They is a Problem
On he, she, and they
I’m a bit of a grammar-nerd. In my retirement, after thirty plus years as a university professor, I still read grammar books for fun. My students knew me as a “nit-picky” critic when it came to their writing. Commas can be out of place. Subjects and verbs can be misaligned. There’s enough chaos in the world. We don’t need to compound it with grammatical anarchy. Lately I’ve been thinking about pronoun problems.
At the start of each semester, the university would distribute class rosters along with reminders of various policies and procedures. Recently the university began to remind us of the its commitment to diversity and inclusion and to encourage respect for those students who might choose to be identified by the pronoun they, to avoid being pigeon-holed into the masculine or feminine he or she. But here I must pause and think.
I have no objection to using whatever name a student might want to be called. I have always done my best to respect students’ wishes about that. I’d often ask students to pronounce their names for me so I could pronounce their names the way they pronounced them, to call them what they wanted to be called. This is basic human decency, respect. I am not reacting to the recent trend in the U.S. seen in social and other media to give voice to those who do not identify as male or female. They should be heard. What gives me pause now is the use of the plural pronoun they to refer to a single individual.
Having recently relocated to Portugal I have become re-sensitized to grammar as I struggle to learn a new language. In many languages other than English, nouns have gender. In English only living things are “gendered.” (Whether non-human animals ought to be referred to as he or she is a discussion worth having. But not here.) So, for example, the boat has no gender. It’s a thing, an it. “Is your boat fast? Yes. It is.” In Portugal the boat is masculine (o barco). So, “Yes. He is.” German is even more complicated with three gender categories for nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. For German speakers boat (Boot) is the neutral das Boot (as opposed to the masculine der Boot or the feminine die Boot). My father, an old navy man, referred to boats using she. I always thought that was ungrammatical and a bit weird. When it comes to classifying human beings, it seems that most languages use two categories: masculine or feminine. There may be a few languages in which personal pronouns don’t distinguish between masculine or feminine (Romanian? Esperanto?), but in English there are only two. “Is your wife a good chess player?” “Yes. She is.” “And your son? No. He isn’t.”
I’ve spent lots of time correcting students’ sentences in which singular nouns and pronouns do not align. Consider some (real) examples.
(A) The government is oppressive. They routinely violate the rights of citizens.
Referring to the government, they are not oppressive. It is oppressive. And, by the way, governments are not gender specific. So that is not an issue here. But consider the following sentence where number is an issue and gender may also be.
(B) If a person believes they could not provide a stable life for a child, it would be the best outcome to not bring a child into being.
Sentences A and B each incorrectly use plural pronouns to refer to singular nouns. Such confusion is fairly common and fairly easy to fix. For example, we can easily change sentence B from “If a person believes they could...” to “If a person believes he or she could...” or “If people believe they could...” But it seems the he or she formulation is the offending one. It implies that a person can only be a he or a she. We can’t use Richard Russo’s well-intended suggestion (from his novel Straight Man) to make the he or she formulation routine by merging them into a new word, orshe, because that proposal preserves the conventional binary distinction. This is what those who propose using they as a non-gender-specific pronoun are trying to remedy. I get that.
The belief that language-use impacts social arrangements is not controversial. Of course, ridding discourse of the n-word in the U.S. doesn’t automatically rid its society of racism. But it helps us to remain sensitive to how words can reproduce injustice. The same goes for how American English has become more sensitive to how we refer to women. Consider the fairly successful campaign that coined a new title for all women (Ms.) to avoid identifying them as married (Mrs.) or single. So, it’s understandable that as we become more sensitive to the fluid reality of gender identity, we look for unconventional language that doesn’t enable conventional stereotypes and reproduce oppressive practices. But the proposed remedy to the gender-specific pronoun issue seems to have unintended and, to me, undesirable consequences.
Assume for the moment, in the following three sentences, that Hillary identifies as a female and Bill identifies as a male and that personal pronouns are used in the conventional manner.
(1) Hillary finally married Bill and she was happy for many years.
Hillary was happy. We don’t know about Bill.
(2) Hillary finally married Bill and he was happy for many years.
Bill was happy. We don’t know about Hillary.
(3) Hillary finally married Bill and they were happy for many years.
Both Bill and Hillary were happy.
Now assume for the moment that Hillary identifies as non-binary (rejecting male or female identifiers) and Bill also identifies as non-binary (rejecting male or female identifiers), so we use the proposed pronoun they for each.
(4a) Hillary finally married Bill and they was happy for many years.
Immediately, we see an additional complication here. Must we change the singular verb was to were so that it agrees in number with the new plural pronoun? Does they refer to number (conventionally it does) or solely to gender (the unconventional proposal is that it applies at least to gender)? For now, let’s change sentence 4a so that we can focus on the gender issue.
(4b) Hillary finally married Bill and they were happy for many years.
Is Hillary happy and Bill not? Is Bill happy and Hillary not? Are they both happy? Because of the non-ambiguous conventional pronouns used in sentences 1, 2, and 3 these questions don’t arise. Whether Hillary or Bill is happy is clear. Changing the pronouns to the proposed pronoun (as in 4b) obscures things.
As with many policies that emerge from good intentions, there can be unintended consequences. The proposal to use they as a non-gender-specific singular pronoun is a policy that achieves some overdue recognition for a certain group of people, but it does so at the expense of muddying the grammatical waters. My gut tells me there must be a better way.
What about incorporating the German model? Male people (he), female people (she), and neuter people (it)? This would achieve the desired goal of creating recognition for non-binary identifiers, but at the cost of reducing these “neuter people” to things. We should preserve the distinction between persons and things. What we need is a pronoun that is neuter, that does not refer to some people as things, while still preserving the singular/plural distinction. But does it make sense to use one word to refer to three kinds of things? This is not a new challenge.
The bedrock of Christian dogma includes the notion of a tripartite god, a god that is three kinds of thing at once, while referred to with one name. I’ve always had difficulty grasping this concept. Consider another example, the name for an American product, 3-in-1-Oil. This one name refers to three things at once: “an oil that cleans, an oil that lubricates, and an oil that protects” (this is from the company’s website). So, instead of:
If a person believes he can ...
what we want to do is fill in the blank in the sentence below with a singular, non-gender specific pronoun:
If a person believes _____ can ....
We simply must make up a new word. What about pe?
If a person believes pe can ....
If we pronounce the new pe to rhyme with he or she for the sake of easing into a new convention, immediately we face a new problem. For pe would then also sound just like pee. And so it goes. It’s not easy to find the right new word. All I know for sure is that they is not right. Perhaps what we need is a clever social media influencer to set us on the right path. For now, the grammar-nerd in me must avoid using the word they as a non-gender specific singular pronoun. I will use people’s names to refer to them, not pronouns. Does this make me a political conservative, or worse, a reactionary? I don’t think so. I hope not. It may make me a linguistic snob. That I can live with.
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