For the past few days, reporters and armchair pundits on social media have been commenting on a certain detail in the online applications for an array of positions in Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, from Battleground Political Associate to Security Automation Engineer. That detail: pronouns. After requiring applicants to upload their résumé and provide their full name, they are asked—but, I am relieved to say, not required—to announce whether they are “he/him,” “she/her,” “they/them,” “xe/xem,” “ze/hir,” “ey/em,” “hir/hir,” “fae/faer,” or “hu/hu;” whether they are pronoun-less (“Use name only”); or whether the Vice President’s staff should use “custom” pronouns.

If you fill out forms, you are probably being asked to give your pronouns with ever-greater frequency. Still, in my experience, the prompt more often resembles the “optional diversity survey” at the end of the Harris applications, which offers a narrower and not wholly coextensive range of choices: “she/her,” “he/his,” and “they/them,” as well as “My pronouns are not listed” and “I do not wish to identify.”

How exactly did the Harris campaign arrive at its fuller list of so-called neopronouns? I don’t know the answer, but it seems to me an interesting question since, for those who are into this sort of thing, there are many more third-person singular pronouns, even without taking into account the presumably infinite number of “custom” options. Why “fae/faer” and “hu/hu” but not “co/co” and “ve/vis”?

Two years ago, LGBTQ Nation produced “An (incomplete) list of gender pronouns,” which comes with the disclaimer, “Unfortunately, we can’t provide an exhaustive list of all pronouns, as people come up with new pronouns all the time.” Besides “he/him,” “she/her,” and “they/them” (the last with reflexive “themself”), this list trumpets fourteen sets of neopronouns, including “co/co” and “ve/vis” but not “fae/faer” or “hu/hu.” Strikingly, only two of these sets, plus two halves, are on the Harris list. Two halves?! Well, “xe/xem” and “ey/em”—plus “ze” (but LGBTQ Nation records its object counterpart as “zir” rather than “hir”) and “hir” (but LGBTQ Nation records this as the object of both “sie” and “xie” rather than of “ze” and “hir”).

There are far longer lists, too, which isn’t surprising in a world in which MedicineNet can produce a “medically reviewed” register of “the 72 other genders” besides male and female: “caelgender,” “cloudgender,” and “condigender,” for example. The best account of neopronouns is Dennis Baron’s 2020 book What’s Your Pronoun: Beyond He & She, which records such proposals as ip, um, and vey (oy!). Baron and I disagree about a number of matters, but John McWhorter’s comment on the dust jacket is on the money: Baron’s list of “the attempts over the centuries to come up with a new gender-neutral pronoun … is worth the price of the ticket.”

And here’s another question about the Harris campaign’s list: Will one’s pronouns and the choice to disclose them (or not) influence hiring decisions?

In a different context, a recent study by Taryn Eames, a PhD student in economics at the University of Toronto, demonstrates that applicants for American jobs (housekeeper, baker, landscaper, etc.) who disclose “they/them” pronouns are discriminated against. Since neopronouns remain far more unusual than the use of the already-extant “they/them” for a specific nonbinary or gender-nonconforming individual—a practice that the Oxford English Dictionary first records in a tweet from July 11, 2009: “RT @pieskiis: @FireboltX What about they/them/theirs? #genderqueer #pronouns”—I imagine (but cannot know for sure) that applicants who disclose their pronouns as (say) “hu/hu” are often subject to even greater discrimination. (As for “presumed cisgender applicants who disclose pronouns,” Eames’s “results are inconclusive: it is unclear whether these applicants experience no discrimination or some negative discrimination.”)

But perhaps the Harris campaign is different. The list of explicit options might suggest that people who disclose “they/them” and such neopronouns as “hu/hu” are also the subject of discrimination—but positive rather than negative.

At a roundtable event with disability advocates in 2022, none other than the Vice President herself said this to her audience, as part of scripted remarks: “I am Kamala Harris; my pronouns are ‘she’ and ‘her’; and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.” How will she and others introduce themselves this week at the Democratic National Convention? Listen up.

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