The Diocese of Toronto has taken a sad step backwards from full inclusion. In a recent tweet, the diocese – and I’m sorry if this triggers someone, those of a sensitive disposition should avert their gaze now – rashly assumed that the Holy Spirit’s preferred pronoun is “her”. For all we know, it could be “zir”.
Antediluvian throwbacks like me who have always thought of the Holy Spirit as “He” had no idea that the third person of the Trinity had undergone a gender transition.
Does that leave us with a trans-Trinity?
This sort of thing is always rather amusing. The sex of the Holy Spirit is really theologically irrelevant of course. “Gender” is another matter. That’s because Modern English permits the kind of sloppy obfuscation epitomized by your example. If you’re a German speaker, you’ll immediately grasp the difference between sex (male and female) and [word] gender (masculine, feminine, neuter).*
The Holy Ghost/Spirit has traditionally been “he” in English simply because both the Old English ancestor of “ghost” (gast) and the Latin ancestor of “spirit” (spiritus) were both masculine nouns.
Interestingly, in Greek, the term Holy Spirit is neuter (pneuma), while in Hebrew, it can be either masculine or feminine (ruakh); in Aramaic, it’s feminine (ruha).
* That is to say, Mädchen (girl) is neuter in German but no German speaker would consider a Mädchen not to be female. In like manner, no French speaker thinks a table is somehow a member of the female sex simply because the word itself is feminine. Another good French example is the feminine noun victime; again, no French speaker assumes that it only refers to female victims.
Incidentally, the Old English ancestor of “woman” was wifmann – a masculine noun!
Interestingly, and I’d say significantly, at Jn. 14:26 and 16:13, the grammatically neutral noun πνεῦμα is referred to with the grammatically masculine pronoun ἐκεῖνος. There is of course both a grammatically masculine AND feminine pronoun in Hebrew/Aramaic. The Greek language emphasises the personhood of the Spirit. HE is not a thing or commodity, but an agent.