The Tiniest Words Generate the Biggest Uproar

As a linguist, I pay close attention to debates about language. But I won’t be telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that in recent years pronouns have become a subject of intense interest for reasons that have nothing to do with grammar. Across the country, debates rage about the effects of letting people decide whether to be called “he,” “she,” “they” or anything else they choose.

My own opinion on the matter makes no sense whatsoever — at least not the opinion that A.I. recently attributed to me. I checked the other day after seeing a social media post that described me as not approving of trans people. Figuring maybe something I wrote about gender-neutral pronouns had gotten lost in translation, I searched and got this: “He found the use of ‘they’ to replace gender-specific pronouns to be clumsy, disruptive, and unnecessary, and that it could sometimes reduce clarity. McWhorter also suggested other gender-neutral pronouns, including ‘que, ‘s/he, and ‘one.’”

Hmm, not a word of that is true. I wouldn’t be caught dead endorsing the ungainly, unpronounceable “s/he” or the hopelessly wooden “one,” and God knows what “que” is.

In reality, I am very much in favor of the new prevalence of gender-neutral pronominal usage. As conceptions of gender become more fluid, we need a pronoun that allows for more possibility. Plus, “they” had already been used in a singular, gender-neutral way (“Each student has an hour to complete their test”) for several centuries. Shakespeare did it in “The Comedy of Errors”: “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend.” Many sticklers consider it incorrect, but it is native to casual speech (including, I suspect, that of many of the sticklers).

The most heated arguments about gender-neutral pronouns, however, render a different objection: They claim that allowing people to choose their own pronouns is a gateway to things like gender-affirming surgery, gender-neutral bathrooms and trans women on women’s sports teams. People who regard such things as dangerous write me to tell me this all the time.

I’m not here to engage in a debate about those outcomes, and I’ll leave biology to the experts. But this idea — that pronouns can encourage people to become trans — reflects a grave misunderstanding of how language works.

You can see what I mean if you look at other cultures. Gender in the Thai language is entirely binary — “he” and “she” — yet the people known as kathoey, sometimes described as a third sex, have an established place in Thai culture. In fact, the five countries that U.C.L.A.’s Williams Institute has determined to be the most accepting of L.G.B.T.I. people speak languages that distinguish “he” from “she.” On the other hand, spoken Mandarin Chinese has only nongendered pronouns, yet China has no high-profile transgender community.

The lesson from these other languages applies to English, too: New pronouns arise in the wake of new identities. They are not the causes of new identities.

In the English language, gender works in idiosyncratic ways. Its third-person singular pronouns are gendered, but its nouns and verbs do not get assigned to random genders the way they do in so many other languages. The way that plays out can be fascinating to witness. Especially when it’s in flux, which language always is.

“They” is but one facet of a broader current trend toward gender neutrality. Think about how ordinary it is to hear English-speaking women address one another as “dude” and “you guys,” with no specific masculine meaning intended. A great many other languages are creating gender-neutral pronouns: French has combined “il” and “elle” into “iel,” and Portuguese’s “elu” is so pretty, I wish we could use it just because. Languages in the Balkans region, such as Bulgarian and Romanian, are also experimenting with gender-neutral options.

Meanwhile, in English language slang, people gender objects as if the language were Spanish or German, with things being marked as “she” to convey admiration, warning or judgment: of a burrito “Whoa, she’s spicy!” or of a hill “Watch out, she’s steep!” This usage, which some of my students alerted me to, began as gay slang but is becoming ever more common.

Each of these changes is sure to infuriate someone. If the sound of the singular “they” works on you like nails on a chalkboard, well, you won’t have to look far before finding someone to commiserate with. And when it comes to debates over “he” and “she” and “they,” plenty of people pile on who couldn’t care less about apostrophe placement or the order of tenses, because gender is more than grammar; it’s part of the way we see ourselves in the world. When the rules change, it can seem that the ground is shifting beneath our feet.

The solution is not, however, to try to stop people from using pronouns in new ways. That effort will never achieve what the sticklers want it to. It can’t stop social change, but perhaps more to the point, it can’t even stop linguistic change. People, in the end, are going to talk more or less the way they want to, and poxes on what to say will only spark ways to get around it. I’d rather take an interest in the possibilities of the new than scowl about the loss of the old and the familiar.

Of course, another person might see things differently, and that’s … their prerogative.