‘Mx.’? Did The Times Adopt a New, Gender-Neutral Courtesy Title?

Philip B. Corbett is the associate masthead editor for standards.

As overseer of The Times’s newsroom style manual, I heard from a number of people after this opening passage appeared in a recent Metro article:

“Are we anarchist?” Senia Hardwick asked. “Technically, yes.” Mx. Hardwick, 27, who prefers not to be assigned a gender — and also insists on the gender-neutral Mx. in place of Ms. or Mr. — is a staff member at Bluestockings, a bookshop and activist center at 172 Allen Street on the Lower East Side. Mx. Hardwick was explaining that the ethos of Bluestockings, which is run by a collective of volunteers, is difficult to classify. But if you must: “Anarchist is O.K.”

People inside and outside the newsroom wondered if “Mx.” — an unfamiliar term to many — had suddenly taken its place alongside “Mr.” and “Ms.” in our stylebook’s entry on courtesy titles.

The short answer is no. Or not yet. Or perhaps, ask me again in a while. Things are changing fast in this area.

“Mx.,” pronounced “mix,” is a coinage preferred by some transgender people who do not identify as either male or female and so do not want to use “Mr.” or “Ms.”

Like “Ms.” — and unlike the far older and more traditional “Mr.” and “Mrs.” — “Mx.” isn’t an abbreviation of an existing English word, though the echo of the word “mix” seems rather elegant in the context.

Our guidelines on transgender references have long advised Times writers to use the names, pronouns and courtesy titles preferred by the subject. But these guidelines are based on the assumption that people would identify as either male or female, which makes it easy: Caitlyn Jenner, Ms. Jenner, she. What happens when people don’t identify as either male or female? This is still a relatively rare situation in news articles, but it seems to be arising more often.

Usage is unsettled and evolving. “Mx.” has gained some acceptance, but it remains unfamiliar to many readers. (Of course, most news organizations don’t use courtesy titles, which allows them to avoid that issue.)

Even more daunting is the problem of pronouns. Some people advocate “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to a single individual, while others have suggested invented alternatives like “ze” or “xe.”

In this as in other areas of language and usage, The Times is not looking to lead the way, set the rules or break new ground. Our hope is to reflect accepted, standard usage among educated readers.

At a time when usage is unsettled or shifting, that puts us in an awkward holding pattern. A number of outside media writers have asked me some version of “What is The Times’s policy/rule/decision on Mx., or on nongendered pronouns?” The answer, for now, is that we don’t have a rule.

Our style guideline, assuming we eventually adopt one, will try to reflect the language that our readers and society at large are already using — not to dictate what The Times thinks people should do.

In the meantime, though, Times editors and writers want to know what to do about this person, in this article, right now. We’ve handled the small number of examples so far case by case. There are two main goals: to be respectful to those we write about, and to be clear to our readers and avoid distracting them from the main point of an article.

Sometimes it’s easy enough to avoid a second reference altogether, so no courtesy title or pronoun is needed. In some cases it’s feasible to use someone’s full name more than once — or, in the case of a younger person, to use the given name for subsequent references. Sometimes it may be less distracting to use the surname alone, as we routinely do in magazine articles, sports coverage and elsewhere.

On the few occasions when we’ve used “Mx.,” we have always explained its usage. We have avoided nontraditional pronouns, which are likely to be even more confusing or distracting — though writing an article without pronouns is a big challenge, and not practical in all cases.

Consistency is an important goal in style guidelines. It’s helpful to readers and is crucial to writers and editors who can’t reinvent the wheel on deadline. But in a fast-changing area like this, I think we can live with some inconsistency for the time being. We should decide what works best in each case — keeping in mind our responsibilities to readers and to those we write about — while language conventions evolve to keep up.