(CNN) Language changes with the times, and when it comes to our conceptions of gender, the times are most certainly changing.

We are opening up to the idea that binary conceptions of gender are unnecessarily rigid and don’t correspond to the self-image of a great many people, and even that people’s sense of their gender may not correspond to their biological sex. In this new world, a bland opposition between “he” and “she” seems increasingly antique, and even insulting, to many.

However, doing something about that is going to be a challenge. We are dealing not with merely giving new names to new things or actions, which is easy, but with using new pronouns, which is very hard.

This is hard because human cognition makes some parts of language more resistant to change than others. Nouns, verbs and adjectives, for example, are like software. It feels natural to add them, subtract them, revise them. More.

See: CNN

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