Until relatively recently, gender-neutral pronouns were something people used to describe others—mixed groups, or individuals whose gender was unknown—not something people used to describe themselves. But even though people did not, in Young’s time, personally identify as nonbinary in the way we understand it today (though some identified as “neuter”), neutral pronouns existed—as did an understanding that the language we had to describe gender was insufficient. For more than three centuries, at least, English speakers have yearned for more sophisticated ways to talk about gender.
Likely the oldest gender-neutral pronoun in the English language is the singular they, which was, for centuries, a common way to identify a person whose gender was indefinite. For a time in the 1600s, medical texts even referred to individuals who did not accord with binary gender standards as they/them. The pronoun’s fortunes were reversed only in the 18th century, when the notion that the singular they was grammatically incorrect came into vogue among linguists.
In place of they, though, came a raft of new pronouns. According to Dennis Baron, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who wrote the definitive history of gender-neutral pronouns in his book What’s Your Pronoun?, English speakers have proposed 200 to 250 pronouns since the 1780s. Although most petered out almost immediately after their introduction, a few took on lives of their own.
Thon—short for that one—has resurfaced frequently since an attorney named Charles Converse first introduced it as a more elegant way of writing he or she. Converse claimed to have coined the word as far back as 1858, but it didn’t actually appear publicly in a magazine until 1884. The word made a splash in grammarian circles, and more than a decade later the publisher Funk & Wagnalls added thon to its dictionaries. “There was a sort of band of followers” for the word, Baron told me. “Through the 1950s and into the 1970s, there were prominent people in the U.S. who every once in a while would promote thon.”
The Sacramento Bee used the gender-neutral hir from the 1920s to the ’40s. Mx.—the gender-neutral equivalent of Mr. or Mrs.—was first recorded in an April 1977 edition of the magazine The Single Parent.
Many of these early pronouns were created either for linguistic simplicity or to include women, but none that Baron tracked from before recent decades had the explicit goal of encompassing a larger diversity of genders. “I’m sure there were people who said, ‘Hey, these pronouns aren’t me,’ but we don’t have a record of what they did after that,” Baron said. But “that doesn’t mean people weren’t talking about it.”