Lecturer bewildered; some feel belittled

Earlier this month Steve Elers, a lecturer in the School of Communication at Massey, published an opinion piece in Stuff that has now provoked an impassioned response from both students and staff.

In the piece, titled “The bewildering politics of gender pronouns”, Elers expresses his confusion with the large catalogue of terms and pronouns for gender that he deemed to be unnecessary. This has now opened a wide discussion of the constantly evolving nature of language and acceptance of diversity in the community.

In Massive Magazine’s last issue, MUSA president Stefan Biberstein wrote an open letter to Elers expressing disappointment in his comments.

He states at the end, “We extend an invitation to join the MUSA executive and representatives of diverse peoples in further discussion around this topic”.

Elers himself has said that he has spoken to Biberstein and is happy to accept his invitation to have a discussion.

Alongside the open letter, there have also been two opinion pieces from fellow staff published in response, one from a senior lecturer in Linguistics at Massey, Dr Julia de Bres and another by a professor of social work at Massey, Mark Hedrickson.

De Bres’ piece is titled “Gender diverse language is something to celebrate.”, while Hendrickson’s piece is titled “Pronouns are not so difficult”. Both explore some of the social, linguistic and historical contexts of gendered language and pronouns as well as how the evolution of language is naturally occurring and should be celebrated for its ability to both empower and promote inclusiveness.

Hendrickson said that he thought Elers was trying to be amusing, but it “didn’t work”.

“It doesn’t have to be as complicated as people want it to be.”

He thought the sentiments expressed in the article were “disappointing” and “extremely concerning” given the subjects Elers taught at Massey.

“How can you have that kind of attitude as a teacher of intercultural communication?” he said.

“It’s a problem in English. Many other languages don’t have gendered pronouns,” he said, citing Chinese and other Asian languages as examples of languages that are largely gender neutral.