Lauren Kosslow

Linguistics: Culture and Literacy

Dr. W
Explain a Concept Project
2 May 2019

Explain a Concept Project

For my project, I used the concept of gender neutral pronouns. I find gender neutral

pronouns personally valuable because I was never taught gender neutral pronouns in school, and

I don’t think many others learned about them in a classroom setting. I had to use my own means

to learn about gender neutral pronouns, and I didn’t learn about them until around the end of high

school. My audience is people who never learned about gender neutral pronouns in school but

would like to learn, mostly in the millennial/gen Z age group. I feel as though everyone needs to

be educated on gender neutral pronouns, but I feel like the millennial/gen Z age group is the

group who most wants to learn about gender neutral pronouns and how to use them correctly.

The format I used for this project was a Twitter page, and the link to the account is included at

the end of this paper. As I previously said, I never learned about gender neutral pronouns in

school, so I learned them through other means, with the main source actually being Twitter. I

feel as though a great number of millennials/gen Zers get their news from Twitter, so I felt as

though a Twitter account was good platform from which to educate millennials/gen Zers on

gender neutral pronouns. I created a, “pronoun of the day,” feature where I tweeted a new gender

neutral pronoun almost every day. I then ran polls to see if people had heard of the highlighted

pronoun of the day. The poll that received the most votes, 74 votes inquiring if one had heard the

pronoun, “fae,” received 8% yes, 89% no, and 3% maybe. Most of the polls I ran received votes

of no, indicating that most gender neutral pronouns are still not widely known. I found most of

the pronouns from the LGBTQ resource center for the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I
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also used dictionary.com to define the term nonbinary, and some in class sources to talk about

classical works using gender neutral pronouns. Additionally, I used WedMD to discuss the

symptoms of gender dysphoria and its connection to gender neutral pronouns. This project taught

me additional gender neutral pronouns I was previously unware of, and helped me to see that

education of gender neutral pronouns is an issue which still needs to addressed. Link to the

Twitter account: https://twitter.com/neutralpronoun1

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Works Cited

“Gender Dysphoria: Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment.” WebMD, WedMD,

www.webmd.com/sex/gender-dysphoria#1.

“Gender Pronouns.” LGBT Resource Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,

uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/.

Tudury, Leila. “What Does Nonbinary Gender Mean?” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, 21

Aug. 2018, www.dictionary.com/e/gender-sexuality/nonbinary-gender/.