Gender Neutrality in Quizbowl Writing and Playing

[csa2125]

[This post is mostly made up of things I posted in Discord during discussion of the same, but decided we should "set our ideas in stone" somewhat so it'll eventually be "solved" in some form or fashion]

We all know of the "High School Catherine the Great tossup problem": a question too quickly reveals the gender (or other key attribute, though usually gender) of its subject or a key person related to its answerline, intentionally or unintentionally (by saying "she" too soon or using "this ruler" too much, e.g.). This problem of course generalizes to higher and lower levels than high school, and to more than just tossups on Catherine the Great, so it's worth discussion.

I would say, if there's not some very necessary reason to mention the subject's gender in a question, and quizbowlers agree and are ready / told about using "they/them" as singular 3rd person pronouns for people who may not necessarily use or have identified with those pronouns, I wouldn't be super angry about hearing "they" and "them" used often (where "necessary reason" would be something like "I need to disambiguate the mother of [such and such] from the father of the same during the question for unique answerline purposes").

I believe the current hump is more a "readiness to answer questions on male / female-identified persons that use they/them" than any deeper philosophical or other opposition to the practice.

If I'm used to a Henry VIII question calling him "they" once we agree on the fact that he might not have identified that way and all, I don't personally care, and hope that generalizes. But if I know "they" / "this ruler" type stuff in question == question on female / non-binary person, that can lead to the "Catherine the Great" problem in HS questions, if it's not applied consistently regardless of gender. Another "partial" solution is to use "this person" more often and more generally, but won't work until that becomes the rule than the exception, and not as much possible in shorter form questions.

With they/them, one important issue (credit mostly to John Lawrence here) is that they/them is also a useful and common pronoun for third-person PLURAL purposes. If we could agree on another singular, third-person pronoun to use that isn't too awkward, alienating to "new-to-quizbowl" people for whatever reason, etc. that would be a possible solution to this problem, unless we agree on a specific manner to use they/them.

The other solution is not to "bother" with pronouns as much as to expand the canon such that you have no transparency issues due to the lack of, say, female painters askable at a certain level, but that's manifestly a more long-term solution than agreeing to a certain rule about pronoun usage and consistency therewith. For sure, this is a much bigger problem the lower in difficulty you go, barring some event that makes Lee Krasner, Sofonisba Anguissola, Remedios Varo, and another good number of painters ultra-famous at those levels, for my example.

I prefer the canon expansion route, personally, but once you realize you're playing a HS tossup on a female ruler of Russia regardless of the gender-hiding in the question, the answer space will probably be limited for a long while (even sometimes due to reasons of historical records than things I believe quizbowl questions as quizbowl questions can solve, barring invention of a fictional historical 18th-c. Catherine VIII of Russia, e.g., we ask as history ).

Thoughts, agreement, disagreement, etc.?

[Mike Bentley]

The other solution is not to "bother" with pronouns as much as to expand the canon such that you have no transparency issues due to the lack of, say, female painters askable at a certain level, but that's manifestly a more long-term solution than agreeing to a certain rule about pronoun usage and consistency therewith. For sure, this is a much bigger problem the lower in difficulty you go, barring some event that makes Lee Krasner, Sofonisba Anguissola, Remedios Varo, and another good number of painters ultra-famous at those levels, for my example.

I prefer the canon expansion route, personally, but once you realize you're playing a HS tossup on a female ruler of Russia regardless of the gender-hiding in the question, the answer space will probably be limited for a long while (even sometimes due to reasons of historical records than things I believe quizbowl questions as quizbowl questions can solve, barring invention of a fictional historical 18th-c. Catherine VIII of Russia, e.g., we ask as history ).

Thoughts, agreement, disagreement, etc.?

I think the canon would have to change more than it's ever changed in the past for this to work. And even then, I have a hard time seeing how some categories would change in this way unless there's huge sub-distribution changes like "20th century history+ is 3/3 out of 4/4." If political leaders is something you're going to toss up, there just aren't that many options as you go further back in time. You can certainly write questions on older time periods that include more diversity, but unless both the canon and people's knowledge base changes in a really radical direction, I don't see how canon expansion leads to a reduction in "this queen" transparency at most levels of quizbowl.

In general, the few tournaments I've played that have used "they" consistently have mostly been similar in terms of playability. There are a few instances where it does lead to some ambiguity, but you also get the benefit of making it easier to ask about Catherine the Great or what have you. I'm less a fan of it being used in a small minority of questions / clues as that tends to lead to more confusion without the added benefit of reducing answer space transparency.

[Cheynem]

At the risk of venturing on pretentious, I think tournaments should probably include an opening statement read to players that explains their policy on this and how they are using gendered pronouns to try to avoid confusion (which I think might still happen, particularly if the word "they" is used inconsistently).

[1.82]

Using "they" as an all-purpose singular pronoun clearly impacts understanding (for reasons already mentioned in the original post) and serves to make the language of quizbowl questions, which can already be hard to parse, still more difficult to understand. Good writers are able to minimize the problems of transparency arising from female pronouns.

[Woody]

I strongly support this and have advocated for it in the past. I hope that NAQT adopts using "they" or another equivalent gender-neutral pronoun as their standard, especially for MS/HS sets which is where I think this most negatively impacts strategy

[caroline]

I think that the sentiment of gender-neutral pronouns is fair—as noted above, using he/she in a question can quickly narrow down the answerspace, especially at lower levels of difficulty. I used gender-neutral pronouns when editing for 2021 NASAT literature, and I thought it worked fine, but my personal philosophy moves moreso toward no pronouns (i.e. purely “this author” rather than they/he/she), or at minimum “avoid using pronouns wherever possible,” which achieves the same goal as using gender-neutral pronouns, but with clearer writing. The reason for this is that the singular “they” can lead to a lot of confusion and ambiguous pronoun usage, as other posters have noted.

To elaborate further, take, for example, this sentence: “A teacher named A talks to a group B in a work by this author, where they said C.” Was C said by teacher A, group B, or the author? Maybe you could figure it out based on context, but it’ll take the player time to think it through that they should be spending listening to the clues. Assuming that C is a claim said by the author in that work, I could rewrite it into the clearer, more concise “A teacher named A talks to group B in a work by this author, which says C” (and that is only one of many possibilities). Also, the majority of “their work” constructions (e.g. “this author wrote X in their poem Y”) can simply be rewritten to “the work” (“this author wrote X in the poem Y”).

For this reason, the 2021 NASAT lit used (gender-neutral) pronouns pretty much as a last resort, but if you really insist on using gender-neutral pronouns, please make sure to carefully read all your sentences and ensure they are written without pronoun ambiguity. I do also see some people’s criticism that if you overuse “this person” in a question, it becomes apparent that you are trying to hide the answerline’s gender (and thus it’s likely a woman anyway). However, personally I’ve never used pronouns (of the he/she/they/etc form) much to begin with (regardless whether they’re gender neutral) and don’t see why you need them, since I think it is important to consistently reinforce throughout a question what it’s asking for via “this person/book/etc” phrases.

[Cheynem]

I think Caroline's post is very good. I would say that the biggest reason, though, that I end up using gendered pronouns in questions is because of character caps, specifically in shortish NAQT tossups for middle school/high school sets (i.e., saying "This author" vs. "He/She," and the aforementioned uncertainty about using "They"). To be clear, I am not saying this is a good reason to keep doing this perpetually, just that as many have pointed out, things would have to be standardized to make the more understandable/acceptable.

[Stained Diviner]

Outside of the strict character limit Mike mentions, it is very easy to write questions that do not use pronouns. Avoid using he/him/his early in all of your tossups, and you can ask about Catherine the Great as many times as you want to. (Gendered pronouns at the end might be a good thing to narrow down the answer space, but writers and editors can make that decision question by question.) It's a very simple solution--the only complication is that you have to write your Peter the Great questions slightly differently so that your Catherine the Great questions play the way they should, so you have to make this decision when you start writing your set rather than after you've written 200 tossups and decided that maybe 1 or 2 women as answers would be a good idea (but then decide that actually it wouldn't because the question would be too transparent). If you are head editor of a tournament, tell all your editors and writers about this before they start writing.

This person negotiated with the Duke of Buckingham for English ships that were used in the Recovery of Re island. This person negotiated the Treaty of Monzon after directing the capture of Valtellina. This person found out about a conspiracy between the Marquis de Cinq-Mars and King Philip IV of Spain, which led to the beheading of Cinq-Mars. This person paid a person to kill Count of Soissons in revenge for a plot to kill this person. This person often had conflicts with Marie de Medici. Name this minister who curtailed the Habsburgs during the Thirty Years' War and who was succeeded by Cardinal Mazarin.

Armand du _Plessis_, Cardinal _Richelieu_

If your next history question after this one is on Catherine the Great, then your Catherine the Great question will not be transparent.

[Cheynem]

The fourth sentence of this tossup really overuses the phrase "this person."

[Stained Diviner]

I would have changed it if I cared.

[Ike]

It's a very simple solution--the only complication is that you have to write your Peter the Great questions slightly differently so that your Catherine the Great questions play the way they should, so you have to make this decision when you start writing your set rather than after you've written 200 tossups and decided that maybe 1 or 2 women as answers would be a good idea (but then decide that actually it wouldn't because the question would be too transparent). If you are head editor of a tournament, tell all your editors and writers about this before they start writing.

I think you can do this on a bit smaller scale and achieve the same effect. If you have let's say five questions that suffer from the pronoun problem in your set, you can just choose 10 or so questions that don't have such a problem and write them in that language too to couch those five questions. I don't think you need to go all the way with all 200 or so questions.

That being said, I'm actually on board with Naveed's post upthread (and agree with the editing decisions that Caroline made.) If you're a thoughtful writer you'll find ways to handle this issue; in fact several of the best questions I've seen have chosen to lean into the fact that the answerline has a particular gender. I would hate to see questions on say, Virginia Woolf, become way more difficult to parse and absorb because writers are using the phrase "this person" -- many of her insights are so valuable precisely because she is a woman; personally I think you're doing a major disservice to the material discussed in a tossup if you obscure this fact in the interests of transparency instead of finding a different way to clue the subject matter.

[Woody]

I think that the sentiment of gender-neutral pronouns is fair—as noted above, using he/she in a question can quickly narrow down the answerspace, especially at lower levels of difficulty. I used gender-neutral pronouns when editing for 2021 NASAT literature, and I thought it worked fine, but my personal philosophy moves moreso toward no pronouns (i.e. purely “this author” rather than they/he/she), or at minimum “avoid using pronouns wherever possible,” which achieves the same goal as using gender-neutral pronouns, but with clearer writing. The reason for this is that the singular “they” can lead to a lot of confusion and ambiguous pronoun usage, as other posters have noted.

To elaborate further, take, for example, this sentence: “A teacher named A talks to a group B in a work by this author, where they said C.” Was C said by teacher A, group B, or the author? Maybe you could figure it out based on context, but it’ll take the player time to think it through that they should be spending listening to the clues. Assuming that C is a claim said by the author in that work, I could rewrite it into the clearer, more concise “A teacher named A talks to group B in a work by this author, which says C” (and that is only one of many possibilities). Also, the majority of “their work” constructions (e.g. “this author wrote X in their poem Y”) can simply be rewritten to “the work” (“this author wrote X in the poem Y”).

For this reason, the 2021 NASAT lit used (gender-neutral) pronouns pretty much as a last resort, but if you really insist on using gender-neutral pronouns, please make sure to carefully read all your sentences and ensure they are written without pronoun ambiguity. I do also see some people’s criticism that if you overuse “this person” in a question, it becomes apparent that you are trying to hide the answerline’s gender (and thus it’s likely a woman anyway). However, personally I’ve never used pronouns (of the he/she/they/etc form) much to begin with (regardless whether they’re gender neutral) and don’t see why you need them, since I think it is important to consistently reinforce throughout a question what it’s asking for via “this person/book/etc” phrases.

I like this, and it also helps reinforce the subject of the question, which helps for accessibility to newer players who aren't as used to clocking and remembering whether the question is asking for a person or a work

[Cody]

There is little reason not to use answerline referents either exclusively, or deep into the question, for almost all questions. Experimentation on this front dates back to at least Minnesota Open 2012. Absent low character caps, this practice makes questions better because it removes ambiguity and ensures players can always key into what the question is asking for. It is no different than writing on non-person answerlines where short pronouns are often not available (the use of “it” generally being ill-advised). Using increasingly specific answerline referents in a pyramidal manner also helps players narrow the answer space in a knowledgeable manner.

[theMoMA]

To me, the singular "they" is completely natural and normal in everyday speech, but it's not nearly precise enough for quizbowl questions. I want each sentence of my questions, as much as possible, to have one and only one reasonable interpretation. The word "they" has two meanings, which are entirely context dependent, and when you use "they" as a singular, you're deploying it in the much less common usage. This can lead to ambiguity and confusion, as others have pointed out above. It can be confusing to experienced players who are highly attuned to how questions refer to answers and reflexively parse "they" as referring to a group. It also risks creating an insider language that the initiated understand but is not readily comprehensible to an outsider picking up a packet for the first time.

I included in this post from 2016 some strategies I've used to make questions less transparent without resort to the singular "they."

You can see plenty of these in action in Minnesota Open 2012, which uses almost no gendered pronouns before the very ends of the questions. (The set does not use the singular they.)