Reading an article about animal liberation (in this case, whale/shark/fish/sea cucumber liberation) started becoming a little awkward when I began noting the author's and the interviewees' struggles with pronouns. Here I was, sprawled nearly upside-down on my couch (head on the butt cushion, legs over the back cushions), meant to have my heart breaking for these poor sea creatures. I mean, these guys - these volunteers who had sacrificed whatever they left back in their normal lives to come out here on what were essentially pirate ships for all the protection they got from any government - were describing the bloody struggling fin-thumping sharks on the decks of boats, and tuna dangling by the roofs of their mouths, and so forth, and I was going along, heart in my own mouth, wishing I hadn't been raised on sushi so I didn't love it so much, when suddenly the pronouns started becoming palpably forced, or else noticeably omitted.

Neither the author nor the interviewees knew what to call these suffering, dying creatures as they described them gasping on deck. It? Him? Her? You can't tell the sex of a madly thrashing shark by glancing at it (or even a calm shark, for all I know), and 'it' sounds ridiculous when you're talking about that kind of suffering. 'It' implies something that doesn't have the mental capacity for suffering. 'Him' sounds the most natural, but why assume it's a him? And 'Her' sounds like you're just forcing the issue of women's equality, pronoun-style, in a totally inappropriate and unrelated situation. And 'him or him'... um, well, let's insert it in context in an otherwise intact quote: "[t]hey just cut the line and threw him or her back into the water like he or she was a piece of nothing." Yeah.

Mostly, they fell back on 'him' - they were animal rights activists, after all, not ones to particularly give a shit, at that heightened moment, about offending pronoun-sensitive women - but it still read awkward and messed up the narrative. Suddenly, I wasn't seeing the suffering anymore, but rather thinking pedantic thoughts about pronouns.

The problem's been considered, I'm sure, even though I've never heard it discussed for animals, since they indisputably HAVE a gender (or at least a sex, depending on what your definition of both terms is, and whether you see a difference). But I have definitely heard it debated in genderqueer circles. Hir, ze, zir, etc (there's even a Wikipedia subsection on it, so it MUST be major!). These are supposed to be gender-neutral - to throw the intrinsic labeling and subsequent stereotyping of gender out the window. Maybe also to discount the importance of gender completely.

So I sort find it odd that there isn't a gender-neutral pronoun for animals, at least one that could be in use when gender is completely and totally beside the point, such as when one is fucking flopping around dying on a deck.

A lot of the time, in stories, human victims are given an (often exaggerated) gender so the reader can either identify with, want to rescue, or be attracted to them. The comically long hair of Rapunzel, the flexing muscles of an injured soldier strugging to drag himself to safety. It tugs at heartstrings (groinstrings, whatever). But what use is that in an animal? We feel weird about animal gender in a way we don't about human gender, unless their gender is useful somehow (milking cows, siring bulls) or else just a fact, always known, parceled in with everything else we know (pets, mostly). But to give a dying animal a gender, one that's destined to be either food or bycatch? In suffering, it's a he, in death, he or she is an it.

And everything is awkward about that. There's no option that ignores gender while still acknowledging suffering.