectations for feminine behavior, the ways in which women are “supposed” to talk out in the world—in meetings, in line at the grocery store—are in part a curated performance. Don’t ask too many questions or you’ll sound unassertive; don’t say anything negative about a child or you’ll sound like a nonmaternal sociopath; don’t make too many allusions to The Bachelor or you’ll sound basic. No matter your sexuality or gender presentation, anyone who has ever been female, either in birth assignment or identity, is unavoidably still dragooned into following some patriarchal convention of feminine speech.
So how do women speak when they’re in the exclusive company of other women? What does woman-on-woman conversation sound like, according to data from linguists? Is it different in any meaningful capacity from how men talk with other men? And what can all that teach us about femininity itself?
Since Otto Jespersen’s time, linguists have found some answers to these questions. One of the foremost scholars of “girl talk” is Jennifer Coates, a linguist at the University of Roehampton in Britain. Coates, now in her seventies, has more than three decades of expertise in the field of gender and conversational style; and though she would never use the phrase “girl talk,” her work provides plenty of support for the idea that women often communicate differently when surrounded solely by other women. Over the decades, Coates and her peers have carefully examined the speech styles of many different all-women and all-men groups—these are called genderlects. They’ve looked at various ages, races, cultures, sexualities, and socioeconomic classes, and while there is undoubtedly variation based on these factors, not to mention the context of the conversations (speech usually varies from the brunch table to the boardroom), one observation has remained rather constant: while men’s speech style can be categorized as “competitive,” women’s is “cooperative.”
Analyze a few hundred transcripts of dude-on-dude chatter and you’ll usually find a dominant speaker who holds the floor, and a subordinate waiting for his turn. It’s a vertical structure. But with women, the conversation is frequently much more horizontal and malleable; everyone is an equal player. While men tend to view conversation as an arena for establishing hierarchies and expressing individual achievement, women’s goals are typically to support the other speakers and emphasize solidarity. Thus, women progressively build on what one another says.
There are lots of misconceptions about men’s and women’s speech styles, especially when it comes to the topics they talk about. You may have heard the banality that women talk about “people,” whereas men talk about “ideas.” This stereotype is th
e linguistic analogue of assuming that when women get together, all they do is have pillow fights, paint their nails, and talk about their celebrity crushes. Nonetheless, some of the most discerning figures in media still buy into it. In 2016 writer Andrea Wulf won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book prize for a biography of the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and in response, a male journalist from the Guardian theorized that the reason women have started winning more science book awards is not that more women are writing books about science but that “female science writers” are “more likely to focus on people, while their male counterparts are more likely to address a problem, a mystery, or an underexplored scientific field.” It’s men that make the real discoveries, he implies—women are just there to make their stories all warm and snuggly.
The way Jennifer Coates sees it, it’s often true that women’s topics of conversation center on people and feelings, while men tend to steer in the direction of things and events—sports,* gadgets, current affairs. (This is a generalization, of course.) But ultimately, it’s all a means of talking about “ideas.” I took note of a recent conversation among three of my friends, where the topics discussed surfaced in this precise order: social media obsession, sex work, veganism, sobriety, PhD programs, and a current murder trial happening in Downtown Los Angeles. Those sound a lot like “ideas” to me.
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