Pronouns, Gender, and Harm

Recent work in linguistics and philosophy extensively explores the way in which speech can harm others. Most of this research focuses on expressions such as slurs which encode harm or derogation in their conventional meanings. But it is also possible to harm and derogate with expressions that are, in and of themselves, semantically neutral. Often this kind of harmful speech involves deliberate misapplication of terms. This chapter focuses on one such case, that of gendered terms and gendered pronouns, which are sometimes used to purposefully misgender trans people. This kind of speech has two main effects: it signals a trans-exclusionary ideology of the speaker, and it serves to negate the identity claimed by the misgendered individual, which both denies their agency and (at least potentially) hurts them. The chapter considers two possible analyses of such discourse acts and concludes that an analysis in terms of signaling speaker background ideologies via pragmatic means is to be preferred to one which makes such ideologies part of lexical content (however construed).