In English, trees are referred to as objects, it. At the very level of grammar, Robin Wall Kimmerer argued, the English language gives us permission to commodify, consume, waste and destroy nature. She has proposed "To stop the age of extinction, let's start by ditching 'it'." But a plant is a who, not a what. We might instead, she suggests, use a new word like ki, inspired by the Anishinaabe word for beings of the Living Earth, Bemaadiziiaaki. To be pronounced like key, it sounds like kin to he and she - and its proposed plural is, indeed, kin! I've tried this in classes before, and, if it initially feels contrived, it comes to feel less so with time. I'm not sure anyone else has actually taken up Kimmerer's proposal, though: in English usage there needs to be an accusative and possessive; I can find no trace of them online. Ki can perhaps serve also as the former but the possessive is harder: ki's? We'll have to work out our own grammar. (I'll try to use it in the rest of this post.)
But we shouldn't assume English speaks for most languages, even European ones. In Latin, trees are feminine. In French and German masculine ... though German's always fun: many tree species are feminine (Eiche, Tanne, Kastanie), at least until you add Baum (O Tannenbaum...). Other languages don't gender pronouns, or do things even more fun. In Japanese, I think, you'd use this/that/those (この木、あの木), maybe also その? In Chinese, I think, you could use the impersonal 它 but might also use the measure word for plants 棵, pronounced ke - (这棵树，那棵树) - not quite ki but close! Knowing some of the students registered for the upcoming "Religion of Trees," I think we can have a fruitful polyglot discussion here.
But there are further pronomial challenges worth working our way through. Ki isn't gendered - any more than it is - but aren't trees themselves gendered? One hears about male and female trees, like ginkgo, to avoid whose smelly fruit cities plant only "males." But gingkos are unusual, unrepresentative of trees as a whole.
Biology textbooks inform us that all trees have male and female parts, sometimes within the same flower - remember anthers (the tips of stamens) and pistils? 75% of the world's tree species are like this, too called cosexual in the pie chart below, hermaphroditic elsewhere. Cherries, magnolias, elms, dogwoods fit here. Another 10% are monoecious, having separate flowers or cones but on the same tree: oaks, walnuts, pecans, cedars, firs...
Only 5% of trees are like ginkgos dioecious, with distinct trees for anthers and pistils; willows, cottonwoods and aspens also belong here (and in practice apples which, while cosexual are "self-incompatible"). The remaining 10% are polygamodioecious (regrettably rendered "polygamous" above), who may have cosexual and monoecious flowers, and include ash trees, mulberries, red maples, mango trees...
It's even more complicated than this, as Catriona Sandilands, coiner of the phrase "queer ecology," points out with delight:
Mulberries, at least white mulberries, Morus alba, are normally dioecious, which means that there are pollen producing, quote, male trees and also pollen receiving, quote, female trees, the female ones being the ones that - having received the pollen - produce berries. But it gets a little bit more complicated because some mulberries in certain conditions are monoecious, meaning that they both produce and receive pollen. So they're both male and female. Mulberries also change sex quite frequently. The mulberry orchardists, to their immense frustration, will discover that a certain proportion of their trees have decided to become male, thereby not producing fruit. And the reverse can also be true...
What if white mulberry, rather than ginkgo, were our point of reference? Neither is representative of trees - most of whom are cosexual - but it gets us closer to appreciating the queerness of all plants from a human vantage point: 75% of tree species, remember, are cosexual! In short, trees are queer. And recognizing the queerness of trees can do more than free kin from misplaced human categories. As young plant scientist Will Dwyer recently enthused,
Plants, like queerness, suggest new ways of being, living and loving. They are bisexual, they are trans, asexual, polyamorous, hermaphrodite and gender fluid. They are other; they are in between, alive like animals but seemingly still as minerals. Plants are everywhere, proud and strong and often hidden in plain sight. Like us, they make their presence known by their gifts to the world: shelter, nourishment, a breath of fresh air. Queerness can be all of those things, too: a home, a family, a source of sustenance.
For that matter, does it still make sense to use the language of male and female for plants at all? Biologists Brad Oberle and Emily Fairchild in a brand-new article have argued for replacing the language of "plant gender" entirely, as not only unhelpful scientifically but pedagogically unfortunate.
Beyond our scholarship, any definition of "plant gender" invites confusion: people have gender; plants do not. We must consider the understanding of gender with which students enter our classrooms. Students who are familiar with sex/gender distinctions that originated in the social sciences and permate popular culture may express discomfort about our usage. They might also feel excluded from our scholarly project. History shows that gendered metaphors in botany pose barriers for inclusion - Linneaus's sexual system had such an effect for generations of women and girls whe could not fully participate in the field. What chilling effect might our practices have on students whose genders to not match their sex assigned at birth? We call on instructors to deliberately engage with students about how language has been used, how it can be confusing, and how we could do it differently.
(These issues aren't just rhetorical. Oberle is listed as being at New College of Florida in the article, but has joined the exodus from the school in the murderous crosshairs of Ron Desantis, sworn enemy of inclusion, and is now at NYBG.)
So maybe we make ki explicitly queer (something Kimmerer might or might not welcome). Indeed trees are queerer even than this. Even the cosexual trees can't do it alone, requiring the ministrations of breezes, insects, birds and bats to get their pollen from the right anthers to the right pistils. (Deborah Bird Rose is eloquent on this multispecies erotics: pollinators need to be lured and rewarded, too.)
This opens up a final fruitful complication in thinking about the appropriate pronouns for trees. In all sorts of ways, trees are multiple. They're part of symbiotic multispecies consortia, not just with the animals who spread kin's seeds but with the mycorrhizae who help kin get nutrients from the soil in the first place. And these mycorrhizae are among the ways kin communicate with other trees, of the same species and others, in the forests where most trees live. Trees aren't individuals at all but multiple, composite, each branch and leaf in some ways doing ki's own thing - even detachable from the "tree" - but somehow linked to the whole.
Our queer ki can't be singular as opposed to plural. Plants may be persons, but not in the ways we imagine persons based on our human experience. Articulating and exploring this will be exciting for our sense of who plants are. And of who we are. And, since the project is called "religion of trees," perhaps even more. I remember my excitement on discovering the way Wil Gafney deals with the question of what pronoun to use for God. Drawing on the language of the Bible she proposes not he or she but she, he, they, One who is three, seven, twelve, many. We might need something like that for trees - and for what kin can teach us about divinity.
(There's another post waiting to be written about the feminization of trees - not only in The Giving Tree and Suzanne Simard-inspired talk of "mother trees" and their "daughters," but in Marderian ontophytology, which inverts without displacing the western association of plants and women with passivity and fecundity.)
