Shoreline City Council To Approve Gender-Neutral Language

SHORELINE, WA — The Shoreline City Council is headed toward approving a change to its rules that would remove gender pronouns from meeting language.

Councilman Chris Roberts proposed the idea in early August to help non-binary people feel more included in city business.

"Throughout the Council Rules there are gender references (he/she, him/her) for the Mayor and Councilmembers. The amendment will replace these references with gender-neutral language to be inclusive of people who are gender non-binary," a Shoreline city staff report described the change.

Roberts said he got the idea after serving on the state Democratic party rules committee. In 2016, the party noticed that presidential delegates were required to be either men or women, which caused non-binary Democrats to ask for change.

"Two years working with that opened my eyes to whenever I see he or him, or he and her, in government documents," Roberts said.

He raised the issue at the Aug. 12 Council dinner meeting, and the rest of Council agreed that the change should be made, he said.

Shoreline isn't the first government in Washington to make the bureaucracy more gender-neutral.

In 2016, King County voters approved a measure that would remove gendered language from the King County Charter and the King County Code. The Council passed ordinances in 2018 to complete that work.

"The ordinance replaces gendered pronouns such as he, him, she, or her with the title of the subject in impacted sentences. For example 'he' could be converted to the position’s title such as 'director.' The ordinance will also take the gendered pronoun out of terms such as 'workmanship' which could be converted to 'quality of work," a March 2018 county press release described.

But way back in 2013, Washington lawmakers completed a six-year edit of state law to remove references to gender. Words like "freshman" became "first-year student," for example.

Washington now also has an option for people to select "X" as a gender on drivers licenses, indicating someone who doesn't identify as either a man or woman.

The Shoreline Council will vote to make the change on Sept. 9 along with a few other changes to Council rules, including banning the promotion of political candidates during public comment, and loosening rules around when Councilmembers' surnames have to be used.