Or I could do what I\u00a0usually\u00a0do with longer posts and refer to the bird as either\u00a0‘he’ or ‘she’ with this explanation in parenthesis the first time I use the chosen pronoun in the post\u00a0– “I\u00a0don’t really\u00a0know the sex of this bird”. That lets the reader know that I don’t really\u00a0know the sex and when I continue to use that pronoun it becomes obvious that I’m just trying to avoid awkwardness in my text.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBut with that last option the question then becomes which pronoun to use, ‘he’ or ‘she’. I’ve used them both in the past but most often I’ve used ‘he’,\u00a0as the commenter above pointed out. I’ve done that for a reason and it has nothing to do with political incorrectness.<\/p>\n
The last thing I want to do is imply that a bird is one sex or the other when I have no idea what it is. When ‘he’ is used\u00a0in the context of birds\u00a0many\u00a0folks don’t even think of it as being\u00a0gender specific. I see evidence of that daily, in social media and elsewhere, when people use ‘he’ when they obviously misidentify or don’t know\u00a0the sex. They rarely do that with ‘she’ – when they use the feminine pronoun they nearly always get it right. So I use ‘he’ most often in an effort to avoid misleading as many readers as possible. When I use ‘she’ it fairly screams to the reader that the bird is positively\u00a0a female. And on those rarer occasions when I use\u00a0‘she’ I\u00a0make extra effort and use more text to explain what I’ve done\u00a0but once again\u00a0that becomes awkward so I use the masculine pronoun more often than I do the feminine.<\/p>\n
So there you have it. That’s my\u00a0‘logic’, for what it’s worth. There are no perfect solutions that I know of but if you’re aware of one that would work for me\u00a0I’d be thrilled to know about it. Many long-term readers know I’ve struggled with this issue for years but newer readers are likely unaware of that history.<\/p>\n
As my good friend Hieronymus Bosch said in a comment to this post on Facebook, “English needs a gender neutral pronoun.” I strongly agree!<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
PS – another ‘housekeeping’ item. I have WordPress set up so that first time comments have to be approved. After that comments from the same person are automatically approved and appear immediately. But for the last few months WordPress has been screwing up occasionally and not automatically approving comments even from long time blog followers. So if you’ve noticed that your comment doesn’t show up until after I’ve approved it, that’s why. <\/em><\/p>\nSorry, so\u00a0far I’ve been unable to resolve the problem.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With Feathered Photography I face a dilemma when choosing pronouns referencing the sex of individual birds. In a recent comment a reader took exception to the way I handle it so I think it’s high time I explain why I deal with it the way I do. I’ve done it before in comments but never as the subject of a blog post.<\/p>\n
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