What should I use in this sentence?
If he were a girl, I would have kissed him/her.
Should I refer to the real gender of the person or the one I'm assuming the person to be and why?
Edit : Recent developments on this question has influenced me to start a bounty on the question. It's really confusing me as the answers are contradicting but still have credible sources to support them.
In my personal opinion, you should use 'him' and here's why:
"If I were a cup, where would I hide?"
Now, the subject is thinking of a hypothetical situation where he is a cup. Now, if that sentence was spoken from the perspective of the cup, then it would be:
"If I were a cup, where would it hide?"
Not that the gender has to do anything with an animate and inanimate object, but I think it works out in the same way as this example.
Also, the stress is on the improbability of the situation. "If he were...", but he is not a 'she' at the point of reference. So the subject is still a 'he', so you should refer the subject as a "him".
Note: This may not be a perfect explanation, but for me, the comparison works.
You should use 'him' as that matches the subject of the speculation, which is 'he.'
The antecedent of the pronoun 'him' in this case just happens to be another pronoun 'he'.
To illustrate:
If he were a girl, he would take over the world.
This does not work as well if the gender of the pronoun changes, as with the sentence:
If he were a girl, she would take over the world.
With the second example, at least some readers may be confused and left wondering who 'she' is.
I stand corrected. I posted an earlier answer saying that you should use "she," (which I think makes some sense)
Nonetheless, a corpus search shows that the correct use is not changing the gender:
"He would even go so far as to say that, if he were a girl, he would have a naval officer, or forget about it." Mysteries, Knut Hamsun.
"Certainly, if he were a girl, he never should fix upon Julien for a lover ..." A Woodland Queen, Andre Theuriet
See more at Google Books.
The inverse use is also consistent:
- If she were a boy, her father would not have to be afraid for her ..." Beyond the Waves, Elizabeth Marek
- "Papa loved her—she knew that without a doubt, even though she wasn't a boy and wasn't really his—but if she were a boy, she'd have endless job possibilities." Song of My Heart, Kim Vogel Sawyer
;-)
Commented
May 19, 2016 at 15:32
Great American Novelist* Jonathan Franzen goes with the hypothetical in his 2015 novel Purity:
If Colleen had been a boy, Pip would have slept with him.
–Page 251, Purity: A Novel, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
See on Google Books
Both Colleen and Pip are female characters.
Based on this usage, the rendition of your sentence would have her–going against every answer here, with all their astute reasonings!
Franzen is one of today's leading authors of serious fiction. Thus, I'll be so bold as to say I doubt that there is a right or wrong here.
A rewrite of the sentence could follow the pattern of one you suggest in a comment:
If Colleen had been a boy, Pip would have slept with that (hypothetical) boy.
A way to look at this is that the entire sentence (not just the if clause) is hypothetical (or irrealis), thus in the realm of the hypothetical the person is of the opposite gender and should be referred to as the hypothetical gender. (This is my thought, not Franzen's or his publisher's.) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), a subsidiary of MacMillan, is a highly respected publisher.
"Farrar, Straus and Giroux authors have won extraordinary acclaim over the years, including numerous National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and twenty-two Nobel Prizes in literature."
You would use "him". The word you pick is going to be the object of the sentence and "he" is part of the qualifier for the object so the pronouns should agree. To see this you can restructure the sentence as:
I would kiss him if he were a girl.
To address your question on Varun's answer: you can see why "that girl" is incorrect by restructuring the sentence as:
I would kiss that girl if he were a girl.
Which is incorrect and confusing.
The form of a pronoun is determined by the pronoun's antecedent. The antecedent is the word (or words) to which the pronoun refers.
If he were a girl, I would have kissed ___.
The antecedent of the pronoun "he" does not appear in this sentence. If this sentence had occurred as an integral part of a longer passage, the antecedent would likely have appeared in the previous sentence.
The pronoun that we want to put in the blank space, however, has an antecedent earlier in the same sentence. As shown by many examples in published literature, that antecedent is "he", not "girl". The pronoun that fits in the blank is therefore "him". It's not very much different in that way from the sentence,
If he were not a boy, I would have kissed him.
It may be of interest to observe that in longer passages, it often is possible for a pronoun of one gender to be used earlier in the passage to refer to the "same" person as a pronoun of the opposite gender later in the passage. Here's an example from a recent opinion piece in Rolling Stone:
... If Trump were a woman, running for the GOP nomination, he'd have damn near zero percent of the vote.
Imagine if Donald Trump were Donna Trump, who inherited wealth from her father, drove multiple businesses into bankruptcy and then used her fame to become a big-mouthed reality-TV star.
In the first sentence, the pronoun is still "he", because despite the hypothetical gender implied by the words "were a woman", the antecedent of the pronoun is "Trump", which was previously established to be the name of a man. But in the second sentence, we are introduced to the female character "Donna Trump, who inherited wealth from her father". In that sentence, "who" is relative to "Donna Trump" and is also the antecedent of "her". Although "Donna Trump" is still clearly intended to be the same person Donald Trump would have been "[i]f Trump were a woman," she has been introduced by a female name, not by a pronoun, and therefore can be the antecedent of female pronouns.
Other answers quote examples, but there seems to be examples for both possible answers, so maybe the answer is "it depends...".
But on what?
It seems to me that it depends on the impression that the speaker wants to give. To borrow Varun KN's example, consider the following two sentences.
If I were her cup, she would kiss me every time she took a sip.
If I were her cup, she would kiss it every time she took a sip.
Both of these are, in my opinion, grammatically correct, but the meaning is worlds apart. The first conveys a strong impression of somebody in love: they would even be willing to be a cup, just to be touched by her lips. On the other hand, the second is a prosaic description of a mechanical process- lip meets cup.
Looking at the sentence in the question, we don't really have any background for the reason why the speaker wanted to kiss him, but we know that this is a real situation that happened in the past (would have) and we know that the speaker did not kiss him- because he is male. The appropriate pronoun is therefore him.
If he were a girl, I would have kissed him.
Let's change the scene a little, and imagine that the speaker sees somebody like this
The speaker finds him very attractive: they don't normally go for men, so they really wish that this guy were a girl, because they can imagine kissing those lips. Omit the have to make it an ongoing wish, and we have:
If he were a girl, I would kiss her
The speaker is visualising this attractive man as an equally attractive girl, and they really would like to kiss her, so the appropriate pronoun is her.
If he were a girl, i would kiss him
you would refer to the real gender as your not assuming their gender, the person is real, which is what you would say, not the imaginative gender.
Its like walking in a supermarket and an attractive guy walks the other way and you may think to your self "If he were a girl, i would kiss him"
If you wanted to say 'her' then the sentence would be "If he he were a girl, i would kiss that girl" because you are referring to the 'transformed' person
Hope this helps
The correct word here is "him", as noted by other answers. But it seems to have some paradoxical feeling to it.
English is gender specific, which reflects cultural concepts and ideas passing in English-speakers' brains; it's hard to escape the question "would it be a boy or a girl that he would be kissing?"... And culturally, it is an important question: it brings about people's attitude towards transsexualism, homosexuality, and gender.
If you want to stress the cultural thing and make people aware of the dilemma, then using "her" instead might actually be a good idea! It might be regarded as grammatically incorrect, but language is a tool to express ideas and feelings.
If you want to avoid the confusion and paradoxical feeling, you may be able to use a more neutral phrasing:
If it were a girl, I would have kissed her.
This has a different feeling - a completely different hypothetical person, instead of the same person having the opposite sex, so it's "more natural"; however, it might not be fit what you're trying to express.
So let us take the gender out of the equation by giving examples on both sides.
If he were a girl, I would have kissed him.
If she was a boy, she would have a mustache.
IMHO, the start of the sentence dictates the end for consistency sake. If you start with "he", and it was correct at that juncture, it remains valid for the rest of the sentence no matter what the sentence says. Hope this helps.
Contrary to most answers, I would suggest using the gender neutral, singular them:
If he were a girl, I would have kissed them.
Alternatively, to avoid the confusion of changing "he" to "them", you could also do this:
If they were a girl, I would have kissed them.
For more on singular "they" see these two articles:
