Who’s ‘They’?

Who’s ‘They’?
First Words
By AMANDA HESS MARCH 29, 2016, New York Times

image from article

We are witnessing a great explosion in the way that human beings are allowed
to express their gender identities. We are also hearing a lot of awkward
conversations. What are we supposed to ... call everyone? A recent scene on
HBO’s “Girls” riffed on this problem, drawing a linguistic fault line down a
Brooklyn street. On one side is a no­-frills coffee joint run by Ray Ploshansky,
the show’s resident grumpy old man. (He’s, like, 38.) Across the street, a hip
new cafe springs up and instantly hoovers up Ray’s clientele.

When Ray crosses the road to eyeball the competition, he encounters a
barista he can’t quite size up. First he calls the barista “sir,” and the barista
balks, “Why’d you feel the need to call me ‘sir’?” So Ray tries “female?” and the
barista says: “Oh, ‘female’? You a biologist? You a biological essentialist? Are
you a detective?” So Ray asks, “What’s going on here?” and a second barista
steps in to explain: “What’s going on here is that you offended they, and you
offended me, so I think it’s best that you leave.” He does. The baristas
embrace.

The cafe clash took the language debate of the moment and personified its
most extreme positions. On one side are people like Ray, who come off as
clueless and offensive for failing to recalibrate their language to accommodate
people who don’t identify as “he” or “she.” On the other side are “theys” like
the barista, who can sound unreasonable and absurd when they try to police
new rules of language that are still in flux. But in the subtext of the scene, a
third figure emerged. The barista character was played by the younger sibling
of Lena Dunham, the creator of “Girls”: Grace Dunham, a young queer writer
and performer who identifies as a “trans person with a vagina” and recently
wrote on Twitter, “I hate, fear and am allergic to binaries” — and is also game
for joking about how hard it can be to get everybody on the same page.

This registers as a modern problem, but gender­-neutral pronouns have
been proposed for centuries. In 1808, Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested
repurposing “it” and “which” “in order to avoid particularizing man or woman,
or in order to express either sex indifferently.” But only recently has
mainstream pop culture entertained the idea of a neutral pronoun for referring
to trans, genderqueer and even some feminist folks who either don’t identify
as “he” or “she” or are interested in demolishing that binary in speech. A flurry
of totally new constructions has emerged to bridge the gap. On Tumblr, it’s
now typical for young people to pin their preferred pronouns to their pages:
The writer behind a blog called “The Gayest Seabass” identifies as “Danny,
xe/xim/xir or he/him/his or they/them/their, taken­-ish, 20.”

Lynn Liben, a psychologist at Penn State, has studied the effects of
gender-­coded language — English weaves it in by way of pronouns (she, his)
but also identifying nouns (girl, uncle) and honorifics (Mr. and Mrs.) — for
about 15 years. In a pair of studies conducted in preschool classrooms in 2008
and 2010, Liben found that when teachers emphasize a gender divide in
speech — like saying, “Good morning, boys and girls” — children adopt more
intense stereotypes about what boys and girls are supposed to do, and become
less likely to play with children of a different gender at recess. “When they see
adults talk about gender as a category system,” Liben says, “kids become more
vigilant about making the distinction themselves.” Jill Soloway, creator of the
Amazon series “Transparent,” is a fan of “they” as a corrective to that
phenomenon. “A really interesting thought exercise is to say ‘they’ and ‘them’
for all genders,” she told The New Yorker recently. “The promise of this
revolution is not having to say, ‘Men do this, women do this.’ ”

These gender­-neutral constructions, which not so long ago may have
sounded odd or even unthinkable to traditionalists, are becoming accepted as
standard English. The Washington Post is one of the first to have taken up the
cause, welcoming the singular “they” into the paper’s stylebook late last year.
And in January, the American Dialect Society voted the singular “they” its
2015 Word of the Year, noting its “emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a
known person, often as a conscious choice by a person rejecting the traditional
gender binary of he and she.”

But central to the appeal of the singular “they” is that it’s often deployed
unconsciously. It’s regularly repurposed as a linguistic crutch when an
individual’s gender is unknown or irrelevant. You might use it to refer to a
hypothetical person who, say, goes to the store and forgets “their” wallet. That
casual usage has a long history — it has appeared in Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Austen and Shaw. It wasn’t until 1745, when the schoolmistress­-turned-grammar-­expert
Ann Fisher proposed “he” as a universal pronoun for a person
of unknown gender, that the use of “they” in the same circumstance was
respun as grammatically incorrect. “The Masculine Person answers to the
general Name, which comprehends both Male and Female; as, any Person who
knows what he says,” she wrote.

It’s precisely the vagueness of “they” that makes it a not­-so­-ideal pronoun
replacement. It can obscure a clear gender identification with a blurred one.
Think of genderqueer people who are confident in their knowledge of their
own gender identity as one that simply doesn’t fit the boxes of “he” or “she”:
Calling all of them “they” can make it sound as if someone’s gender is
unknowable; it’s the grammatical equivalent of a shrug. In December, the Post
copy editor Bill Walsh called “they” “the only sensible solution to English’s
lack of a gender-­neutral third-­person singular personal pronoun,” with
“sensible” being the key word. The singular “they” gained favor with The Post’s
standard-­bearer partly because the presumptive “he” “hasn’t been palatable
for decades,” but also because a generic “she” feels “patronizing” and
“attempts at made­-up pronouns” — like “xe,” “xim,” and “xir” — strike Walsh
as “silly.” The New York Times hasn’t officially adopted “they,” but The
Times’s standards editor, Phillip B. Corbett, thinks it’s likely to earn a place in
the paper’s stylebook as usage evolves. “Eventually, I assume, certain forms
will become widely adopted, and that’s the point when it would make sense for
us to set out formal style rules,” he told me. “My guess — just a guess — is that
‘they’ is far more likely to become the default pronoun in these cases, rather
than ‘xe’ or other neologisms.”

A 2014 dispatch in The Economist in favor of “they” argued that
“pronouns (unlike nouns and verbs) are a ‘closed class’ of words, almost never
admitting new members.” (The Economist’s style guide, by the way, still calls
the honorific Ms. an “ugly” word.) If the point of the gender-­neutral pronoun
is to get hulking institutions like The Washington Post and The Economist to
become comfortable with a concept that currently strikes traditional folks as
incomprehensible — the rejection of the gender binary — then “they” feels a
little bit like a shortcut on the way to acceptance. It represents a third option
outside the binary, sure. But it doesn’t compel people to make mental room for
a new word.

The media guide for “transgender issues” by Glaad, a lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender advocacy group, advises reporters to use whatever
pronoun their subjects prefer. If they don’t prefer “they,” using it anyway feels
like an erasure of their own identity in favor of society’s new standardized
label. In a very real way, accepting the fluidity of gender requires rejecting
standards in general. It means opening our “closed class” of pronouns. In “The
Argonauts,” Maggie Nelson’s memoir of gender and language, she acknowledges
“the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into
categories,” but embraces another need “to pay homage to the transitive, the
flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.” It’s hard to sum it all
up in a word.

Amanda Hess is a David Carr Fellow at The New York Times