History Main / PronounTrouble

-->'''Curly:''' Well, it was like this, Mr. Court...
-->'''Defense Attorney:''' Address the judge as "Your Honor!"
-->'''Curly:''' Well, it was like this, My Honor...
-->'''Defense Attorney:''' ''Your'' Honor, not ''My'' Honor!
-->'''Curly:''' Why? Don't you like him?
* ''Franchise/JurassicPark'': All of the dinosaurs in ''Film/JurassicPark1993'' were engineered to be female as a means of population control, to prevent more dinosaurs than the park staff could handle from appearing on the island since it already has a million and one other problems from computer glitches to indecipherable illness in the dinosaurs. However, characters sometimes refer to them as if they were male, such as Lex inquiring about the ''Tyrannosaurus'', "Is '''he''' gonna eat the goat?!" It becomes slightly more justified when it turns out that some of the dinosaurs have mutated to become male and are breeding anyway, but plenty of characters still refer to them as female -- Muldoon's last words are, "Clever girl." The Pronoun Trouble reoccurs in the fourth film, ''Film/JurassicWorld'', when the park has been rebuilt and dinosaurs are being engineered again; correctness or lack thereof is used to signify which characters recognize the dinosaurs as living, breathing animals and which consider them to just be company assets to make a profit. Perhaps most notably, Vic Hoskins never gets it right and keeps calling the all-female Raptor Squad boys; Delta in particular doesn't take kindly to that and kills him near the end when he tries to calm her down by calling her a "nice boy."

* In ''Literature/TheHost2008'', the human characters have difficulty referring to Wanderer (an alien parasite who has inhabited many bodies- male, female, and otherwise) because of this. Wanderer herself identifies as female and asks them to call her 'she'.
-->''"In my species, I am the one who bears young. Is that 'female' enough for you?"''
* In ''Literature/ImperialRadch'', the language of the titular empire, Radchaai, only has one pronoun for people (by TranslationConvention, rendered as "she") and no concept of gender. This is protagonist Breq's native language, and as such she consistently has trouble figuring out what pronouns to use for people when speaking other languages. Later in the series, when other people find out Breq is an AI, there's some question over whether Breq is a "she" or an "it". The crew of ''Mercy of Kalr'' are immensely offended by people calling Breq "it" and want her to know they never would, but also have no problem using that pronoun for ''other'' AIs (who themselves don't mind). Breq herself would actually be fine with "it", except most humans who call her that are invariably doing so as an insult and a pointed statement about her (lack of) personhood--so she has to insist on "she" to make an ''equally'' pointed statement about her personhood, despite not really being that attached to the pronoun.

* ''Literature/JurassicPark'': all of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were engineered to be female as a means of population control, to prevent more dinosaurs than the park staff could handle from appearing on the island since it already has a million and one other problems from computer glitches to indecipherable illness in the dinosaurs. However, the characters--including the park staff--refer to some of the dinosaurs (particularly the adult ''Tyrannosaurus'') as if they were male. They even actually acknowledge this, knowing full well that all the dinosaurs are female (at least, before it turns out that some of them have mutated to become male and therefore start breeding against their designs) but that it's simply easier to not worry all that much about which pronoun is used at any given time.
* ''[[Literature/OutOfTheDark Into the Light]]'': The Sarthians have three sexes: male, female, and neutro. While the humans are wondering how to refer to the neutro at first, the sophisticated translation software they're using comes up with a pronoun on its own. It starts using the Old English "ou" and its derivations (ous, oum, ouself) for the neutro.
* ''Literature/PostSelf'':
** Both RJ Brewster and Ioan Bălan use the neopronoun "ey." Dear, Also, The Tree Was Felled prefers "it" for itself. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] when RJ's pronouns-at-birth tip off a researcher to eir identity when ey should have remained an anonymous data-point.
** In ''Nevi'im'', of the four alien species, one chooses to use "it" pronouns, two use "they", and one uses gendered English pronouns.
* In ''Literature/WhatMovesTheDead'' by Creator/UrsulaVernon, Gallacian, the fictional native language of the protagonist, has six sets of pronouns: one for men, one for women, one for rocks, one for God, one for children and priests/nuns, and one for soldiers. This causes some translation headaches when the soldiers hire out internationally, but mostly people muddle along (a soldier's a soldier, at the end of the day). The child pronoun causes slightly more trouble--it is ''extremely'' taboo to call a child by adult pronouns, tantamount to saying you're a paedophile. (So taboo that a Gallacian spy blew his cover by hesitating just a bit too long before referring to a little girl as "she".) Hence native Gallacian speakers are never quite comfortable in languages that lack this separation, and new learners are prone to greatly embarrassing themselves. In the climax of the story, [[spoiler:one character refers to the sentient fungus infesting her body with the pronouns for a child, since that's what she regards it as.]]
* ''Literature/WhenTheAngelsLeftTheOldCountry'': Rose doesn't know Uriel is an angel for the first half or so of the book, and thinks Ash referring to Uriel as "it" is a quirk of their particular Yiddish dialect rather than Uriel's actual pronouns.

-->''But these tender passages, sacred though their fervour, did not pass unobserved by profane eyes; for crouched in the bushes and gritting his teeth was the dastardly 'Squire Hardman! When the lovers had finally strolled away he leapt out into the lane, viciously [[DastardlyWhiplash twirling his moustache]] and riding-crop, and [[KickTheDog kicking an unquestionably innocent cat]] who was also out strolling.\\
"Curses!" he cried -- Hardman, not the cat -- "I am foiled in my plot to get the farm and the girl!"''

** In the Spanish translations of the earlier ''Discworld'' books, Death was referred to with female pronouns since the word for death is feminine in Spanish. When Death became an actual character and the English started using "he" this was rectified.

* In ''Literature/TheEnemyPapers'', every member of the Drac species is both male and female at the same time. The story is told from the standpoint of a human who's been trained to think of the Drac as merely an enemy that need to be exterminated, so the storyteller uses "it" as the pronoun. (E.g., "Jeriba Shigan took out its notepad and began to write.")

* In ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'', Tolkien mentions in the appendices that the language used in [[DirectLineToTheAuthor the original version of the book]] had respectful and informal forms of the pronoun "you", except in the Shire, where the respectful form had fallen out of use. So Pippin referred to Denethor, the steward of Gondor, as an equal, and that fueled the rumors that he was a prince of the halflings.
** In the Spanish translation of the books, the problem is in number, when a character says "May the Valar protect you." Since the Valar are not mentioned anywhere else, the translator uses "El valar" ("el" is masculine singular for "the"), probably assuming that the Valar is a sort of CrystalDragonJesus. It is clear from other works, though, that the proper form would be the plural "Los Valar."

* In the Spanish translations of the earlier ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' books, Death was referred to with female pronouns since the word for death is feminine in Spanish. When Death became an actual character and the English started using "he" this was rectified.
* The ''{{Literature/Discworld}}'' novel ''Literature/MonstrousRegiment'' features multiple SweetPollyOliver characters, some of whom have revealed this but continued living as men by the end of the novel. The narrator's use of pronouns gets a bit inconsistent after that, as well as characters forming sentences like "She's a very practical man". And the fandom is even more inconsistent with the pronouns, especially when the desire to avoid spoilers comes into it.

* ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' has a number example: the local SufficientlyAdvancedAlien, the Ellimist, switches between using "I" and "we" a lot. The Ellimist is a legend among the Andalites, but the stories are iffy on whether there's more than one Ellimist. The {{Prequel}} book of his origins eventually reveals that there's only one, but he wound up absorbing the minds of a bunch of dead aliens at one point, which apparently explains his ambiguity.
** [[PuppeteerParasite Yeerks]] are implied to be genderless, but the series generally uses the pronouns of their host bodies, including when a Yeerk is narrating.[[note]]Conveniently, we never see a Yeerk switch host gender for very long--Visser One occasionally infested men, for example, but "her" most narratively important hosts (Eva, Jenny Lines, Allison Kim) were always women.[[/note]] However, [[{{Fanon}} some fans]] prefer using gender-neutral pronouns in fanfic.
* Another Creator/KAApplegate book, ''Wishtree,'' is [[{{Xenofiction}} told from the perspective of a red oak]]. Early on Red notes that red oaks are monoecious, meaning they have both male and female flowers. Red doesn't particularly care which pronouns the reader wants to use, and the non-human characters generally manage to avoid using any third-person pronouns for Red at all.

** Nintendo has trouble whether they should refer to [[Characters/SuperMarioBrosAssortedNasties Birdo]] --whose gender has been portrayed inconsistently-- as male or female at times, so they've used "Birdo" as a pronoun at least once.

'''Ermac:''': We do not understand.

** Kurenai Tsubasa's arc ended with the reveal that he was a crossdressing boy, which he and Ukyo both knew and were not attempting to hide. The Viz dub has Tsubasa claim to be a girl, but jumps through verbal hoops to have neither Ukyo nor anyone else talking to her reference Tsubasa's gender. The English manga keeps Ukyo from saying Tsubasa's gender, but Akane does when talking to her, [[DubInducedPlotHole yet Ukyo is still surprised Akane didn't know Tsubasa was male]]. The English subtitles make even less of an effort, having Ukyo repeatedly her Tsubasa "she".

* In ''VideoGame/Persona4'', [[spoiler: Naoto]]'s social link runs into a translation problem for this reason. In the original Japanese, once you leveled up her social link far enough, you got a scene where [[spoiler: she asks if you prefer her using "boku" or "atashi" to refer to herself]]. In the English version, the scene is changed to being about the pitch of her voice.