'Zie' and 'hir' have come into vogue in certain corners of the transgender community. The equivalent of 's/he' and 'him/her,' these gender-neutral pronouns are meant to free transgendered and gender-variant people from the tyranny of the sex/gender binary. The expectation, I suppose, is that once American society has overthrown the oppression of 'he' vs. 'she,' the Utopia of gender liberation will be achieved. I don't mean to burst anyone's genderqueer bubble, but it seems to me that the argument for the use of gender-neutral pronouns is a profoundly ahistorical one that is not informed by a close examination of how languages actually work.

I would point out that Chinese has a gender-neutral pronoun and has had one for thousands of years, and yet China has traditionally been among the most patriarchal societies on earth. A great civilization -- arguably the greatest continuous civilization in human history, China nonetheless has been and unfortunately remains a profoundly misogynist Confucian culture even after half a century of ostensibly gender-egalitarian Communist rule.