At Harvard, students can pick 'ze, hir, hirs' - The College Fix
At Harvard, students can pick ‘ze, hir, hirs’
Gender-neutral pronouns have hit Harvard.
“The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ registration tool now gives students the option to choose preferred gender pronouns for the first time,” The Harvard Crimson campus newspaper reports.
On the page that typically asks students to write down their gender marker—examples of which include “male,” “female,” and “transgender”—they could also manually write in preferred gender pronouns when they registered this week. Examples on the page included “ze, hir, hirs” and “they, them, theirs.”
FAS Registrar Michael P. Burke said the change, which administrators have discussed for a number of years, was intended to “make students feel more comfortable with their gender identity” at Harvard and ease students’ relationships with faculty and advisers, some of whom will be able to see their pronoun information.
The news follows on the heels of the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s controversial request to the campus community to use “gender-neutral pronouns” such as “ze, xe, xem, xyr, zirs and hirs.”
Read the full Crimson article.
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Jennifer Kabbany is editor of The College Fix. She previously worked as a daily newspaper reporter and columnist for a decade in Southern California, and prior to that held editorial positions at The Weekly Standard, Washington Times and FrontPageMagazine. She received a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship in 2002 and currently contributes to National Review Online's Phi Beta Cons section.