Amia Srinivasan · He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita: How Should I Refer to You? · LRB 2 July 2020

At the same time, none of us are captured by the categories by which we gain recognition. I am that name you give me, but I am also something else that cannot quite be named. The relation to the unnameable is perhaps a way of maintaining a relation to the other that exceeds any and all capture. That means that something about the other can be index

In Ojibwe, an indigenous North American language whose nouns are not classified by gender but according to whether they are considered animate or not, the singular third person pronoun wiin is used for both ‘she’ and ‘he’. In Turkish, the equivalent of ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’ is simply o, which seems to me unimprovable.