Gender neutrality, however loudly announced in official pronouncements or in the news, creeps into our own set of norms on little cat feet. In my case, I realized it had made another inroad when I was settling in at a symphony performance and heard the voice over the loudspeaker: Ladies and Gentlemen, please silence your cellphones and other electronic devices.
Why Ladies and Gentlemen? I thought. Why can’t he simply say, Symphony Patrons? Must he remind us at the outset of our socially assigned gender and its prescribed behavior (Act like a lady!)? And then, as the violins began tuning, I started wondering about the usual school announcements that begin Boys and Girls … What about those? Why not Students? And why is it Boys before Girls but Ladies before Gentlemen?
Good thing the first piece on the program was Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance,” which managed to pull me out of the rabbit hole of such speculation so I could enjoy the concert. I returned to this pesky issue only when I learned of the City University of New York Graduate Center’s memorandum on gendered salutations. As a strong suggestion—not, the lawyer Saundra Schuster emphatically maintained, a mandate—the Graduate Center’s policy
is to eliminate the use of gendered salutations and references in correspondence to students, prospective students, and third parties. … Accordingly, “Mr.” and “Ms.” should be omitted from salutations in any correspondence with a student, prospective student or third party. For pronouns used in the body of a letter, refer to a student or prospective student by that person’s full name. For example, in the body of a letter, you would say “Chris Jones,” when you previously would have referred to “Mr. Jones” or “Ms. Jones.”
Those of us who have written countless letters of recommendation or academic warning might find this directive problematic. For individuals within the academic hierarchy of the university, we have gender-neutral honorifics at the ready: Professor Jones, Dean Jones, President Jones, even Dr. Jones for the free-floating Ph.D. But what of the student, the administrative assistant, the career services counselor? Many of us already use “Chris Jones” at the first mention of the individual, e.g., “I highly recommend Chris Jones for admission to your graduate program in engineering.” But when we refer again to the individual farther down in the body of the letter, we make a calculated decision. If the candidate is relatively young, or our relationship goes back many years, we may use Chris as the name. But if the candidate—or, more problematically, the individual about whom there is some concern—is older, or our relationship is more formal, we generally choose the last name with some sort of honorific; the blunt use of the last name alone, e.g., “Jones has had some difficulty staying on task in recent months,” feels dismissive. Are we now to repeat Chris Jones … Chris Jones … Chris Jones throughout the correspondence? Feels needlessly repetitive. Other solutions have a vague Communist ring: Student Jones; Assistant Director Jones; Librarian Jones. Might as well go with Comrade Jones and be done with it.
The websites to which the CUNY memorandum sends its hapless recipients are no help in solving this practical problem. They discuss the singular they, ways of reconstructing sentences to avoid he or she, the use of gender-neutral terms for job descriptors, and so on.
One is tempted, then, to throw up one’s hands, or to label the whole effort, as The Daily Beast does, “a mind-boggling waste of academics’ and students’ time and energy.” Certainly, the CUNY memo presents a problem without a clear solution, and I have no solution at the ready. But 50 years ago, those who proposed Ms. as an honorific were laughed at; those who advised that terms like fire fighter and mail carrier should be used in place of fireman and postman were told such things would never change. The otherwise sound advice in John Gardner’s 1983 The Art of Fiction implies, to the 21st century reader, a strange exclusivity:
It is feeling, not some rule, that tells the abstract painter to put his yellow here and there, not there, and may later tell him that it should have been brown. … It’s feeling that makes the composer break surprisingly from his key, feeling that gives the writer the rhythms of his sentences. … The great writer has an instinct for these things. He has, like a great comedian, an infallible sense of timing.
A generation from now, I suspect symphony-goers (if there are symphony-goers, and I hope there will be) will be addressed in some way other than as Ladies and Gentlemen, and we’ll all feel fine about it. Maybe, by then, we’ll have figured out a respectful, gender neutral, nonclumsy way to refer to Chris Jones in the second paragraph of that imagined letter. That we don’t have a solution yet doesn’t mean no problem exists.