Another Post About Pronouns
As the Great Pronoun Debate of the 2020s continues to rage on, I’m feeling the need to reiterate: I wish we could just be done with gendered pronouns.
Set the transgender issue aside for a moment. Who benefits from having gendered pronouns? When do they actually help?
The gendered pronoun debate has become largely a debate about respecting transgender identities (both binary and nonbinary), but there’s also a heterosexist element.
The only time I can think of them being truly useful is when we’re talking about two people, a man and a woman, and we want to be able to distinguish them in the story.
Two men? Gendered pronouns don’t help.
Two women? Nope.
More than two people? Nope.
Just one person? Nope.
That seems like a fairly specific scenario: I’m telling a story involving one man and one woman, so I conveniently have a pronoun for each.
Unless, of course, I’m talking about sex, romance, or parental relationships. And then heterosexism rears its nasty head: My romance story about two men falling in love is filled with “he gazed into his eyes, and then he took his hand” ambiguities, while “he gazed into her eyes, and then she took his hand” isn’t.
Consider how “I talked to my mom and dad, and she said it was okay but he said I couldn’t go” would have to be rephrased for a same-gender marriage.
“You love her / But she loves him / And he loves somebody else.” — “Love Stinks”, J. Geils Band
The majority of the world’s languages function just fine without gendered pronouns.
The call to get rid of gendered pronouns is not a call to get rid of gender entirely, any more than the call to use gender neutral language by default is a call to get rid of gender.
A man is a man, a woman is a woman, a nonbinary person is a person, all of that is fine.
But I’m more than a person: I’m white, but my pronouns don’t announce that. I have brown eyes and brown-to-gray hair, but my pronouns don’t announce that. I was born in the United States, I’m left-handed, I’m neurodivergent, I have a disability… pronouns don’t announce any of that.
Why do our pronouns have to announce our gender?
Our language shapes our perception. It’s not solid and immutable, but it informs it. Having gendered pronouns strongly reinforces the greater context of bucketing people into “men” and “women”.
There are reasons to distinguish men from women. I’m not contesting that; I’m not promoting getting rid of gender entirely. I’m not 100% sure of my own gender, for that matter.
I’m promoting not making it so front and center that we need to announce someone’s gender just to talk about them.
Unfortunately, the conversation itself has become painfully political. It doesn’t need to be. “They” has been used for centuries in the singular, for cases where gender was unknown or inappropriate to provide:
- Every student should bring their notebook, every day.
- Someone left their phone on the counter!
- My patient is concerned about their test results.
In an era when heterosexism was centered and we spent a lot of time talking publicly only about two-person relationships that were heterosexual, maybe there was some call for gendered pronouns.
Or maybe there never was.
But now, when the cultural emphasis is on equity and respect for everyone, what do gendered pronouns gain, and what do they cost?
If they mainly serve to reinforce cultural norms and distinctions many of us want to leave in the past, then they themselves belong in the past.
And that, in my view, is the heart of the debate: Not respecting nonbinary people, and certainly not the pronouns themselves, but rather protecting the cisheterosexist status quo.
I was recently at a party where about half the people were nonbinary. Rather than go around and share pronouns, the host suggested it might be easier to just use “they” for everyone. We didn’t do that, but now I’m thinking, maybe we should have.
Changing pronoun usage is as difficult as changing just about anything else about language. Language is engrained in our brains; we learn our first one at such an early age, few of us remember the process. I have struggled for years to get rid of “you guys”, and sometimes I still slip.
This is not a “right away” shift. This will take time, this will require a focused effort. That’s a great inconvenience to people who don’t see the point, who are fine with the status quo. People who don’t want to be seen as bigots, who might not be actively bigoted in their view, but who also don’t see the need for the effort.
This comes out as resentment towards the people asking them to change. Hostility. Sarcasm.
That’s not useful, but neither is scolding people who are superficially supportive but who struggle with the change.
Making this more challenging is that not all nonbinary people accept “they”. For one thing, there is a history of using “they” for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID); for another, some people just don’t like it.
Even so, I feel like it’s emerging as the most reasonable route. Rather than swimming in a sea of pronouns or openly disrespecting nonbinary people, while forcing binary transgender people to out themselves before they’re ready… just use “they” for everyone, at least until they ask for something else (and even then, I do think “they” should be permitted for everyone, in the same way that “you’re a person” is acceptable even if you know someone’s gender).
These are my thoughts today; they will likely change, because they are as fluid as my gender.
