He / she / it / none of the above

I missed this article in the Chinese edition of China Daily when it first appeared on June 20, 2012, but it raises an issue that is sufficiently important to warrant addressing now that William Steed has kindly called my attention to it:

"Qián Jīnfán:  84 suì hòu kuà xìngbié 'rénshēng de cànlàn qī cáigāng kāishǐ'” 钱今凡：84岁后跨性别 “人生的灿烂期才刚开始” ("Qian Jinfan:  'the most glorious period of a person's life only begins' after age 84 when one transcends gender")

What is most striking about this article is that it politely uses TA (note the absence of tonal marking) as a gender neutral pronoun so that the author and editor don’t have to write tā 他 ("he") or tā 她 ("she").  Of course, tā 它 ("it") would be gender neutral, but like "it" in English, is considered dehumanizing.  Setting aside the fact that all three forms have the same pronunciation in Modern Standard Mandarin and that their development as a means to distinguish masculine, feminine, and neuter is a fairly recent phenomenon, the use of Roman letters in an otherwise plain Mandarin character text, and an official newspaper, at that, is remarkable.  Moreover, one wonders why they don’t use English conventions of miniscule and majuscule (and Pinyin, for that matter), but instead just go with TA no matter where the word occurs in a sentence.  Writing "TA" would make most English speakers think that it’s an acronym of some sort.  On the other hand, the author and editor may have thought that it looked more natural to write "TA" instead of "ta / Ta", since most Roman letter terms in Chinese writing are indeed acronyms consisting entirely of capitals, and they may also have thought that "TA" looks more like a square-shaped Chinese character than "ta" or "Ta".

It is curious that the English version of the article in the People's Daily, "Man kept transgender secret for over 75 years" employs masculine gender throughout, while another translation in the English version of China Daily, "It's never too late to be yourself" mostly employs feminine gender, but switches to masculine when talking about Qian as a young boy.

I remember around 30 years ago reading a Chinese play called "Women" (sic) where the title — in Roman letters — was meant to stand for the Mandarin word "wǒmen" 我们 ("we / us"), but was also intended simultaneously to evoke the English word as well.  The play was banned before it could be publicly performed.  I still have the literary magazine in which the play appeared in my office at Penn, but cannot give the exact publication data right now because I am in Central Asia.  If anyone is interested in reading the play, say so in the comments and I'll provide the necessary information when I return to Philadelphia in about a week's time.