Modern English is broadly considered a language without a grammatical gender system; however, there are cases of gender marking for some words harkening back to earlier forms of the language that did have grammatical gender. Mostly due to this lack of grammatical gender, intersections of language and gender where English is concerned have focused on pronoun use in the third person, as it is common and explicitly gendered. That said, there is still research to be done in those nouns and adjectives that still carry vestigial gender which has survived from past English varieties. The way that English-speaking individuals in the gender non-conforming community approach and interact with these pieces of gendered language has not yet been studied. This work is a self-refection on the way I, as an English-speaking non-binary individual, have felt when this leftover gendered language is used towards me. Differing levels of dysphoria are caused by different words, which leads me to a conclusion that some words may be more inherently gendered than others. Further investigation through the lens of a distributed morphology framework reveals that there may be a difference in my dysphoria depending on where the gender feature attaches to the lexeme. This contribution explores this from a personal reflective perspective, as opposed to a generalizable one.
This paper has been published, unfortunately there is a mistake in the references. The corrected version is available while I work with the publisher to fix this issue. The published version does not include second author Charles Reiss, who graciously brought the issue to my attention, and also cites an outdated version of the book.Â