GENDER IN LANGUAGE PROJECT

This lexicon is broken up into general categories of words in Mandarin on which gender are marked—for example, personal pronouns, terms used to refer to family members or romantic partners, terms used by and for the queer community, etc. Most sections have three columns, where the leftmost column contains normatively male-specific terms, the middle column contains normatively female-specific terms, and the rightmost column contains neutral or gender-inclusive terms. In general, words in the same row can be expected to differ only in gender marking, and not, for example, in politeness or formality, unless otherwise noted.

While no gender-inclusive or gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun is widely used or accepted, TA appears sometimes in news and other media. X也 is an innovative form created by the intersex community The Missing Gender 0.972 in 2015. 无也, which uses the Chinese radical 无 meaning 'none', is another innovative form created by Zipeng Zhu in 2021. It is important to note that all of these pronouns are pronounced the same way, and so the difference between them is not detectable in speech, only in writing. This often leads to the claim that Mandarin does not have gendered pronouns. TA (the pinyin) is one of the earliest neutralizations in Mandarin Chinese and perhaps the most visible gender-inclusive innovation in the language. X也 and 无也 are innovations that were created by and for queer speakers of Mandarin seeking an inclusive form in native script, but they are not readily understood by most speakers of Mandarin without explanation, and they cannot (yet) be rendered by computers as a single character in the way that 他 and 她 can be.

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Extended family terms are marked both for the gender of the person you're talking about and for the gender of the family member by whom they're related to the speaker—either a parent, sibling, or spouse. These terms are first divided into these three categories, and then within each category by the gender of the person referred to and the gender of the connecting family member. Currently, we have not found any attestations of gender-neutral or gender-inclusive variants for any of these terms. Ultimately, creating completely gender-neutral terms for extended family members would require collapsing all four of the columns in each table below.

Note: In traditional Chinese families, a person's paternal relatives are viewed as "closer" than their maternal relatives. This is reflective of the patriarchy and sexism embedded in Chinese cultures.

TERMS RELATED TO THE QUEER AND TRANS COMMUNITY

SLANG AND INSULTS USED TO REFER TO TRANS AND GENDER-NONCONFORMING PEOPLE

The following terms are derogatory and frequently used by cisgender people to ridicule people that are perceived as trans or gender-nonconforming. There seem to be no slang terms that exist for trans men, possibly due to a lack of representation in Chinese-speaking queer communities. 女汉子 is sometimes understood as a compliment because people think that women who have more “masculine" traits (e.g. being brave, independent, hard-working, successful) are better than those who are perceived as more feminine. 伪娘, 人妖 and 女汉子 are frequently used to refer to people that are not even necessarily trans, but who are perceived as not masculine or feminine enough.

GENDER-MARKED RADICALS IN WRITTEN CHINESE

In the Chinese writing system, characters are made up of phonetic radicals, which indicate the pronunciation of a character, and semantic radicals, which convey the meanings. There are two gender-marked semantic radicals in written Chinese: the female radical (女) and the male radical (亻). The meanings of gender-paired words which differ only by these radicals are extremely asymmetric. Studies have shown that nearly 90% of the characters that co-occur with the female radical are either derogatory or project harmful stereotypes towards women. In contrast, characters with the male radical are typically semantically neutral or have a positive connotation. This section displays orthographic minimal pairs which differ by gendered semantic radical and common words they are found in. 

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