Shall I call you He or She?
Created | Updated Jun 26, 2002
What gender are you? Does it matter? Probably not. It's the 21st Century, and unless you're romantically interested in someone their gender should be slightly less important than their age, and maybe slightly more important than their eye colour. But I for one would like to know whether I am supposed to say 'he' or 'she' when referring to someone1, as at the moment I am avoiding saying either (for reasons that may or may not become clear later).
What It Means To Be Male or Female
This is a complicated subject, so I'm going to skip most of it altogether. I'm not interested in which chromosomes you have, whether you wear a bra, if you're saving up for the operation, or if you're called Mandy (or Bob) on weekends. The definition of maleness and femaleness in use here is simply: would you prefer to be referred to as 'he' or 'she2'.
Real Life
In the real world, you can usually tell what gender someone is. Physical appearance is a big giveaway, as is voice. If you're still left wondering you can watch body language, or if you're really desperate you can watch to see whether they go into the toilet with the little man on the door or the one with the little woman. And, of course, there's the last resort of mumbling something that could be 'he' or 'she'.
In some situations, however, these methods cannot be employed.
h2g2
It's not just h2g2 that is affected in this way, it's almost anywhere on the internet, but this is as good a place to start as any. If you are thinking about referring to someone in the third person, and are not sure3 what their gender is, what can you do?
The fist clue you have is a person's nickname. Often, nicknames are ambiguous. Often, they say something about a person, for example Jedi Jade suggests a female who likes Star Wars (and this is true, you can ask her). Often, it's hard to tell what exactly the nickname does say about the person, would anyone know what was meant by MyRedDice?
The sort of nicknames that help with our dilemma are those that include a name of the sort you'd give to your child (e.g. Linda) or ones that include the words 'man' (e.g. Spaceman Spiff) or 'woman' (e.g. Catwoman)4.
Where, to look next? Ah, the personal page! That should help. Unfortunately the pages saying 'Hi, I'm name, I'm a girl/boy and I'm age' tend to belong to the people who are less active on h2g25. The pages of the people you want to talk about, the people who seem to be everywhere at once, the people who (if you mention them to someone) are universally recognised, tend more to have pages like this:
'I am a member of groups, I am also a Scout/Ace/Thingite/Dark Disciple. I can be found here and there, I quite like this and that. If you are new you should go to these places.'
This is great, and can be very helpful if you're looking for some places to go, but it doesn't help with our task.
Going back to the nicknames, and something that requires a little more time and effort, how about looking into the meaning of the name? For example: Trillian's Child. This may mean nothing to you at first, but a little detective work yields significant results. Firstly, who is Trillian? Well, as any Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fan knows, Trillian is Tricia McMillan, the only female character who counts6. And who is her child? In the 5th book of HHGTTG, Trllian does have a child, named Random. The important piece of information here is that Random was a female. So, logically, Trillian's Child should be referred to as 'she'.
Let's have another go. How about Greebo? Greebo can be found in some of the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. In them Greebo is a very large, very smelly, very male cat. How male? Very male. Male enough that in one book it is mentioned that a two-headed kitten was born, but no-one was very surprised due to Greebo being every male ancestor for the past 13 generations. So, we would have to assume that Greebo of h2g2 is also male7. Alas, there our system breaks down, as Greebo has divulged the fact that she is, well, 'she'.
Conclusion
It's very hard to know whether to refer to someone as 'he' or 'she' on h2g2. Unless they have said in a conversation 'I am a girl/boy' at any point, it's best to ask if you want to know.
Now why didn't we think of that in the first place!?
