The use of she/her pronouns by cisgender gay men, along with words such as "girl" or "honey," is a long-standing and increasingly visible practice. For many gay men, using these words with their friends is a way of embracing femininity and showing vulnerability or affection to others who share their identities. Creating a shared culture — including language — around femininity can be a way of reclaiming the bases for oppression many gay men have experienced, as well as disrupting the harmful gender binary.
But few if any linguistic practices are all one thing, all the time. In a culture where women and femininity have long been denigrated and belittled, there is a danger that cis men using these words can perpetuate some of these negative tropes. It may be time to reevaluate cis gay men’s use of words like "she" and "girl" to make sure they align with ongoing efforts to respect nonbinary gender identities, and avoid making assumptions about people’s pronouns. Linguists, social scientists, and critics have observed and studied cis gay men’s use of “she,” and their assessments point to the multiple and often conflicting dimensions of the practice.
“Something can both be subversive but also problematic at the same time,” explains Lal Zimman, a linguistics professor at UC Santa Barbara who specializes in trans language practices. “It seems almost impossible to subvert the current systems that we’re living in without somehow relying on those systems. So for it even to make sense for gay men to use ‘she,’ we have to have some kind of association with ‘she,’ and usually that association is femininity, whatever that might mean to us or our culture.”
Historically, queer men and women switched their use of gender pronouns so that they could openly communicate with one another in times when it was not safe to openly have same-sex relationships. This practice — sometimes called "she-ing" — has a centuries-long history around the world, including England, Peru, the Philippines, and South Africa. “Men using women’s pronouns, and women using men’s pronouns, has got an enormous time depth in American lesbian-gay English. It’s not a recent formation at all,” explains William Leap, an emeritus professor of anthropology at American University and pioneering expert on queer linguistics.
Gay men calling each other "she" or "girl" was historically a way of protecting themselves as well as building community in the context of homophobic and violent mainstream culture. Leap has traced many of the roots of American queer linguistics to the Harlem Renaissance. “In Harlem, incredible forms of sexualized language emerged in the context of the linguistic florescence called Harlemese, which was the language of everyday life in Harlem,” says Leap, who is currently finishing a book entitled Language Before Stonewall. “Part of that was this wonderful speaking style that had to do with sexual sameness. One of the things that you get there is incredible playing with pronouns.”
Black queer people of all genders played with their use of pronouns and gendered language during the Harlem Renaissance. Leap pointed to 1920s blues music — including artists such as Ma Rainey and Ethel Waters — as a place where examples of Harlemese gender play can be found. Leap urged me to listen to Ethel Waters’ “My Handyman” as an example of playing with gender; apparently the song was actually referencing a woman. The lyrics include “He shakes my ashes, greases my griddle / Churns my butter, strokes my fiddle” and “Sometimes he's up long before dawn / Busy trimming the rough edges off my lawn.”
This practice is also visible in letters from soldiers during World War II, Leap explains. In the 1940s, military censors were on the lookout for evidence of homosexuality, which could provoke a military investigation. To evade this, soldiers would shift the pronouns in their letters, allowing them to, as Leap put it, “say all kinds of things about what they were up to and what kind of fun they were having.”
Leap also stresses that there are usually multiple reasons a linguistic practice is used, and the history of certain words does not necessarily form a linear path to their use today. “Because this is the history doesn’t mean this is the antecedent to today’s practice,” Leap explains. “But it kind of puts today’s practice into a broader framework of what pronoun shifts could mean. Now, do today’s young people know that when they say things like, ‘Is she for real?’ I don’t know.”
Using words like "she" and "girl" can be a way for cis gay men to bond and embrace femininity. “When I was growing up I didn’t want to be called ‘girl.’ And I would ask myself, why? What’s wrong with that? And that’s because of the way I was socialized and affected by the patriarchy,” says Black writer and activist Darnell Moore, a queer cisgender man. “Now if someone calls me ‘girl,’ I’m fine with that…. the context in which I’ve experienced this for the most part has been one of a willingness to move beyond the rigidity of markers of a certain type of manhood and masculinity.”
Yet some women have experienced gay men using words like “girl” toward them in ways that don’t feel all that different from the misogyny they have experienced from straight men. “It got kind of weird when I was doing things in a leadership role in LGBT spaces, and ‘girl’ was used toward me as a way of putting down my ideas,” says Brianne Huntsman, a cis queer woman who lives in Salt Lake City. “I also saw it being negatively used when white gay men would say, like, ‘Oh girl, what are you talking about,’ and they would be talking to a woman of color, especially a Black woman. That was very loaded, given how African American people have been treated in the sense of people calling them ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ to deny them their adulthood and ability to make decisions for themselves.”
Considering misogyny within gay men’s language practices raises the question of how using words like “girl” or “honey” is connected to their use of other, more controversial words that have historically been used to demean women, such as “bitch” and “cunt.” Multiple interviewees referenced RuPaul’s Drag Race as a show that has popularized the use of words associated with femininity among cis gay men. RuPaul has also been widely criticized for his transphobic views on drag. He uses the acronym CUNT to describe a drag queen’s ideal qualities — charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. Another term that has been popularized on the show, “hunty,” is a combination of the words “honey” and “cunt.”
“Gay men are a large group of people with a lot of different kinds of relationships to gender, and I think there are absolutely gay men who operate in relation to feminine language that really is a reflection of their male privilege, whether it’s through using it in ways that denigrate or stereotype women, or whether it’s just feeling license to use the language how they see fit,” says Zimman, the linguist from UC Santa Barbara. “Of course, gay men are men. Men are prone toward misogyny, so that’s not something to be left out of the picture.”
Other aspects of identity, particularly race, also provide important context for this practice. Much of the history, as well as the more contemporary popularization of cis men using terms like "she/her," has Black and Latinx roots. Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary on Harlem’s drag ball scene, as well as Drag Race, have brought the use of words like "she" and "girl" between Black and Latinx drag queens to a wider gay (and straight) audience; today this is something employed by gay men of all races. As with all language, context is important. Wealthy white gay cis men calling each other "girl" may be drastically different from Black or Latinx gay cis men who continue to be marginalized in very different ways.
As is visible in a film like Paris Is Burning, a few decades ago there were more shared spaces, language, and culture between cis gay men, trans women, and gender-nonconforming individuals. In ball culture during the 1980s, the use of a shared vocabulary could signal inclusion, affection, and safety. But in recent decades, this context has changed. “Part of the difficulty is the way that queer politics has come to be very much about sexuality and not gender,” explains Zimman. “This is the mainstream gay idea of being just like straight people, except for whom one is attracted to. That kind of rejection of gender nonnormativity also gives us the situation we find today, where we have more of a split between gay men and trans women, for instance, than we might have seen in previous decades.”
Alex, who identifies as a nonbinary transfemme and asks that their real name not be used, sometimes feels uncomfortable with cis men using "she/her" toward them. “With ‘girl/she/her,’” they say, “if I’m socializing with cis gay men and that’s what they’re using to describe each other and to describe me, there is a little bit of dissonance there, because I’m not really sure if they’re using that to validate my gender, or if it’s being used as it’s used with other cis gay men.”
There are critical efforts in trans and queer spaces to dissociate pronouns from specific identities. Gay men’s tradition of playing with pronouns and refusing to abide by the gender binary can be a part of this effort. It’s also important to recognize that individuals may identify with different pronouns at different points in their lives, or multiple pronouns all at once. Again, this practice can help normalize that. But as we continue to work on rejecting damaging norms around gender and sexuality, it’s important to question how we employ words and what associations we are invoking. It’s also important to ensure through affirmative consent that people are comfortable with the pronouns and other words used to refer to them.
“I think that with the context in which cis men come to understand ourselves, as shaped by patriarchy and sexism, there’s a need to be thoughtful about our uses of language,” says Moore. “It’s so important. And yet the queer potential, the radical potential in queerness, is our ability to fuck with language.”
Rachel Anspach is an independent journalist whose work has been published in Teen Vogue, Complex, Slate, The American Prospect, and Rewire.