In what could be the first-ever case of a court-ordered pronoun, Chelsea Manning has won the right to be called she. A U.S. Army tribunal has directed prison officials to use a feminine pronoun when referring to Manning, who has changed her gender identity from male to female.
Manning happens to be a high-profile prisoner. As Bradley Manning, she was convicted in 2013 of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in a military prison. Manning was the source of the hoard of classified U.S. government documents publicly revealed in 2010 by WikiLeaks. Although she announced a desire to begin living as a woman immediately after sentencing, and an Army medical team agreed that she had gender identity disorder, the military resisted Manning’s request to be called Chelsea and to use a gender-appropriate pronoun when referring to her.
On March 4, which just happened to be National Grammar Day, the United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals ordered the Army to comply with part of Manning’s request:
Reference to appellant in all future formal papers filed before this court and all future orders and decisions issued by this court shall either be neutral, e.g., Private First Class Manning or appellant, or employ a feminine pronoun.
In plain English, the Army doesn’t have to call her Chelsea, but it does have to call her she.
The issue of pronouns for trans persons has been coming up a lot online and in the media, and the Manning case draws renewed attention to the problem. It’s clear that there are more variations to the notion of gender than the two traditional categories of male and female can express. Facebook now lets its users select one of fifty-eight possible gender designations, including genderqueer, neutrois, cis male, androgynous other, and transperson. But when it comes to pronouns, Facebook friends can only wish him, her, or them a happy birthday.
That’s because English pronouns don’t offer many gender choices. In fact, most pronouns are gender neutral: I, we, you, they, and their variants (me, us, your, them, and so on)—none of these indicates the gender of the person referred to. In contrast, the third person singular he and she are resolutely gender specific, making it difficult for English speakers to avoid referencing gender even if they want to.
There’s the option of it, to be sure, which doesn’t express gender. But it is used for things and sometimes animals. Only rarely is it ever used for people. So really, English has no third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun. When gender isn’t known, or when both genders are in play, there’s no satisfactory one-pronoun solution. Take examples like the following:
Tell the student to come to the workshop this afternoon, and to bring a draft of [his, her, his or her, their] essay.
Everyone loves [his, her, his or her, their] mother.
Each pronoun option comes with problems. The generic masculine leaves out women. The generic feminine upsets too many men. Using both together, he or she, his or her, is cumbersome, especially if you need to use these constructions often. Singular they is perhaps the most common choice, particularly in speech. It’s used less frequently in writing because they is plural, and the words it refers to in the examples above, student and everyone, are singular. Since pronouns are supposed to agree with their referents in number, some people find singular they ungrammatical.
There’s another option: invented gender-neutral pronouns. Since the mid-19th century, more than eighty of these have been launched, including thon, ip, hesh, co, per, xe, E, sie, and tey. Thon and hesh actually appeared in major dictionaries for a while, and more recently, zie has proved popular in some transgender online discussions.
The advantage of invented pronouns is that they call attention to gender fluidity, instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist. Plus, “Call me jhe” is a way of taking back the language, giving speakers a way to control how others refer to them. The disadvantage is that these pronouns call attention to gender fluidity as something that demands special attention, rather than treating it as no big deal. In any case, no one can agree on which made-up gender-neutral pronoun to back, and none of them has seen any sort of widespread adoption.
Which brings us back to singular they. To use a Madison-Avenue-style slogan, it’s the choice of English speakers everywhere, both those determined to queer the notion of gender and those who assume everyone’s either male or female but want a pronoun that’s “gender agnostic.” And the number agreement thing? That shouldn’t really be an issue. After all, you has functioned comfortably as both singular and plural for 300 years. I don’t know any grammar stickler who wants to bring back thee and thou.
Although she had more radical options, Chelsea Manning picked a traditional pronoun, she, and in challenging the Army she won only a small victory for herself. The tribunal’s order sets no precedents for other cases, and its scope is narrow: it doesn’t affect references to Manning outside of court filings. Reporters are free to write about Manning using any gender they want, and prison guards can still call Manning anything they want face to face. Nor does the ruling affect appeals courts up the line, including the U. S. Supreme Court, should they consider Manning’s case. But by getting a military court to acknowledge a prisoner’s right to choose their own pronoun, if only in a restricted context, Manning won a legal victory not just for herself, but also for trans people, for speakers of English, and for pronouns everywhere.
The Army is lucky that Chelsea Manning asked only for a traditional, gender-appropriate pronoun. In 1792 the grammarian James Anderson suggested that English would be better off with thirteen genders instead of just two.
Further reading: For a comprehensive historical database of nonbinary pronouns, click here.
