He or She?

 

Filipino transvestite beauty queen.

Jordan Peterson rose to prominence over which pronouns to use to refer to transvestites. This has become a dominating issue: if someone looks like a woman, but is in fact biologically male, do we say “he” or “she”? Or “zhe,” or “they.” Or seventy or a hundred other possibilities now being floated.

This is a relatively new problem in North America, but it occurs to me it is not elsewhere. In Thailand or the Philippines, transvestitism has been open and socially accepted for generations, perhaps centuries. So I thought to ask my Filipina wife, in Visayan, do you refer to a male-to-female transvestite as “he” or “she.” 

She reports that, as indeed seems most sensible, biological sex is definitive. He may look like a woman, but he is still, in fact, “he.”

Problem solved.