It has come to my attention that lately many people have been trained to perceive pronouns as swear words. This aesthetic perception is not universally shared: many regard the conventions behind it as an unwelcome and unnecessary reinvention of the English language, born of the political hurly-burly surrounding the phenomenon of gender self-identification.

It is a subject I have no burning desire to discuss. Should I so much as say boo, one angry mob will hang whatever remains of me after another has finished lynching me.

My instinct for self-preservation is not the only reason I have given thought to the pronouns I use. See, my texts are genuinely gender-neutral by nature. They are about thinking. Thinking requires brains, not any particular genital configuration, hormonal profile, sexual preference, skin pigmentation, hair color, or surname.

The whole shebang is about as relevant here as singing formulas in an operatic voice during a math lesson. It might add color, but afterward nobody would care about the logic of the theorems.

Some languages have genderless pronouns. English, alas, has no universally accepted one free of emotional or political baggage. I do not particularly like the traditional choice, he, used in gender-neutral contexts. It has always been ambiguous. Nowadays, a reader might even begin to suspect that I have something against women. Which is false.

On the other hand, any alternative, merely by dispensing with the traditional he—even the ugly but ostensibly neutral he or she—could be construed as a sign that I hate men. Which is false.

I have little tolerance for idiots, but this intolerance is gender-neutral. There are plenty of them of every gender.

In desperation, I thought about inventing a new pronoun, such as hu, short for human. But all this would achieve is alienating both camps and distracting readers even further from the actual subject with a strange new word.

Then it clicked. If they can change the meaning of existing words, why can’t I?

I hereby declare that he, in my texts, is short for human and not a pronoun at all. It just so happens that this abbreviation is homonymous with the pronoun he. Which is which will be clear from context. If the context definitely requires the subject to have a penis, then it is the pronoun. Otherwise, it is the abbreviation.

For example, in “He inserted his penis into her vagina,” the subject is a biological male. In “He deserves better,” on the other hand, he means “the human in question.”

Clear enough.