English Neopronouns and Conjugation

26 September 2023

This post was originally made on Cohost.

I wish anybody had realized the English personal pronoun convention was not "subjective/objective" but is in fact "subjective/possessive (determiner)"; it should not be "he/him" it should be "he/his" because I think I use "him" once a month but literally any time I talk about a dude I have to use "his" and this applies to all neopronouns too.

However, this problem arose because "she/her" is the same as "she/her", and thus half our language is easy to make this mistake with. The convention (at least in my line of work) was largely started with feminine pronouns, which have identical objective pronouns and possessive determiners in english. This is a rare exception, even amongst neopronouns.

Some people have been trying to correct this by adding additional default information: instead of adding the possessive determiner, they add the whole possessive pronoun. This is very formally correct, but in common English is rather infrequently used. It's not common in casual conversation to say "the bag which is theirs", it's more common to say "their bag", and especially for neopronouns the conjugation is not always clear in reverse.

"He/him/his" works fine because "his" and "his" are the same. "They/them/theirs" works okay… but you have to remember that it is not "theirs" bag but "their" bag. If the determiner does not use the common english "s" suffix to transform it into the pronoun, this could become confusing information.

Many neopronouns fashioned after masculine or nongendered pronouns do require knowing the possessive pronoun in average English conversation. The common "xe" pronoun uses "xem" as an objective pronoun, which you could derive from assuming masculine grammar, but uses "xyr" as a possessive determiner. There's no way to pull this information out of thin air, aside from a vague relationship in pronounciation to "their." However, it should be noted that the whole point of using neopronoun labelling such as this is to prevent assumptions from being made.

Anyways as a trans woman who has occasionally wielded neopronouns, consider this my official request to consider your conjugations, and please swap to "subjective/possessive" if you're only going to provide two aspects of your pronouns. If you really want to include the objective, then please consider "subjective/objective/possessive (determiner)."

And if you're curious about how english pronouns work, here's a pretty cool site: Grammar Monster - Types of Pronouns