History
In 1975, Christine M. Elverson of Skokie, Illinois, won a contest by the Chicago Association of Business Communicators to find replacements for "she and he", "him and her", and "his and hers". Her "transgender pronouns" ey, em, and eir were formed by dropping the "th" from they, them, and their.
The May 1980 issue of American Psychologist reported on a study by Donald G. MacKay, testing rates at which subjects miscomprehended the gender of a subject in textbook paragraphs when written with he meaning he or she compared with three epicene pronoun sets: E, E, Es, Eself; e, e, es, eself; and tey, tem, ter, temself.
In 1983, a mathematician-educator, Michael Spivak, wrote an AMS-TeX manual, The Joy of TeX (1983), using E, Em, and Eir. His set was similar to Elverson's, but capitalized like one of MacKay's sets. Writing in 2006, Spivak said:
| “ | The original pronoun set was not created by me. I think I read about it in a newspaper clipping, perhaps from the Boston Globe, during the time I taught at Brandeis, and I believe it was credited to an anthropologist; later on, when I wanted to use it, I was unable to locate the source. In "The Joy of TeX", I wrote "Numerous approaches to this problem have been suggested, but one strikes me as particularly simple and sensible." I assumed people would figure that I was using a construction I couldn't properly credit, and not consider me so immodest as to praise my own invention (though I guess that was a rather immodest assumption). | ” |
In May 1991, a MOO programmer, Roger Crew, added "spivak" as a gender setting for players on LambdaMOO, causing the game to refer to such players with the pronouns e, em, eir, eirs, emself. The setting was added along with several other "fake genders" in order to test changes to the software's pronoun code, and was left in place as a novelty. To Crew's "dismay", the Spivak setting caught on among the game's players, while the other gender settings were mostly ignored.
Other writers applied Elverson's original “th”-dropping rule and revived “ey”, such as Eric Klein in his legal code for a planned micronation called Oceania. John Williams's Gender-neutral Pronoun FAQ (2004) promoted the original Elverson set (via Klein) as preferable to other major contenders popular on Usenet (singular they, sie/hir/hir/hirs/hirself, and zie/zir/zir/zirs/zirself).
Read more about this topic: Spivak Pronoun
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