On the Politics of "They"

Kevin Drum just posted a little note on his blog announcing that he has "gone over to the dark side" and started routinely using "they" or "them" as gender-neutral singular third-person pronouns. I say, hooray! slash, why is this the dark side, exactly? I've long been an advocate of this as both the most natural way to talk, even putting politics aside, and essentially requisite once you take the politics into account. Anyway, here's Drum explaining his decision:

I'm not proud of this. But he or she has always grated on the ear. Likewise, using he some of the time and she some of the time is just too damn much work. And it's kind of confusing too. How careful are you going to be to use them equally? How much attention are you going to pay to make sure you aren't using them in gendered ways (he when you're writing about doctors, she when you're writing about nurses)? Etc.

 I would go a lot further as to both he or she and the alternation method: I think they're both flatly unacceptable for political reasons. The basic impulse here is that separate is not equal. Imagine, for instance, that for some reason we lived in a world where it was just baked into our language that we had to use a different third-person singular pronoun to refer to someone based on whether they were white or black. Or gay or straight. We wouldn't be okay with this, would we? I don't think we would, not even a little bit. And we most certainly would not be okay with either of these alternatives Drum identifies, the "X or Y" approach or just trying to mix and match. Because that would suggest that every time we referred to anyone, even a fictional person the details of whose persona are not important, we must give them a race, or an orientation, and make a special note of it in how we refer to them, and go out of our way to note that we're not doing that. Similarly, the way our language actually works, if the grammar pedants who oppose the "they" solution have their way, it is simply impossible to refer to a person without either giving them a gender or making an explicit, out-loud statement that you're not going to give them a gender. There is simply no natural way to just refer to someone as a person and as nothing else. Even "he or she" doesn't really refer to someone as a person, even awkwardly, because it's telling you that, while we're not assigning this person a gender, they have one (of course, everyone does, that's not the issue) and, more to the point, whichever gender they have is so important, so fundamentally definitional of their entire existence, that if we knew which one it was we would have to incorporate it into the way we refer to them.

In other words, a world where "he" and "she" are the only valid third-person singular pronouns valid for use as to human beings is a world which insists that all people are inherently defined by their genders. That's basically a denial of the common humanity of men and women and to me that's just flatly unacceptable. There's plenty of stuff to say about why the grammar pedants should lose on their own terms (Shakespeare uses the "they" construction, I'm pretty sure), but that's not the point. If the case were absolutely ironclad that using "they" this way was incorrect as a matter of linguistics, that wouldn't matter. At some point there's got to be a kind of popular sovereignty over language, a right of the people to amend their language if it no longer serves their need, and if we must accept that the English language as of today simply doesn't include a sufficiently egalitarian third-person singular pronoun, well, that's just an area that's crying out for amendment. And guess what! We've already been making that amendment (if it was ever needed in the first place; see above re Shakespeare), albeit in sort of a gradual, common law-y way. Good for us!