Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive contexts where fairness and inclusivity are critical. Pronoun usage, especially concerning gender-neutral and neopronouns, remains a key challenge for responsible AI. Prior work, such as the MISGENDERED benchmark, revealed significant limitations in earlier LLMs' handling of inclusive pronouns, but was constrained to outdated models and limited evaluations. In this study, we introduce MISGENDERED+, an extended and updated benchmark for evaluating LLMs' pronoun fidelity. We benchmark five representative LLMs, GPT-4o, Claude 4, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen Turbo, and Qwen2.5, across zero-shot, few-shot, and gender identity inference. Our results show notable improvements compared with previous studies, especially in binary and gender-neutral pronoun accuracy. However, accuracy on neopronouns and reverse inference tasks remains inconsistent, underscoring persistent gaps in identity-sensitive reasoning. We discuss implications, model-specific observations, and avenues for future inclusive AI research.

We present a comprehensive evaluation of gender fairness in large language models (LLMs), focusing on their ability to handle both binary and non-binary genders. While previous studies primarily focus on binary gender distinctions, we introduce the Gender Inclusivity Fairness Index (GIFI), a novel and comprehensive metric that quantifies the diverse gender inclusivity of LLMs. GIFI consists of a wide range of evaluations at different levels, from simply probing the model with respect to provided gender pronouns to testing various aspects of model generation and cognitive behaviors under different gender assumptions, revealing biases associated with varying gender identifiers. We conduct extensive evaluations with GIFI on 22 prominent open-source and proprietary LLMs of varying sizes and capabilities, discovering significant variations in LLMs' gender inclusivity. Our study highlights the importance of improving LLMs' inclusivity, providing a critical benchmark for future advancements in gender fairness in generative models.

Gender-neutral pronouns are increasingly being introduced across Western languages. Recent evaluations have however demonstrated that English NLP systems are unable to correctly process gender-neutral pronouns, with the risk of erasing and misgendering non-binary individuals. This paper examines a Dutch coreference resolution system's performance on gender-neutral pronouns, specifically hen and die. In Dutch, these pronouns were only introduced in 2016, compared to the longstanding existence of singular they in English. We additionally compare two debiasing techniques for coreference resolution systems in non-binary contexts: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) and delexicalisation. Moreover, because pronoun performance can be hard to interpret from a general evaluation metric like LEA, we introduce an innovative evaluation metric, the pronoun score, which directly represents the portion of correctly processed pronouns. Our results reveal diminished performance on gender-neutral pronouns compared to gendered counterparts. Nevertheless, although delexicalisation fails to yield improvements, CDA substantially reduces the performance gap between gendered and gender-neutral pronouns. We further show that CDA remains effective in low-resource settings, in which a limited set of debiasing documents is used. This efficacy extends to previously unseen neopronouns, which are currently infrequently used but may gain popularity in the future, underscoring the viability of effective debiasing with minimal resources and low computational costs.

A large body of NLP research has documented the ways gender biases manifest and amplify within large language models (LLMs), though this research has predominantly operated within a gender binary-centric context. A growing body of work has identified the harmful limitations of this gender-exclusive framing; many LLMs cannot correctly and consistently refer to persons outside the gender binary, especially if they use neopronouns. While data scarcity has been identified as a possible culprit, the precise mechanisms through which it influences LLM misgendering remain underexplored. Our work addresses this gap by studying data scarcity's role in subword tokenization and, consequently, the formation of LLM word representations. We uncover how the Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizer, a backbone for many popular LLMs, contributes to neopronoun misgendering through out-of-vocabulary behavior. We introduce pronoun tokenization parity (PTP), a novel approach to reduce LLM neopronoun misgendering by preserving a token's functional structure. We evaluate PTP's efficacy using pronoun consistency-based metrics and a novel syntax-based metric. Through several controlled experiments, finetuning LLMs with PTP improves neopronoun consistency from 14.5% to 58.4%, highlighting the significant role tokenization plays in LLM pronoun consistency.

Transgender and non-binary (TGNB) individuals disproportionately experience discrimination and exclusion from daily life. Given the recent popularity and adoption of language generation technologies, the potential to further marginalize this population only grows. Although a multitude of NLP fairness literature focuses on illuminating and addressing gender biases, assessing gender harms for TGNB identities requires understanding how such identities uniquely interact with societal gender norms and how they differ from gender binary-centric perspectives. Such measurement frameworks inherently require centering TGNB voices to help guide the alignment between gender-inclusive NLP and whom they are intended to serve. Towards this goal, we ground our work in the TGNB community and existing interdisciplinary literature to assess how the social reality surrounding experienced marginalization of TGNB persons contributes to and persists within Open Language Generation (OLG). This social knowledge serves as a guide for evaluating popular large language models (LLMs) on two key aspects: (1) misgendering and (2) harmful responses to gender disclosure. To do this, we introduce TANGO, a dataset of template-based real-world text curated from a TGNB-oriented community. We discover a dominance of binary gender norms reflected by the models; LLMs least misgendered subjects in generated text when triggered by prompts whose subjects used binary pronouns. Meanwhile, misgendering was most prevalent when triggering generation with singular they and neopronouns. When prompted with gender disclosures, TGNB disclosure generated the most stigmatizing language and scored most toxic, on average. Our findings warrant further research on how TGNB harms manifest in LLMs and serve as a broader case study toward concretely grounding the design of gender-inclusive AI in community voices and interdisciplinary literature.

As 3rd-person pronoun usage shifts to include novel forms, e.g., neopronouns, we need more research on identity-inclusive NLP. Exclusion is particularly harmful in one of the most popular NLP applications, machine translation (MT). Wrong pronoun translations can discriminate against marginalized groups, e.g., non-binary individuals (Dev et al., 2021). In this ``reality check'', we study how three commercial MT systems translate 3rd-person pronouns. Concretely, we compare the translations of gendered vs. gender-neutral pronouns from English to five other languages (Danish, Farsi, French, German, Italian), and vice versa, from Danish to English. Our error analysis shows that the presence of a gender-neutral pronoun often leads to grammatical and semantic translation errors. Similarly, gender neutrality is often not preserved. By surveying the opinions of affected native speakers from diverse languages, we provide recommendations to address the issue in future MT research.

Machine learning and NLP require the construction of datasets to train and fine-tune models. In this context, previous work has demonstrated the sensitivity of these data sets. For instance, potential societal biases in this data are likely to be encoded and to be amplified in the models we deploy. In this work, we draw from developments in the field of history and take a novel perspective on these problems: considering datasets and models through the lens of historical fiction surfaces their political nature, and affords re-configuring how we view the past, such that marginalized discourses are surfaced. Building on such insights, we argue that contemporary methods for machine learning are prejudiced towards dominant and hegemonic histories. Employing the example of neopronouns, we show that by surfacing marginalized histories within contemporary conditions, we can create models that better represent the lived realities of traditionally marginalized and excluded communities.

Gender is widely discussed in the context of language tasks and when examining the stereotypes propagated by language models. However, current discussions primarily treat gender as binary, which can perpetuate harms such as the cyclical erasure of non-binary gender identities. These harms are driven by model and dataset biases, which are consequences of the non-recognition and lack of understanding of non-binary genders in society. In this paper, we explain the complexity of gender and language around it, and survey non-binary persons to understand harms associated with the treatment of gender as binary in English language technologies. We also detail how current language representations (e.g., GloVe, BERT) capture and perpetuate these harms and related challenges that need to be acknowledged and addressed for representations to equitably encode gender information.