Nearly 900 pronouns will be stripped next month from the “law of the land” in Contra Costa County.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved a plan to modernize the county’s ordinance code — a collection of laws that governs areas such as health and public safety, administration and land use — by eliminating gendered pronouns.
“I think this brings us up to date well into the 21st century — this was long overdue,” Supervisor John Gioia said Tuesday. “Words mean something, and so it is important to make this change to be, as others said, inclusive.”
With an aim to better reflect the community’s diversity and clarify legal definitions within the county’s policies, the board voted to remove such pronouns and replace them with gender-neutral pronouns or references to specific titles, positions and roles.
The most simple edits will substitute “he” with either “they” or a non-gendered description — such as “department head” or “hearing officer” — that focuses on the role the code is referencing.
The change takes effect Jan. 2.
Tim Ewell, Chief Assistant County Administrator, said a three-person team started developing a plan in May to find and fix gendered pronouns in the county’s 1,300-page ordinance code. There were 841 total “hits.”
Even rules about nondiscrimination stated that no person should be promoted or discriminated against because of “his” race, color, origin, sex, age or handicap, among other things.
“So obviously, this doesn’t work,” Ewell told county leaders Tuesday. “If you think about it, that’s (a gendered pronoun) about every page and a half, which means it’s pretty well embedded into the county code. It’s the local law of the land.”
The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved a plan to modernize and degenderize the county’s ordinance code, which governs areas such as health and safety, administration, and land use.
Ewell said the county’s Equity Committee is slated to address lingering discrepancies in department-level policies and procedures throughout 2025.
Contra Costa County isn’t the first local government to modernize the usage of pronouns in their laws.
Berkeley revised its Municipal Code to include gender-neutral pronouns in 2019 shortly after the California Legislature in 2018 adopted a resolution that encourages state agencies and the Legislature to use gender-neutral pronouns when drafting policies, regulations and other guidance.
In the fall of 2021, Santa Clara County — the first county in the nation to establish an Office of LGBTQ Affairs — adopted a policy requiring gender-inclusive language in all new county ordinances, resolutions and proclamations of the Board of Supervisors to the extent permitted by law.
Voters in both Oakland and San Jose approved ballot measures in Nov. 2022 that updated their respective city charters to use gender-neutral language.
And 50 years ago, the California Constitution was amended to replace masculine gender words, such as man, with gender-neutral words, such as person — a proposition that passed by fewer than 45,000 votes.
Supervisor Diane Burgis applauded the edits approved in Tuesday’s ordinance, which she hopes will prove thoughtful and inclusive to future generations of residents.
“What we’re doing is not trying to exclude or put into context something that we don’t mean,” Burgis said Tuesday. “Some people will make a bigger deal about this, but I think it’s consistent with what we’ve been doing, as far as trying to be inclusive and not exclusive.”
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Contra Costa County’s ordinance code was first codified 64 years ago and re-codified in 1973. Besides incremental changes as needed, some areas of the code have remained without review for several decades. That includes the county’s guide for how to interpret the literal grammar and definitions of the actual words within the code.
In 1991, previous board members agreed to clarify that within Contra Costa County’s laws, “the feminine gender includes the masculine and neutral genders, and the masculine gender includes the feminine and neutral genders.”
From a legal perspective, that essentially meant that any reference to “his,” hers” or “theirs” in the ordinance code was classified the same and technically interchangeable.
“But we also know that words matter,” Ewell said Tuesday. “That’s why we’re coming back today and recommending to go through the county ordinance code to remove those gendered pronouns altogether.”
Gioia said the edited, non-gendered ordinance code is anchored in equity, emphasizing that the previous legal wording change regarding pronouns in 1991 wasn’t enough.
