On (the gender of) my hypothetical reader

Where I explain the (non-)sexism of referring to my hypothetical reader as “he.”  Keywords: #gender-language #he-as-he-or-she

There is, in my native Portuguese, a long-standing convention of referring to one’s hypothetical reader as “he”—even when the writer is a she. A similar convention exists in English. Both have, in recent years—and for reasons I shall not delve into here—become problematic enough to force some authors to, either change their style, or justify their continued adherence to the extant norm. As an example, here is Richard Dawkins explaining how he tried the former (style change), only to return to the latter (the existing convention):

I am distressed to find that some women friends (fortunately not many) treat the use of the impersonal masculine pronoun as if it showed intention to exclude them. If there were any excluding to be done (happily there isn’t) I think I would sooner exclude men, but when I once tentatively tried referring to my abstract reader as ‘she,’ a feminist denounced me for patronizing condescension: I ought to say ‘he-or-she’, and ‘his-or-her.’ That is easy to do if you don’t care about language, but then if you don’t care about language you don’t deserve readers of either sex. Here, I have returned to the normal conventions of English pronouns. I may refer to the ‘reader’ as ‘he’, but I no more think of my readers as specifically male than a French speaker thinks of a table as female. As a matter of fact I believe I do, more often than not, think of my readers as female, but that is my personal affair and I’d hate to think that such considerations impinged on how I use my native language.¹

Alas, I too tried changing, by adopting a strategy that I thought, improved on Dawkins’: namely, by referring to my hypothetical reader both as a he and as a she—just not at the same time. That is, instead of resorting to those ghastly “he-or-she” or “his-or-her” linguistic horrors, I tried doing either one or the other, more or less at random. And I too, ended up reverting back to the status quo, for I found the resulting prose, produced by my tentative change, much too awkward.² And I justify it by standing—or perhaps I should say leaning (for support)—on the shoulders of the great mathematical physicist Roger Penrose:

There is an inevitable problem in writing a work such as this in deciding whether to use the pronoun ‘he’ or ‘she’ where, of course, no implication with respect to gender is intended. Accordingly, when referring to some abstract person, I shall henceforth use ‘he’ simply to mean the phrase ‘he-or-she,’ which is what I take to be the normal practice.³

In fact, to deflect potential criticism vis-à-vis putative genders laying beyond the customary male/female categorization, I shall go further and say that ‘he’ stands for any gender the reader takes himself to be placed in! 😉︎

Happy readings!

June 27, 2026. Got feedback? See the contact page.