Until yesterday, the only information everyone could see on every Google+ profile were your name and your gender. Last night, Google+ Profiles Product Manager Frances Haugen posted this video announcing that soon Google users would be able to control their gender information:
In a nutshell: If you decide to make your gender private, you will be referred to in gender-neutral language (part of the example Haugen offered: If your gender is set to private, instead of “Greg added you to his Circles,” Google will say “Greg added you to their Circles.”) “I know this is grammatically questionable,” Haugen says, saying that gender privacy is more important than being grammatically perfect.
This is a good first move on Google’s part, and it’s pretty mind-blowing that this is a conversation that is happening in public. It’s not even conceivable that this kind of a public statement on genderqueer issues from one of the biggest corporations in the world would happen in, say, the 1980s, or even the 90s.
Easy fix:
You have been added to Greg’s circles.
(You’re welcome, Google +)
It has only been grammatically questionable to use “their” as a gender-neutral pronoun since the mid-nineteenth century. The change was an explicitly misogynistic one.
While Google’s change does empower genderqueers I’m pretty sure it has more to do with Google trying to increase buy-in from women. After all there are no intersexed or other non-binary options.
Still awesome that I have a new excuse to inform people their pedantic grammatical conventions were created by nineteenth-century misogynists.
Thanks, sexmachinealpha. I did not know that!