…The dialectal epicene pronoun a is a reduced form of the Old and Middle English masculine and feminine pronouns he and heo. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the masculine and feminine pronouns had developed to a point where, according to the OED, they were “almost or wholly indistinguishable in pronunciation.” The modern feminine pronoun she, which first appears in the mid twelfth century, seems to have been drafted at least partly to reduce the increasing ambiguity of the pronoun system….

Creative Commons Attribution: see https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/

I read that extract with great interest and began to wonder how difficult it might be to revise our habits in the use of the pronoun, especially in contexts where gendered assumptions are at play. As, for example, in the following attempt… 

The charming couple

Once upon a time, lost in a dark forest and all alone, there was a beautiful princess…

Such gendered expressions. Let us rather refer to her as….

Sorry. Not “her”. Hmmm. The search for neutrality.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful….

That seems to imply the male gaze, so let me avoid that.

Once upon a time there was a person of royal descent. They were quite an attractive looking person, if one can assume for the moment that the attractiveness of a person might in some small measure be attributed to their physical features rather than to their being attractive because of intellectual ability or emotional intelligence or political acuity.

Anyway. They were standing there in the forest, looking lost and not a little forlorn. As luck would have it, along came another person. They were riding a horse and they were also attractive in a traditionally-defined way. They looked quite regal, in their bearing and demeanour. They also looked quite charming (to use a term frequently employed by my partner’s parent on the patriarchal side).

Anyway, they (that is to say, in this instance, both of them) seemed to strike up an instant affinity with their other. After exchanging pleasantries the offer of a lift to the nearby village was negotiated and mutually agreed by both parties. The second of them – the one on the horse – bent down as if to assist the first (the one on the ground) to mount the horse, but they (the first one to appear in our story) declined the offer, asserting their ability to mount the horse without the kind of assistance that might have been proffered by the other only on the basis of a gendered assumption of their status in some arbitrary social hierarchy. The saddle-bound one accepted with grace the right of the other to decline their offer of assistance, and relaxed back into their upright position on the horse while the other mounted the horse in their own way and without assistance.

In virtually no time at all they (both of them) were seated, the newly-alighted one now seated behind the other, who introduced themself as the inhabitant of the local castle and as a person known in some quarters as a “prince”. In reply to a question from them to the newly-alighted one now seated behind, the newly-alighted expressed the view that they had no problems with them designating themself as such, if the local people had become used to such an appellation. Indeed, the one seated behind added the observation that they had also been accorded a similar honour by the local people in their own district, who had taken to addressing them as “princess”.

Legend has it – well, that is to say, various narrative discourses over centuries have represented different versions and constructed varying tropes to suggest this – that they (both of them) then rode together on the horse into the sunset and lived together as partners, in some contentment, for many years.